A Goddess Reimagined: The NYPL Podcast Ep. 214
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Madeline Miller's first novel, The Song of Achilles, transformed The Iliad from a vast impersonal epic into an intimate and poignant love story. Now Miller turns her mind to Homer's other great work, and one of mythology's most riveting figures, in Circe.
The daughter of the nymph Perse and the sun god Helios, Circe is trapped between the worlds of gods and mortals, both of which are threatened by her expanding capabilities harnessing the forces of witchcraft. Banished by Zeus to a deserted island, her powers grow as she crosses paths with some of mythology's greatest characters: Daedalus and Icarus; the Minotaur; Medea; and, of course, Odysseus.
Madeline Miller discusses her writing process, witchcraft, and why this story resonates today with classicist and translator Emily Wilson, the first woman to translate The Odyssey into English.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
[ Music ]
>> I'm Aidan Flax-Clark and you're listening to the New York Public Library Podcast. So, I studied classical languages in college, and as the total dork that makes you, I'm really excited to share this conversation with you. It's with Madeline Miller and Emily Wilson. They were here to talk about Miller's new book "Circe" which is a retelling in novel form of the story of the mythological goddess Circe. In the story and in the few other places, she appears in ancient history, she's portrayed as a basically an evil witch, but in Madeline Miller's books, she tells it from a much more nuanced and arguably much more feminist point of view. Madeline Miller was here talking about Circe with Emily Wilson who's a scholar and a translator. Last year Emily Wilson published the first English translation of "The Odyssey" by a woman in all of the 400 years of translating "The Odyssey" into English and all of the 60 plus versions that exist. So, here is Madeline Miller's conversation with Emily Wilson.
>> I want to start off actually by just reading two very short passages from the book and then we'll start talking and get to the questions. The two sections I'm going to read, the first one comes just after she has been exiled and arrived on her island of Aiaia and she is first discovering her witchcraft, she's also the first witch in western literature, so this towards the beginning of the book as she's discovering her powers. "I had a little pride, as I had said, and that was good. More would have been fatal. Let me say what sorcery is not. It is not divine power which comes with a thought and a blink. It must be made and worked, planned and searched out, dug up, dried, chopped and ground, cooked, spoken over, and sung. Even after all that, it can fail, as gods do not. If my herbs are not fresh enough, if my attention falters, if my will is weak, the drafts go stale and rancid in my hands. By rights, I should never have come to witchcraft. Gods hate all toil, it is their nature. The closest we come, is weaving or smithing, but these things are skills and there is no drudgery to them since all the parts that might be unpleasant are taken away with power. The wool is dyed not with stinking vats and stirring spoons, but with a snap. There is not tedious mining, the ores leap willing from the mountain. No fingers are ever chafed, no muscles strained. Witchcraft is nothing is but such drudgery. Each herb must be found in its den, harvested at its time, grubbed up from the dirt, called and stripped, washed and prepared. It must be handled this way, then that, to find out where its power lies. Day upon patient day, you must throw out your errors and begin again. So why did I not mind? Why did none of us mind? I cannot speak for my brothers and sister, but my answer is easy. For a hundred generations, I had walked the world drowsy and dull, idle and at my ease. I left no prints, I did not deeds. Even those who had loved me a little did not care to stay. Then I learned that I could bend the world to my will, as bow is bent for an arrow. I would have done that toil a thousand times to keep such power in my hands. I thought: this is now Zeus felt when he first lifted the thunderbolt." The second passage comes from much later in the novel after she has already started turning men to pigs. The "he" in the section is Odysseus. "He asked me once, why pigs? We seated before my hearth in our usual chairs. He liked the one draped in cowhide with silver inlay in its carvings. Sometimes he would rub the scrolling absently beneath his thumb. 'Why not' I said? He gave me a bare smile. 'I mean it, I would like to know.' I knew he meant it. He was not a pious man but the seeking out of things hidden this was his highest worship. There were answers in me I felt them very deep as last years' bulbs growing fat. Their roots tangled with those moments I spent against the wall and my lions were gone and my spell shut up inside me. After I changed a crew I would watch them scrabbling and crying in the sty falling over each other stupid with their horror. They hated it all their newly voluptuous flesh, their delicate split trotters, their swollen bellies dragging in the Earth's muck. It was a humiliation, a debasement. They were sick with longing for their hands those appendages men use to mitigate the world. 'Come,' I would say to them, 'it's not that bad, you should appreciate a pig's advantages mud slick and swift they are hard to catch, low to the ground they cannot easily be knocked over. They are not like dogs they do not need your love. They can thrive anywhere on anything scraps and trash. They look witless and dull which lulls their enemies, but they are clever they will remember your face.' They never listened, the truth is, men make terrible pigs."
