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S'està carregant… Memorial (2011)de Alice Oswald
Books That Changed Me (103) The Trojan War (34) S'està carregant…
Apunta't a LibraryThing per saber si aquest llibre et pot agradar. No hi ha cap discussió a Converses sobre aquesta obra. I was enriched reading Alice Oswald’s free translations from ‘The Iliad,’ but less so by her and her afterworder Eavan Boland when they unimaginatively disparage both translation and written language itself.: “…she places herself in the active role of oral inheritor, rather than the more passive one of translator. ‘…I think [my] method…is compatible with the spirit of oral poetry…as if its language, unlike written language, was still alive and kicking.’” (p. 85)
Ms Oswald has audaciously set out to translate the book’s atmosphere, rather than its story. A poet known for her landscape verse, Ms Oswald read classics at Oxford. The result is a work by someone who not only understands Homer’s Greek, but who also has an ear for modern verse. It is a delight to read.
In this daring new work, the poet Alice Oswald strips away the narrative of the Iliad the anger of Achilles, the story of Helen in favor of attending to its atmospheres: the extended similes that bring so much of the natural order into the poem and the corresponding litany of the war-dead, most of whom are little more than names but each of whom lives and dies unforgettably and unforgotten in the copious retrospect of Homer s glance. The resulting poem is a war memorial and a profoundly responsive work that gives new voice to Homer s level-voiced version of the world. Through a mix of narrative and musical repetition, the sequence becomes a meditation on the loss of human life. No s'han trobat descripcions de biblioteca. |
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Google Books — S'està carregant… GèneresClassificació Decimal de Dewey (DDC)821.92Literature English & Old English literatures English poetry 1900- 2000-LCC (Clas. Bibl. Congrés EUA)ValoracióMitjana:
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Stands by a grave and says nothing
Review of the W.W. Norton Company paperback edition (2013) of the original Faber & Faber hardcover (2011)
This is an extraordinarily beautiful meditation and elegy on death, loss and the fleeting nature of life. Although ostensibly a "version" of Homer's Iliad, it is Alice Oswald's poetic similes that follow each listing of a death or deaths from the Greek epic which are the affecting and haunting chorus to each passing.
Oswald starts off by listing all 200 names of the dead from The Iliad, from Protesilaus through to Hector. She then begins to intone each again, with some excerpts relating to their deaths in the epic and then following them with her similes, each of those latter repeated twice. In my ignorance I thought the repeats were a typo at first, and then realized the beauty of repeating them and letting their imagery sink in.
Reading this during the current pandemic and the extent of the worldwide loss of life due to that disease made me think of the mythological Trojan War as a metaphor for any sort of long term unjust forms of death and I became more focused on Oswald's choruses than the Iliad sections.
The poem is followed by an excellent Afterword by Eaven Boland in this 2013 Norton paperback edition.
I've been a long term fan of Christopher Logue's Homer in War Music (2015), but I have to confess that Alice Oswald has become my new fave Iliad adaptation.
My thanks to Liisa & family for this kind gift. ( )