temptations, distractions, translations

Ulysses, episode 5, Lotus-Eaters

I’m continuing to read Ulysses slowly. Here’s my check in for the latest episode. I get off-topic in this one, which is kind of the point. All past updates about Ulysses reading are here.

I had every intention of making Ulysses headway at my parents’ house over the holidays. I did not open it once. I did take full advantage of my parents’ Netflix account, which I do not have access to any more thanks to household sharing restrictions, and watched Carry-On starring Taron Egerton and Jason Bateman.

When I returned to Philadelphia, I felt a little chagrined when I realized that the episode I was on in Ulysses was the Lotus-Eaters. The reference to the Odyssey here is an early story that Odysseus tells his Phoenician hosts after he has escaped Calypso. He regales his hosts with his tales of what exactly¹ happened after the Trojan War. In this anecdote, early in the voyage home from Troy, Odysseus and his men stop on an island. He sends a small crew out to meet the inhabitants, who give them lotuses to eat, which makes the men forget about their desire to return home. Odysseus must force the men back onto the ship and tie them up to break the spell of the tempting fruit/flower.

In this episode of Ulysses, Leopold Bloom walks around Dublin, with a task in mind representative of his temptation that he performs circuitously: picking up a flirtatious letter from a penpal under an assumed name. His mind wanders as he sees people in Dublin, many of whom are indulging in some sort of temptation or vice, though he gets frustrated when people interrupt his lazy wandering. He also goes to church and witnesses a communion, though does not take part. The episode ends with him imagining his naked body in a bath, linking his genitals to the flower imagery that has existed throughout the chapter. “and saw the dark tangled curls of his bush floating, floating hair of the stream around the limp father of thousands, a languid floating flower.” (After all, he’s Mr. Bloom).²

We all have temptations from our goals that we set each day, just mine over Christmas break looked like a Jaume Collet-Serra movie about Taron Egerton trying to 1. do an American accent 2. stop Jason Bateman from getting a nerve agent onto an airplane.³ But I’ve locked back in and here’s a Ulysses update. I end up talking about Petrarch.

---

My main thought on first read-through was nothing much happens in this episode. Though not much has happened in any of the episodes. I think my verb is a problem here, but I don’t know what to replace it with to better convey my meaning. I guess what I mean is that in the first four chapters, I could see the beginnings of threads that I knew would pay off. Stephen’s Irish identity in conflict with his intellectual thoughts and emotions, Joyce’s theory of the form, Leopold and Molly’s marriage in crisis. I had gleaned enough about these things or was able to bring enough context (pre-acquired or from annotations) to see some nexuses, even as I missed others.

In this chapter, the main thing is that Leopold is distracting himself, letting himself walk around Dublin, performing some tasks whose loops will never be closed, like filling an order for his wife’s lotion at an apothecary that he never picks up.

The flirtatious letter from Martha Clifford, the retrieval of which is the main “task” of this interim time between Leopold’s domestic duties and the funeral he has to get later in the day, I imagine,⁴ might play out into something grander. But I’m in the dark still there. One thread I know comes back up based on the annotations I’m reading is one of the interrupters of Leopold’s stream of consciousness, Bantam Lyons, and a miscommunication they have. Leopold has focused on aromatics senses a lot in the chapter (ordering a scented lotion of his wife, a flower enclosed in his secret’s penpal’s letter, incense and stone in the church). This focus on indulging senses to the point of distraction connects to Odysseus’ Lotus Eaters. And Bantam does not smell good, so Leopold reacts with disgust to him. Bantam tries to borrow a newspaper from Leopold, to look at information about a horse race (gambling, its own form of lotus eating). Leopold’s dismissive comments are misconstrued as advice about what horse to bet on and this leads to later conflict. So an unintended interaction/task becomes the thread of “plot” that spins from this episode.

Both of the main online guides I’ve been using to read the book point out that, even more than the previous four books, this one relies on references to The Odyssey as scaffolding. I felt some cosmic neatness here in my reading timeline, with the heavier references to coming during a time when I was distracted and when The Odyssey related to a recent topic of the day (week, two weeks, forever) on the internet, partially about translation, combining paternalism, ignorance, and bull-headedness.