[ Laughter ]
[ Applause ]
>> So, I was just want to just start off by saying this, thank you all for being here, but it's such an honor to get to talk to Madeline Miller about her work. I admire her work extremely deeply and I just wanted to say that, and I guess also to say that originally when "Song of Achilles" first came out, I didn't read it, because I had a completely mistaken idea about what it was going to be. But I thought it was going to be just genre fiction and only going to be interesting to somebody who already knew "The Iliad" very well, and in fact, that was completely wrong and just wanted to acknowledge how completely wrong that I was and it's a really good literature I think. I really.
>> Thank you.
>> I'm already. I mean, I think you're just an amazing writer, a very distinctive writer, a very precise writer and you can see already just the people who have read the book in those passages how good you are with sentences and with imagery and just describing processes and people and thinking both funny, serious, emotional, it's very, very good writing I think. And I think in this book, maybe even more than in "Song of Achilles" this is very rich role-building with you capturing all these, this complex very, very alien kind of world and making it entirely vivid and that we actually believe that really are in Circe's head and in Circe's world. It's wonderful. So, I guess I just have to stop because I know that this event was sort of billed as Circe's celebration of indomitable female strength in a man's world, and so I guess I'm interested partly because I had the best translation of the "Odyssey." So much of the marching was about me about a woman and I'm curious about whether you think that's, is that the right way to market "Circe"? Because it seems to me that there was some very positive male characters in this book. There were also some very, you know, wonderfully villainous female villains such as Pasiphae. So, and also I'm not sure if I see Circe as an icon of indomitable female strength or is her strength specifically female as opposed to specifically witchy or specifically about being an in-betweener. I mean, it seems to be essential in your depiction that she's not a god, not an Olympian, but also not a mortal. She's somewhere, she's an alienated strength. But in not sure is that necessarily a female strength? Is it right to see this as a female book?
>> First of all, thank you. I think, I think both. As you say, one of the things that I drew right from Homer as I was starting to think about Circe's character, I went to the "Odyssey" and I tried to sort of sift through and find all the little pieces that the jumped out at me and that I felt I could build this character on. And one of the, the most important ones was this adjective that Homer gives her where he says she's speaks like a mortal, like a human. And that was fascinating to me, because of course, it implies that there's a way to speak like a God and a way to speak to like a mortal, and that Circe even though she's a goddess, is straddling these two worlds that she has sort of a foot in each world and, therefore, she's able to look at each, at each side as kind of an outsider to both. So, that part was interesting to me and I was also interested in, in general, what it means to be a God and also the flipside, what it means to be human; the Ancient Greek Gods where truly horrendous. They were cruel. They were, you know, nasty for no reason, totally self-involved. You know, if you angered them, not only would they punish you, but they would punish your children and possibly your children's children and there on down the line. You know, one of the classic stories about the Greek Gods is, of course, Actaeon who is wandering in the woods one night hunting and he sees the goddess Artemis naked in a pool, doesn't matter that he didn't mean to, doesn't matter that he's sorry, he's turned into a deer and torn apart by his own dogs. So, that is the family that Circe's coming from. And so, aside from sort of the mythical aspects, I also wanted this to be a story about a culture that is where abuse of your power is built in. And so, that affects Circe as a woman, because as sort of the lowest, wrong on the divine ladder she's a nymph, so she has very, very little power. She is, of course, on the receiving end; nymphs were basically pawn, pawns and prey in the ancient world. But there are also mortals themselves are also on the receiving end of that power abuse and there are number of male characters, as you say, who also experience that. And so, I was looking at her experience as a woman, but also at this sort of sick culture as a whole.
>> So, I guess picking up on that I wanted to hear from you about how it was to go from "Song of Achilles" to "Circe" and, I mean it seems to me that they're both about the central character in "Song of Achilles" is also in a way a luminal character who comes from a terribly abusive family structure and who's in this necessarily abusive system of where the warriors are training themselves to kill all the warriors and there were problems with the whole value system and the novelist of teasing out what happens if you're alienated by this whole world that you find yourself in. So, I wondered to what extent do you see it as a continuation of something of the same story or did it feel like a completely different story?
