From jmpfund@bgnet.bgsu.edu Sun Mar 14 21:36:00 1999 Received: from mxu2.u.washington.edu (mxu2.u.washington.edu [140.142.32.9]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW99.02/8.9.3+UW99.01) with ESMTP id VAA20484 for ; Sun, 14 Mar 1999 21:35:59 -0800 Received: from bgnet0.bgsu.edu (bgnet0.bgsu.edu [129.1.2.15]) by mxu2.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW99.02/8.9.3+UW99.01) with ESMTP id VAA02342 for ; Sun, 14 Mar 1999 21:35:58 -0800 Received: from [129.1.190.233] (tc1-167.dialup.bgsu.edu [129.1.190.167]) by bgnet0.bgsu.edu (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id AAA31539 for ; Mon, 15 Mar 1999 00:35:55 -0500 (EST) X-Sender: jmpfund@popj.bgsu.edu Message-Id: In-Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 00:35:41 -0400 To: "Classics List" From: "James M. Pfundstein" Subject: Flight of the TSE-TSE (Was: Eliot and Mr. Murray) PTR queries: >Then you are arguing that a Swinburnesque aesthetic is unobjectionable as a >representation of Euripides? The examples Eliot quotes don't justify all the hay Eliot makes out of them, certainly. No translation can represent an original adequately, unless the original is devoid of poetic merit. Murray's translations of Euripidean plays had and have this advantage over any such work by Eliot: they exist. The classically inclined reader of English waiting for Eliot's "Agamemnon" would have died of old age by now. Re the "Thyestes" imbroglio PTR writes: >Ah, but the error of fact is an error of accuracy in the scholarship of >Greek, not of accuracy with the Greek language. If he's writing about an essay about literature, naturally I evaluate his comments accordingly. I don't know how we'd go about testing Eliot's accuracy in knowledge of Greek or Latin without holding a posthumous Construe-a-Thon. (If we could get Federal funding for this I think it's worth trying.) >And it's his knowledge of Greek and Latin RELATIVE TO FROST that's the >>issue. Not with me so much. But Frost doesn't seem to make the pretensions to scholarly criticism that Eliot does (at least in the few pieces of Frostian prose I've been able to lay my hands on in the past couple of days). So Frost is superior (in my view) because he was not actively promulgating error. But if it turns out he did... why, then Ile fit him! >I've read the Poetics a number of >times -- hell, parts of it are sources for my creative writing class -- but >I didn't remember the discussion of Thyestes off the top of my head. Why >should he have looked it up when he's not writing about the fragments of >Greek tragedy? Why should he have made the statement, if it wasn't relative to his purpose? I'm not intruding the notion of a Greek "Thyestes" play into the discussion: it was Eliot's idea to bring it up; it was his responsibility to ensure its accuracy, and the "Poetics" citation in my post was just one way to indicate how easy it would have been to check. > >> F.L. Lucas (whom Eliot cites) may have discussed it [i.e. the matter of >>a >>Greek "Thyestes"] > >Why would he have mentioned it in a book about "Seneca and Elizabethan >Tragedy?" Seneca's Greek sources (if any) are a perennial topic, and Lucas' horrible book is historical in structure so, as I say, he may have mentioned it. >Shouldn't you look that up, if you're going to mention it? Or >are you committing the same error for which you're castigating Eliot - >saying something you haven't checked and might be wrong about to show >>that you've read F.L. Lucas? I'm not saying that you are: I'm saying >that you >could, innocently, be making the mistake of imitating Eliot in this. If I were writing for a journal I certainly would have checked it, or excised the statement; normally less formal standards apply to an e-mail posting than to a published article (although, of course, I wear my dinner jacket and tie when composing either one). > >The theater is a gift which has not been vouchsafed to every race... > > >That is, indeed, ridiculous. To call it an "ethnic" theory is going a bit >too far; surely he's merely saying that the Romans had no talent for >theater - more a cultural judgment than an ethnic one. Ethnicity includes culture, so I think my description was rather generous in that respect. Eliot himself doesn't mention culture; he says "race." "These be the Nun's Priest's words, not mine." But, in passing, it is Eliot's statement that is itself ridiculous. N.B. the Italians are among the nations unvouchsafed the gift of theater, in spite of Goldoni, Commedia dell'Arte, Pirandello, etc. >Have you noticed >two things: 1.) that Eliot in the Seneca essay, too, faults Romanticism >for the >misapprehension of a classical author ("Professor Mackail is inclined by >his training to enjoy the purer and more classical authors, and is inclined by >his temperament to enjoy the most romantic: like Shenstone or some other >eighteenth-century poets, Seneca falls between" I'll go farther yet. He lays his finger on the paradox that ought to give all Seneca-haters pause to reflect: that Seneca's influence on English drama was at its peak when English drama was greatest (p. 52f). Eliot's answer is inadequate because he paid inadequate attention to the evidence, but he at least starts with the right question for his topic. >2.) That in the first section, the one ostensibly dealing with Roman drama >as it was, there are only two paragraphs that do not mention English drama >>or English Renaissance poets: and that Racine (or at any rate, the >French) is >mentioned in one of them. And he mentions Hindu and Japanese and Spanish theater as well-- each more than once. Greek theater is mentioned far more often in this section than English or any Renaissance theater, but I would agree with you that this is not his main topic. His topic is what he says it is (again, see "Selected Essays" p. 51; also, in the last words of his section on Seneca proper: "we must remember that we cannot justly estimate his influence unless we form our own opinion of Seneca first, without being influenced by his influence," "Selected Essays" p. 61). >>So that if his assessment of the original is inaccurate > >No, you've only proven that he's in error in certain incidentals, not in >the entire assessment. A flaw in one part does not necessarily destroy the >whole. But not necessarily not, either. His treatment of Seneca's plays is a tissue of errors, the grosser errors of fact that I've shown, the less obvious errors having to do with the history of Greek and Roman theater-- even his praise of Seneca is misguided, in that he tends to pluck passages from their context without acknowledging the skill it took to create that context. PTR replied (on Eliot's description of the mad scene as "the end of ["H.F."]") >Yes, it would exculpate Eliot if his contemporaries who were classicists >were equally fast and loose with figures. Remember, I'm arguing that he >was as good or better a scholar of Greek and Latin than Frost; and if his >contemporary classicists were equally fast and loose, it would prove that >your criterion couldn't be used to distinguish his abilities with Greek and >Latin. The fourth act of a five act play is not the end (and, again, the figure of 300 lines is one Eliot himself views as a sizeable chunk of the play). This is one more piece of evidence to suggest that Eliot has not read the play ("Hercules Furens") carefully and completely. And "H.F." is the only play from the Senecan corpus of which he attempts any structural analysis, so his errors in discussing this play are especially significant. > >Anyway, good to argue with you. > >Patrick Likewise! I've been on spring break and haven't had a good argument in ten days. I tried shouting at my wife's cats, but they just ran under the bed. Now if they had only read Seneca's prose and had the proper Stoical outlook... [Message breaks off in incoherent mumbling, shouts of "Heironymo's mad againe!" etc. etc.] JMP("Pfurens") .