I’m pretty uninterested in responding directly⁵ to or rehashing a bunch of arguments that have been happening, mostly on Twitter, that posit either that 1.a The Odyssey is an impossibly esoteric reference 1.b that means either people who know what it is should feel superior or people who don’t know it should feel bad (or alternatively, people who don’t know it should feel proud of their incuriosity?) 2. that Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey is bad because it doesn’t sound like Robert Fagles’ translation of The Odyssey. But you can read BDM on at least argument one below, though she also touches on argument two.

the revenge of the percy jackson kids

Still, I do have a copy of both Fagles’ and Wilson’s Odyssey translations and I revisited both after I read episode 5. I also looked at Samuel Butler’s prose translation, since this is one that Joyce read⁶ and The Perseus Digital Library’s edition of the Greek.⁷ The Lotus-Eaters anecdote is not the main event in Book Nine of The Odyssey; this is also where Odysseus meets the Cyclops. The Lotus Eaters takes up maybe 20 to 30 lines in the chapter. But Joyce expands and contracts the Odyssey to fit his needs.⁸

Odysseus is famously waylaid by gods and winds and distractions, but in his telling of the Lotus Eaters story, he’s not the one who forgot what the task was. In the text, the lotus specifically makes those who eat it forget their “nostos” (“without thinking further of their return,” Butler; “all memory of the journey home dissolved forever.” Fagles 9.109-110; “They had forgotten home.” Wilson 9.107). It isn’t just indulgence in pleasure that is the problem, but the forgetting of the return journey. Odysseus emphasizes to his Phoenician listeners that he saved the day by when he “dragged them back in tears” (Wilson) or “brought them back, back to hollow ships, and streaming tears” (Fagles).

Nostos is maybe the most important word in The Odyssey and is important to the structure of Ulysses as well. The first three episodes were the Telemachy, focused on Stephen, the Telemachus figure. Right now I’m in the Odyssey, with Leopold, our Odysseus. But the final three books are the Nostos, the the return, where both heroes will make some sort of return to their homes.

The primacy of this concept in both the Odyssey and Greek myths is profound. The word appears in the first five lines of The Odyssey. “Tell me about a complicated man…and how he worked to save his life and bring his men back home,” Wilson, 1.1-6, with wonderful enjambment between “men” and “back home” that emphasizes the phrase in her translation. It’s also the root of the word “nostalgia.”⁹ Odysseus is not the only Greek hero who has a “nostos,” but his can be viewed as the most successful. The word comes up in The Odyssey in the telling to Telemachus of Agamemnon’s failed homecoming, that ends with his murder, or in The Iliad, where Achilles knows he won’t have the opportunity to have a homecoming at all. Odysseus has the complete return—it’s the return ends with moral justice being enacted in his home, and the hero telling it. He’s the nostos resolved: absence, wandering, return.

I don’t really have anything original to say about how nostos functions in The Odyssey, or by extension Ulysses. But in light of the prescriptive discourse around whether The Odyssey is a reference someone should try to get or which translation someone should read, I mostly just thought about how much I love reading works in translation. I am surprised whenever The Odyssey translation discourse happens because people that I would align myself with more (so people who are not outright dismissing Emily Wilson’s translation as too woke, too feminist, too not RETVRN) don’t suggest the (my) obvious answer to “what translation of The Odyssey should I read?” which is: as many as you can get your hands on.

---

Petrarch hit by Cupid’s Arrow as Laura crowns him, via wikicommons

My first meaningful memory of reading poetry in translation was reading a Petrarch sonnet in high school. I had definitely read things in translation before that, including The Odyssey and The Iliad. But Petrarch sonnets were much more accessible when it came to considering comparative aspects of translation. I was pretty sure the first one I read was 133 because I remember the image of an arrow, but I fact checked my memory with archive.org and found the textbook I’m positive we used in my 10th grade literature class, and the only Petrarch sonnet in it was something called “Sonnet 42” translated by Joseph Auslander.