>> Again, I think a little bit of both. That both these characters, both Patroclus and Circe were, are characters who looking to see whether or not it is possible to live ethically in the world that they have been born into, and that is, that is their journey. They are really fighting for that, for a lot of the, a lot of both their stories and they're compromised in various ways and the push back and, you know, is it possible, in Circe's case, to be an independent woman in this world? Is it possible to live life on your own terms? Is it possible to have a relationship with a man in any sort of equal way or positive way in this culture that is so male dominated? So, in that sense, I do think that they, that there is some similarity, but I also think that there is a little bit of contrast. With "Song of Achilles", I wanted to take a story that was very epic and tell it from really an intimate lyric perspective. And with "Circe" in some ways, I felt that I was doing a little bit the opposite, that I was taking sort of a woman's life and women's lives have traditionally been shutout from epic and the stuff of women's lives have been shutout from epic and put her at the center of an epic story. And just as, you know, she shows up in the "Odyssey." She's there for about, you know, two-plus books of the "Odyssey", so Odysseus shows up for two-plus chapters of this. So, I feel like it was fair to. [laughter] to make the flip. I was very careful about that [laughter]. So, so I think there absolutely are those similarities, but I also was looking at it slightly differently as well.
>> Yeah. That makes sense. So, I guess just coming back to what I hinted at before which is that the question of whether you're a witch, I mean, whether writing is that kind of [laughter], because of the sorcerer or whatever. I mean that in a totally positive way. To what extent did, were you sort of thinking consciously, it seemed like it's a very, very, it's very much conscious about craft and about the where does the art come from right? I mean, we have these inset artist characters, there's both Circe herself and also Daedalus the master craftsman and it seems like the novelist are interested in this question of, does Circe's art, her witchcraft, does it come through pain? Is it because she's been hurt so badly and bullied so badly and she's alienated? That's what turns her into somebody who's able to create this, this kind of craft or is it, is it as the passage you just read, is it primarily about hard work? It's not about inspiration, it's about how hard you can work on witchcraft? So, I guess I want to know more about how like, how you were meditating on your own process of writing of becoming a great writer, like was going on in writing about writing in this book? Or is it wrong to read "Circe" as a sort of writer?
>> Poets for, you know, going back centuries have sort of seen writing as, as an art of transformation, you know, going all the way back to Ovid and before that. The thing about "Circe" that I wanted to bring out with that hard work and with her craft, was as I was looking at sort of what it means to be a God and what it means to be human, one of the things that, of course, came up in the ancient world, is that Gods don't suffer. They don't have to work for anything. Everything they want they get immediately. And that they have no idea what real suffering is like and they have no idea also how to work at something. You know, if you look at the classic story of Athena and Arachne, you have Athena who just shows up and does this, you know, does this weaving and then Arachne is better than she is and she has a tantrum about it and turns her into spider, and you know, it just seems to me that Gods are so adverse to actually working at what they're doing and so it seemed as Circe moves away from the divine world and sort of experiments with the mortal world, that work becomes a piece of that, that that is sort of an entrance into the mortal world. And Daedalus as well, the master craftsman, he spends so much time on his inventions working and working and she really, the two of them, find a wonderful place to meet talking about craft even though their crafts are very different. So, I do work very hard at my writing and I take many years, "Song of Achilles" was 10 years and this was 7. I hope to one day be as potent a witch as Circe [laughter].
>> But she took thousands of years, right?
>> But it's right, that's right yeah [multiple speakers].
>> Yes. Yeah, so I thought there was some great villains in this piece. I mean, even in this novel, even though of course it's a very moral novel very interested in ethics, but I guess I was also interested in whether you had fun writing the villains as well, because I remember thinking, for instance, about Pasiphae and the wonderful scene and we have the Minotaur and it seemed as if there's a vividness about monstrosity and darkness and evil, as well as, a vividness about what goodness might be. I mean, I was interested that you, and as she managed to make goodness also seem vivid too which I think is very difficult to do, because there's; I think that thing with the moment when Daedalus is described as having a face which looks like itself, such that there's this idea that authenticity, integrity, it might take you away from the world of similes and imagery towards this is just what it is. It's about telling the truth. And Telegonus also then is representative of this plainness of truth in contrast to the wonderful flamboyant, dramatic villains. And so, I guess I'm wondering whether you struggled with that and with was it more fun to write the flamboyant villains or was there a different kind of fun that you can find in writing the truthful honest characters as well?
>> They were both, they were both really fun to create. I mean, I do think that if you have the opportunity to write a Minotaur birth scene you are obligated to take it [laughter]. So, I took it. And I did; I loved flushing out these villains, and a part of what I loved about them is that I never wanted them to be just purely villainous. There are a few characters who, you know, fall closer to that than others, but even you know the mother of the Minotaur, Pasiphae she is, she also has reasons for what she does as people do, and I wanted that, that to be part of her portrait as well, but yes it's very, I mean it's always fun to write villains. But I love just as much writing characters like Daedalus and Telegonus. I think that's also a really interesting thing to explore. I don't know if this is coming from my theater background, but you know, those would both be characters that I would love to direct on a stage and so it's really fun to write them and invest them with that psychology. So, I was; but yes, a good villain, you know, it's always fun.
>> Great. So, I guess then, I mean, I don't want to spoil everything about the plot, but I guess this, the narrative arch is sort of framed around Circe's relationship with her abusive father, Helios the Sun God. And I guess I wondered if you could talk more about Circe's father issues and, but then what, but whether there's any relationship between Circe's father issues and your Homer issues? I mean, and are there ways that [laughter]. I mean, is Circe's goal, attempt to get away from the two dominant all-seeing father, is that going on in this novel with the novel itself or is one to see Helios as a sort of Homer? I mean, is there other ways that, you know, Homer might also just be the material that gets transformed, right? Is the, Homer isn't just the all-seeing dominant father, but also the plants that you can do something with. So, I guess I just wanted to know to what extent you felt you like you were having to write back against Homer or to what extent were you just plucking some plants and processing them?
>> Yeah. I've never thought about Homer as Helios. Now I'm going to think about that. So.
>> I might be wrong.
>> No, no, no. No, no, no I love that idea. I think I have never; Homer has never done to me what Helios does to Circe thankfully. It's not quite as adversarial a relationship with Homer. I, because his world is expansive and beautiful and vivid and exciting, and I have lived in it with such passion for so many years, so he's, he has given me so much. But there were definitely moments where I wanted to pushback against the epic tradition. One of them is the scene where Odysseus and Circe first meet. She has turned his men into pigs, so he sends up a contingent to her house, she welcomes them in, she gives them food, drugged wine, she turns them into pigs, sends them off to her sty. So, they don't come back and one of the men who stayed outside goes back to tell Odysseus, you know, what happened, so he, he's needs to go up and fix this. And he goes up and on his way as he's going to the house, the God Hermes comes down and gives him some herbs which make him immune to Circe's power. So, he goes in, she tries her spell on him, if fails, he draws his sword, she screams and drops to her knees and begs for mercy and invites him into her bed sort of all in one big chunk. And that part had always, has always been really disappointing to me, because Circe is so exciting up to that point and there are so few female characters like her who are that smart and interesting and, you know, you're sort of expecting this great battle of wits between Odysseus and Circe and it's going to be really interesting and here's someone who can really standup to this wily hero and instead it's just, you know, the sword and it's over. Now, I think Homer is actually doing something more complicated than that, because she does retain some of her wisdom. She ends up helping him through monsters, she gives him information how to talk to the spirits in the underworld, but in that moment, I did want to pushback against that and instead of just sort of going with the male epic tradition of, you know, Odysseus the phallic sword. I mean, could it be more, you know, symbolic than that? And, and instead say you know keep, keep the lens on her and her experience of that moment and does it have to be about submission in that moment? Is there a way that the two of them could have come together that is not about submission? And so, in that case, I was pushing back. Actually, the person I think I pushed back against the hardest was Ovid. So, the, again, spoilers, is it a spoiler if it's 3000 years old? I don't know [laughter]. So, but Ovid, there's a love triangle in the story that comes, is inspired by Ovid between a nymph named Scylla, you might recognize that name, Glaucos and Circe. And Ovid, I think, is very interested in Circe's witchcraft and power and so he spends a lot of time on that, but her psychological motivations are not so flushed out as much as I love Ovid, he basically it's sort of she's this lovelorn goddess who's constantly falling in love with someone and it's sort of several episodes of "He's Just Not That Into You." And, you know, then she gets angry and she transforms him or she transforms the person he loves and it's this very shallow portrait and sort of pathetic and it's very stereotypical as if she sort of has nothing more interesting going on. So, I really wanted to completely rewrite that, that triangle and how that went so that Circe is an actual person with actual motivations.