The spring returns, the spring wind softly blowing
Sprinkles the grass with gleam and glitter of showers,
Powdering pearl and diamond, dripping with flowers,
Dropping wet flowers, dancing the winter's going;
The swallow twitters, the groves of midnight are glowing
With nightingale music and madness; the sweet fierce powers
Of Love flame up through the earth; the seed-soul towers
And trembles; Nature is filled to overflowing ...
The spring returns, but there is no returning
Of spring for me. O heart with anguish burning!
She that unlocked all April in a breath Returns not ...
And these meadows, blossoms, birds,
These lovely gentle girls—words, empty words,
As bitter as the black estates of death!

I’m somewhat reconstructing memories here, but reading Petrarch in 10th grade and also in 12th grade, reading Thomas Wyatt’s “Whoso List to Hunt, I Know Where There is a Hind” which is an imitation of Petrarch’s 190, spurred an interest in Italian poetry and Italian language. Petrarch sonnets are great to poke around with a dictionary and some knowledge of Latin and Romance language grammar, because they are so short and have been translated, imitated, aped so many times, so there’s a lot of holds to rely on if you need help.

But in rediscovering what the first Petrarch sonnet I ever read was, I realized I’m pretty sure I never looked up the original Italian of it. I’m not sure I would have had the notion or wherewithal to do in when I was 15. Also, even now, it was kind of hard to figure out which poem Auslander was translating. Because the numbering used in the textbook, retained from Auslander’s original 1931 publication, does not line up with the Canzoniere, which includes Petrarch poems other than the sonnets, mixed in with the sonnets, it took me a minute to find the source poem. And Auslander works freely with some of the nouns that I thought would be identifiers, So when I was looking at a reproduction of the text in a PDF I found (bad librarian) and comparing them with the original Italian/AS Kline’s literal poem translations, using ctrl+F to find “April”/“spring”/“nightingale” from Auslander did not land me on the right one because these are not words that Kline uses in the translation. I was able figure it out by scanning the poems for the imagery of spring returning.

If I had thought earlier to go to the source text in a printed book (reproduced again on Archive.org), I would have found confirmation beyond my rudimentary Italian detective skills that “Sonnet 42” by Auslander’s reckoning is based on 310 in the Canzoniere, Zephiro torna, e’l bel tempo rimena

Sonnet 42 from Joseph Auslander’s translation of Petrarch, via archive.org

Here’s the original Italian and the pretty literal AS Kline translation, inset.

Zephiro torna, e 'l bel tempo rimena,
Zephyr returns and brings fair weather,
e i fiori et l'erbe, sua dolce famiglia,
and the flowers and herbs, his sweet family,
et garrir Progne et pianger Philomena,
and Procne singing and Philomela weeping,
et primavera candida et vermiglia.
and the white springtime, and the vermilion.

Ridono i prati, e 'l ciel si rasserena;
The meadows smile, and the skies grow clear:
Giove s'allegra di mirar sua figlia;
Jupiter is joyful, gazing at his daughter:
l'aria et l'acqua et la terra è d'amor piena;
the air and earth and water are filled with love:
ogni animal d'amar si riconsiglia.
every animal is reconciled to loving.

Ma per me, lasso, tornano i piú gravi
But to me, alas, there return the heaviest
sospiri, che del cor profondo tragge
sighs that she draws from the deepest heart,
quella ch'al ciel se ne portò le chiavi;
who took the keys of it away to heaven:

et cantar augelletti, et fiorir piagge,
and the song of little birds, and the flowering fields,
e 'n belle donne honeste atti soavi
and the sweet, virtuous actions of women
sono un deserto, et fere aspre et selvagge.
are a wasteland to me, of bitter and savage creatures.

In his introduction to his translations of Petrarch, Auslander writes: “We have been only too well aware of the audacity and heresy of this labour. The translator’s lot is, at best, an unholy and unhappy one. His problem is procrustean. He is continually torn between the narrow truth of the text and the large lustre of the spirit.” He then quotes Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “The only true motive for putting poetry into a fresh language must be to endow a fresh nation, as far as possible, with one more possession of beauty.” Comparing Auslander’s more true to sonnet form translation to Kline’s, his priorities can be seen—he shifts the words that made it harder for me to identify the poem quickly, but he attaches form to spirit, retaining a rhyme scheme that preserves the volta, or sonnet’s turn, between the octave and the sestet. Petrarch does with a conjunction, “Ma,” (“but”), which Kline translates literally, and Auslander does it with a refrain of the first half of the first line, but a change in the second half.