>> Great, and I thought it was wonderful how you did that and it also flushes out your central character such that she's not, she's complex, she's not just abused. She's also an abuser. And I was interested in that thread that's, of course, is essential to the novel that this is, and I think it also part of its intersectional as opposed to sort of straight out second way of feminism, that it is this idea that social class matters, that it matters that even people who are themselves abused are also potential abusers of others lower down the chain, with this Telemachus saying," yeah enslave women." There's Circe and Sylla, these complex areas of guilt, as well as, a sense of I'm being bullied, but then I'm going to enact my bullying on others. So, I wondered if you could just talk even more about that aspect of what you're saying in this book?
>> Yes. Well, I absolutely wanted that to be a piece of it, because in this world that values power so much and looks down on weakness so much, is it possible to sort of touch power, to take power without then becoming part of that abusive system yourself? And I think Circe misses the mark on that a couple of times, and she's trying, she tries but she also fails because she's been raised sort of with that type of abuse as part of her, part of her surroundings and how can you will power in a way that is not harmful? Is that possible? So, I really wanted to look at that.
>> Yeah. It's a huge question and it's really well evoked here. I guess I, you talked about Ovid and, of course, you talked about Homer; I guess I'm wondering what other literary influences are there? I mean, you also talked about theater and I know you taught Shakespeare and you went to drama school, and are there ways that this is a novel where you could feel the influence of Shakespeare on your plot structure? I mean, is it a family romance? Is it a [laughter] tragedy? What, just talk about more about other literary influences a little bit?
>> Sure. So, Shakespeare I feel has influenced me just so much, although I can't always put my finger on how. I directed Shakespeare plays and one thing that I learned from that is how to tell a story where your audience may know several of the pieces or the ending, because of course, often times if you're directing a production of "Hamlet", at least 50% of your audience is going to know that there's going to be, you know, a pile of bodies on the stage at the end. And so what matters is how you get there. How you tell that story. How you create that arc. You know, can you, if you're directing "Othello", can your audience think "No don't kill her! Don't kill her!", you know, if you can do that as a director you have really succeeded. And so, I feel that practicing that in directing Shakespeare really helped in telling stories that are somewhat known and to sort of make them fresh. But I also think that "Troilus and Cressida" in particular which is a fabulous play, angry, funny, bitter, just Shakespeare just let's all these guys have it. It's his version of "The Iliad", Ajax, Hector, Achilles he just satirizes them all. And there are there's a little bit of the Shakespean Odysseus or Ulysses in "Troilus and Cressida", in my Odysseus just a moment there are a couple allusions to lines and it's not the same character at all, but there are definitely, there's definitely a little bit of influence there. And then the other, the other major thing that was; I didn't set out to have this be a major influence on the work, but it's Tennyson's "Ulysses" poem. The one that ends that ends, you know, "the will to strive to seek to find and not to yield", it was very famous, there are tons of quotable lines from it. But and it was just really hanging in the back of my head as I was working through so much of this and there were a couple of things about it that kept kind of coming up. One is that Penelope is never named. She's just referred to as the "aged wife." How insulting. So, speaking of characters, I loved writing Penelope knowing that she was waiting for me is a little bit of a spoiler. At the end of the work was really a wonderful thing, but so that was a piece of it that even, again, here's this, you know, this poem that celebrates the heroic and the woman doesn't even get a name after waiting for him for 20 years, I think she can be named. So, but also Telemachus himself is sort of this very quiet figure that the narrative Odysseus who's speaking in the poem, paints his son as sort of this very quiet figure and that was a piece also of my, how I created Telemachus. And finally, reading it as heroic and exciting as the Odysseus is in that poem, I think it would be very hard to live with him, and so that was also went into my portrait.
>> I guess sort of picking up on like who is it easy or hard to live with? I mean, how much was it, did it feel as a personal book informed by your own family relationships? I mean, I don't want to think that any of these [laughter] relationships are anything that have experienced. I mean, of course, the whole sequence of the terrible boyfriends, terrible--terrible father, of a terrible mother, of the terrible children, but it's very much a sort of book about how awful family can be and yet it's also a book about in the right circumstances the right alternative family structure could be a really great thing, the right kind of attachment. So, I mean, I'm assuming that your father is not quite like Helios and that, in fact, your family isn't [laughter] quite like the demigods, but I guess I'm sort of wondering even beyond the literary what, did you feel that you were sort of writing from personal experience some of the time or was it mostly sort of imaginative about how it would be to have this kind of, you know, specifically horrible family? I guess I'm embossing partly because, I mean for instance, the sequence in which Circe is the struggling working single mother trying to raise the impossible toddler and how can you get your spells done when they're screaming all the time? And I felt like I could relate to that, but also that but it seemed very, it seemed very truthful to you know a real experience of being a parent. So, then I'm wondering to what extent did you have to, have to imagine as opposed to convey if my siblings were about a thousand times worse than they really are, this is what it would be like?
>> Yes. So, fortunately I do not come from that family as written. And I try not and bring anyone directly from my life into my fiction. It's; none of it is autobiography. But I did, there are some experiences that absolutely resonate with my life and I think all writers have that is all the things you experience, all the things you see and read and feel, the things you suffer, all those things, you know, kind of all mixed together and they come out in your writing. Certainly there are some experiences that Circe has that resonate with me or, you know, with close friends of mine, things I've witnessed, and absolutely, I don't, I want to say this strongly; I don't believe you have to have experienced something in order to write about it, but I will say that being a mother did affect the motherhood sections of the novel. Thankfully my children are not demigods, but, but I think, I think all parents and all caregivers can, you know, sympathize with that sort of 3 AM, "I've been walking this child for 2 hours, they're not going to sleep, oh my God, you know, how am I going to get through this?" And I wanted that, that visceral thing to be there and, again, going back to sort of women and epic, you know, motherhood is not traditionally an epic subject and I really wanted, you know, but it is a piece of Circe's life and I wanted it to be given it's due.
>> Uh-hum, yeah. So, I guess just sort of more broadly I think it's wonderful that this novel is coming out now and then there are so many other sort of creative reinterpretations of classical myth that seem to be coming out at the moment. And I'm wondering, do you think classical myth or the Greeks are having a moment in our culture and are there are particular reasons why people are so eager to turn back to antiquity right now? I mean, did it feel to you that Homer is particularly resonate with, you know, even beyond your own obviously lifelong deep devotion to Homer and the ancients? Is our culture particularly looking back to the ancients right now for any particular reasons?
>> I think, I think they are and I'm not sure I can put my finger on why. And what's interesting, is I feel that "The Iliad" and the "Odyssey" tend to go a little bit in cycles and I would say that about 7 years ago, we were sort of in an Iliad phase.
>> You were just on trend.
>> And I, this was not planned. This is not planned. And but now I think we're in a honesty phase and so actually I would love to hear.
>> What else is on trend?
>> Yeah. I would love to.
>> Yeah.
>> Hear why, you know, what your experience has been translating the "Odyssey" and sort of what is it about the "Odyssey" that is speaking to us right now, because I'm not sure I can say?
>> Yeah. I mean, I think part of it is about alienation home, immigration, and migration, like my [inaudible] of course are big, right? And the "Odyssey" is all about migrants and all about finding alternative homes, alternative family structures. Self-recognition and recognition of the self and the other and this whole question of who do we have to expel from the family in order to retain a sense of self that seem so important, not just in the U.S., but in a lot of countries around the world. I think I could do a long list, but [laughter]. Yeah. We should start to wrap up and maybe as a final question, can you tell us what you're doing next and I mean you get to read it?
>> Well, thank you. I have two projects that are sort of floating around and it takes me a longtime to sort of think through this stuff, so I'm not sure which one is going to come to the floor first. Aside from Homer, the other great ancient love of my life is Virgil's "Aeneid." So, I am interested in possibly working with Virgil's "Aeneid." And then going back to Shakespeare, "The Tempest" is something that has been percolating for several years in the back of my head. So, it may be "The Tempest", it may be that, but one of those.
>> They go well together because, of course, being native is a big source for "The Tempest."
>> Yes.
>> That was great.
>> Thank you.
>> Thank you. [Inaudible].
[ Applause ]
So, we have time for a Q and A. People should raise their hands and I think there's a microphone.
>> So, I also read a book called "The War that Killed Achilles" by Carolyn Alexander in which she kind of convinced me, as I was reading it, that it's an antiwar book, and I wondered if you were familiar with her work and if you would comment on that?