I like the neatness of The Odyssey and Ulysses taking me back to a poem that I read when I was younger than half my age now, certainly in my mom’s classroom at my high school, starting a journey with literature and language that has ebbed and flowed for the past twenty years and that poem starting with a line about a spring wind, Zephyr,¹⁰ returning, though the poem is about how things will never be the same. Especially after I was distracted for the past two weeks from reading Ulysses because I was hanging out with my parents in a house that is not my childhood home. Returning after wandering is to be home for the first time!

That’s the upside, I guess, of works in translation and in dialogue with each other and that’s what I am trying to land on being able to articulate in the fall out of this latest Odyssey discourse. To me, this is magic. I don’t know how I read Ulysses at 33 unless I read Petrarch at 15, not because someone can’t, but because I can’t be the person who picked up this book and wanted to figure it out without having that that starting step in curiosity in something that would not come easily at first.

Recommendations

Poets in a Landscape by Gilbert Highet: I really was a Latin Classics dude, over the Greeks, and I love this book. I think Erich Auerbach’s Dante: Poet of the Secular World, also a NYRB title and recommendation, might be a more famous parallel to this book. But Highet follows seven Roman poets through their physical spaces in Italy, with close readings of their poetry, history and geography. I love a book with good, thoughtful geography, which is one thing I am loving about Ulysses, especially now that I’m in chapters that involve Stephen and Leopold walking through Dublin and how easy it is to trace their steps.

Translating Myself and Others by Jhumpa Lahiri: I first came to Lahiri through her introduction to a new translation of I Promessi Sposi by Alessandro Manzoni by Michael F. Moore that came out in 2022 (also a recommendation, especially if you love Dickens or Sir Walter Scott). Lahiri is a British-American author who now lives in Italy and frequently writes in Italian. In her introduction to I Promessi Sposi, she talked about both her relationship to the gargantuan novel, with sprawling sentences, and the Italian language. So I picked up this book by her, which focuses on her identity in language and as a writer and a translator. It’s lovely!

The Translation of Seamus Heaney: Heaney is one of my favorite poets and was a prolific translator. This edition is an interesting way to read poetry, unified by a role that a reader might not give auteur power to, but one that certainly can have that power.

1. “Exactly” used spuriously here. He’s a liar who lies, like Robert Pattinson.

2. In this one specific way, James Joyce and Colleen Hoover have something in common.

3. I had fun.

4. I’m not “avoiding” spoilers at all in Ulysses, it would be hard to rely on the annotations while doing this, but I am not checking on my own where these threads go.

5. This discussion kind of spun out of control, in part because some of the worst sections of Twitter that have generally been emboldened by Elon Musk exist at the ready to denigrate Wilson’s translation whenever The Odyssey comes up. So I’m not rehashing the details in part because I don’t care to map out the exact spider web of the sequence of events. The important thing is people were talking about translation and The Odyssey over the past few days.

6. The references I’ve seen to Joyce’s bookshelf say that he read two versions of the Odyssey: Butler’s and Charles Lamb’s. Both prose!

7. I was a Classics minor, but I never took any Greek classics—I took Latin classes despite being terrible at Latin translation. I tanked my college GPA with a C in Cicero, which was an entirely elective course I took for no other reason than I liked Latin classes. Again, despite being so bad at them that I got a C in Cicero.

This is all to say, the Perseus Digital Library is a pretty cool tool! I have to look at the Greek with the Latin transliteration and just look for stems that I recognize.

8. This was a major surprise to me! I assumed when I went into this that the books/episodes would have a one to one correspondence. Though it makes sense if he was looking mostly as prose translations/retellings.

9. This feels like internet pop Classicism information. But it is true!

10. Zephyr is also the wind that is left out when Aeolus, keeper of the winds, gifts Odysseus a bag containing all the disruptive winds so that only gentle Zephyr can guide him back to Ithaca. Unfortunately, this is the episode where Odysseus’ men open the bag, thinking their leader is hiding treasure from them, letting all the winds out and blowing them back from whence they came.