>> I do know her work and I think that the ancients really understood warfare in a way that "we" in our modern lives, most of us, I mean those of us who were soldiers I think understand it, but I think most of us war does not touch us directly in our life, whereas, for the Ancient Greeks, I think that they were much closer to that and Homer, you know, yes there's glory in battle, but Homer does not shy away from showing the human cost of battle, the broken bodies, the grieving families, you know, none of that he doesn't pull any of those punches. And when I say "broken bodies" I mean literally you know when you are reading "The Iliad" you learn all the words for the internal organs, because they're all you know exploding out of the body. People are die on every page and it really is a poem about sort of loss and grief along with all this search for glory. So, I certainly feel that, that you could read it that way and that there is a strong; Homer never divorces the glory from the cost. And I actually thing Virgil goes even further.
>> Hi. Thank you so much for speaking with us. I had a question kind of for both of you, so I actually read the "Odyssey" first and then I read "Song of Achilles" afterwards, and I really liked what you said about how we don't hear about strong female characters especially in classical myths, and so I was really excited to hear that you were writing this book about Circe because I think she definitely could have had more done with her storyline to say the very least. But, you know, reading the "Odyssey" itself or reading a novel based on Homer, there is a group of people that you don't hear anything about which are normal people. We hear so much about, you know, gods and kings and queens, and heroes and we hear about the slaves who are still touched by them, but we don't hear anything about a guy who's just trying to make pottery, just trying to get by. And there's really no source material for that, because Homer is so focused on these great and, you know, larger than life people. So, I was wondering if there's any work that you think will be based on actual, on actual, on actual Homer itself or if we kind have to use our best guess, because those stories were never really told?
>> Well, I think the, in Homer in homes you get little glimpses. I mean, you get the occasional simile about the workman, this how the craftsman does whatever the craftsman does, the craftswoman [inaudible], and of course, there's also there's the beggar character Arnaeus in the "Odyssey" right? I mean, and I think we get this repeated double standard about the depiction of both the poor and slaves in the poem such that there's an idea that we should be really kind to poor people and Zeus justice endorses the idea that you should always welcome destitute stranger, but the most welcome the [inaudible] stranger who is, in fact, an elite man in disguise and when it's a real destitute stranger the Odysseus beats him up and that's the right thing to do, because of course, real destitute strangers are just going to suck up all your resources and be no good. And similarly, there was two types of slaves, there was a type of slave who was originally noble, get enslaved, they still retained some nobility, they're great and they're going to also be entirely willing to side with the elite all the time, so they're great. Well, if they show any mind of their own, then you just [inaudible]. So, there's definitely all of that going on. I think you find like the real lives of the poor or even just the medium, archeology is the only way because the literature of this period isn't composed with an [inaudible] showing absolutely no what exactly was happening for all classes in, you know, in society.
>> Well, and this is something I think that you do brilliantly in your translation because there are all these words for slaves that have sort of there's this tradition of translating them to something like maids or handmaids, and I think you, you know, so I think it's easy for us as a modern audience to forget those are slaves, you know, those are not someone who comes in and gets a salary. Those are slaves. And I think you went, and you used the word "slave" much more in those moments to sort of keep that in our eye so that we don't just edit it out as we're reading the translation. I thought that was wonderful.
>> I was really shocked to go back and look at other translations and realize how, how completely pervasive it is to erase slavery from the poem and to have the, which I think also to do with, you know, we're talking about whether Homer is able to critique warfare and to critique the warrior code. These poems are able to critique their own society from inside and I think there's this idea in sort of modern readings of these poems that they must be much more idealizing than they really are, and including the idealizing of this must be a good society and Odysseus must be a good character and therefore he can't be a slave owner, because that's not very good.
>> And I think as a novelist I tried to push back against that a little bit. One of the biggest sort of changes I made to "The Iliad" was that there's a character Briseis who is taken as a war prize by Achilles and she's sort of the reason that Achilles and Agamemnon get into a huge fight. She's kind of the cause of the big first scene of "The Iliad" and she's a princess who has been taken as slave, but in my version I wanted to have characters that were not noble characters and so I make her a farmer's daughter, because I was interested in what is the collateral damage? You know, we talk about the royalty, the Royal House of Troy and we talk about the Greeks camped on the shore, but how are those Greeks surviving? They're raiding all the lands in the area. They're taking everything they have. They're enslaving the daughters. They're killing the fathers and the sons, and I wanted there to be at least one voice that could speak to that experience.
>> Ah, hi. Thanks for speaking. This is more of a general question about writing, but when you're drawing from Homer or like other ancient poems or whatever, when you're writing fiction that has put objectives of fidelity to the source material and telling the story that you as the author want to tell, that and these two objectives are often at cross purposes; how do you navigate that, because I found that when an author takes too much liberties, too many liberties with you know Homer or Beowulf or whatever. It's just, you're basically just writing "Harry Potter" at that point. You're basically just creating a fantasy world and it feels like a copout to the reader and how do you, how do you navigate like telling the story that you as the author want to tell while being loyal to what exists and what people care about?
>> I actually think it's possible to be, to have a successful piece that ranges from extremely close to very far away. I think you can be quite far away and totally transform, actually, I'm thinking of the has anyone here ever read "Lost Books of the Odyssey" by Zachary Mason? That is very transformative of the original material. You know, there's a story where Penelope is a werewolf, so just to you know, but it's very interesting, thoughtful, you know, and so he's quite far away and also successful. So, I think you can do that. But I like to stay a little bit closer, because for me I love to sort of be in dialogue with those stories much more rather than sort of using them as a jumping off point to do something else. And I do sometimes feel that sort of the writer and the academic are a little bit at cross purposes. I think I've gotten better about that. I think it was a lot more with "Song of Achilles" I was much more sort of, "But I have to put that in", but then, "because it's in Homer, I have to put it in." There is in that first scene I mentioned where Achilles and Agamemnon have a huge fight at the beginning of "The Iliad." Athena shows up and she prevents Achilles from killing Agamemnon by grabbing the back of his hair and sort of talking him down. And she just did not fit. I tried 50 drafts of that scene with Athena in it. I was like "that's it, Athena is out." And so, you know, then I wrote a bunch of sort of things to take her out of it, and for me, the way I justified that was I thought, you know, this is a moment where sort of Achilles is thoughtfulness prevails and so she can be symbolic of that, you know, she's there because it's his super ego intervening to say, you know, maybe you shouldn't kill Agamemnon right here in front of everyone. So, I sort of found a way to justify it to myself. But I also think that, you know, you can't, so you can't be bound by it. You have to be able to be free. But whenever I'm stuck, the thing I do is I go read commentaries on Homer, because it is really helpful to hear other scholars debating it. I loved reading your introduction to the "Odyssey." That was, I wish I had that as I was writing along, because I think it's very helpful to be rooted in that scholarship and it always sparks something creatively. So, they can be in conflict, but I think they can also feed each other.
>> Thanks for being here. So, I'm one of the people in this room who reads nothing but English. I have no other language, and so whenever I read anything in translation, I always wonder what I'm missing. And so, listening to you two I'm getting a sense of what I'm getting by reading in translation, but can you give me a sense of what I'm missing? Because you know I'll never do it. I'll never, I'll never read the "Odyssey" in Greek. So, I, I mean, unfortunately for me, so what am I missing?
>> I mean, [laughter]. I think it depends which translation you read. I mean, different.
>> If you're reading Emily's it is very, you're missing very little.
>> If you're reading mine, there are specific things you are missing. My lines are shorter. The original has hexameter lines, I have pentameter lines. So, mine has a rhythm as the original does, but it's a different rhythm and it's a shorter line. I also, one of the consequences of that is that I have fewer very long compound words than the original does. So, the whole sound of it is different and you're just going to miss that, I'm sorry [laughter]. I mean, you could learn, you can transliterate and then read it out loud, [inaudible] of it and you would get some of that, but yeah.
>> Well we were speaking about transformation a little bit and I think translation is actually the ultimate transformation where you're taking something and turning it into something new, but that is also has the same, you know, DNA.
>> Well, yes it the same thing or not? Yes, but there's always that question of is my translation a completely different poem from the original or is it almost the same poem as the original, and I think it's kind of both.
>> Yeah.
>> You know, I want it to be kind of both.
>> And actually, talking about the sound effects, you know, yes it's true that you don't have those compound words.
>> Very different simplex
>> But you.
>> Simplex.
>> Yeah, but you also have this beautiful you know poetry all of its own and she does actually mimic a lot of sound effects that are in Homer in Greek as well. And I think one of the things that I always want to see in a translation of Homer is, is this a good story? You know, does this make me excited to hear it? Do I feel like I'm on the edge of my seat? You know, these stories were, were so exciting and they were adventure stories and they were meant to keep people, you know, right here "like and then what happened?" And so, I think for me a translation has to have that feeling and yours absolutely does.
>> That's because you're a novelist [laughter] it. Here's [inaudible] here. We should stop here, right?
>> Yeah.
[ Applause ]
>> Thank you.
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