June's Reading List

Homer in Translation and Jung

Each month I share a few notes on the books I read during the previous month. The idea of the notes is to give anyone who might be interested enough of a glimpse into the book, at least what caught my eye, to decide if its worthy of your limited time.

As it happens, June left me with very little time for reading so I have only two books to mention. Since we’re now halfway through July I can confirm that July will yield a better crop.

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Memories, Dreams, Reflections by C.G. Jung

Carl Gustav Jung's book, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, is as close to a memoir as we have for the Swiss psychotherapist who worked through the first half of the twentieth century. The book follows his life from early childhood to the end of his public life and will hold a high value for anyone who has read widely in Jung. It offers stories and observations from his own inner life and childhood that serve to fill in gaps existing in his professional oeuvre. 

With much to recommend it, Jung’s memoir nevertheless irked me in the way that he described, at length, the evolution of his relationship with Freud. There are at least two sides to every story and Jung’s is very much one-sided. I’d have to find an equivalent narrative in Freud’s corpus to make a better assessment.

Of course, the two are juggernauts in psychology however out of fashion they may now be. Jung starts as something of a protégé of Freud's, or at least an admirer, but by the end of the book, Jung describes a relationship that has soured perhaps as only a relationship between two psychotherapists can sour, replete with oedipal complexes, death wishes, and magic noises. Jung is highly critical of the older man. Those sympathetic to Freud, or at least those who value the work that he did in illuminating for a modern audience the role of myth and literature in human consciousness, will find Jung's take either reductive or intentionally diminishing of Freud's person and work. Jung strikes me as tending toward abstraction and spiritualism and is therefore resistant to what I might describe as the earthier sexual instincts of Freud. Jung prefers the spiritual and the occult and downplays the physical. Wherever you stand on the matter, if late 19th and early 20th century psychotherapy and its role at the beginning of the great books movement is of interest, then Jung's reflections here will likely be of use to you. 

(One aside: in this book Jung describes his reaction to reading Nietzsche for the first time. I particularly appreciated his thoughts on Nietzsche who so often is either caricatured or valorized in unhelpful ways.)

As is probably true of many psychotherapists, the stories Jung tells of working with patients are fascinating and suggestive. He observes something that should be obvious to all of us: that the worst patients were intellectuals. That made me laugh. He also says things that, I suppose, are common sense, but which are nevertheless refreshing to hear. For example, the fact that those who do not know nature are neurotic (this might simply be restating the earlier point that intellectuals are the worst patients). Some of the work that I have personally undertaken through my company, Iliad Athletics, takes this fact as a starting point. We do everything we can to reintroduce nature into people's lives. 

While it was not one of my favorite reads, it was nevertheless full of insightful observations about human experience and will reward anyone with an interest in either Jung or Freud.

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Memorial: A Version of Homer’s Iliad by Alice Oswald

Alice Oswald’s Memorial is not really a translation of Homer’s Iliad but rather an extraction and presentation of only the parts of the epic poem that mourn death. The subtitle gives this away by describing her translation as a “version” of Homer’s poem.

Making adaptations or derivative versions of great and ancient works is a worthy enterprise in my mind. We can discern at least some of the staying power of the classics in the regular patter of contemporary works that derive from the ancient ones. Alice Oswald and Derek Walcott, have book-length poems and Ricardo Pau-Llosa occasionally offers lyric reflections on characters from Homer. He writes beautifully about Calypso and Odysseus in the journal Arion.

Homer’s Iliad is the epic of war and the body count associated with war. The story itself is so compelling it’s possible to miss the relentless focus on war’s cost. But the Iliad holds the cost squarely in view. In the Iliad, no death is anonymous and abstract. We learn about each casualty’s parents, wife, children, farm, prospects…. Each death is described in all its anatomical detail.

then Socus who was running by now
felt the rude punch of a spear in his back
push through his heart and out the other side.

Oswald accepts this part of Homer’s epic and narrows her focus to present it without the rest of the narrative. Memorial offers a study in Homer’s death scenes and death metaphors. Instead of an overarching narrative in which death appears like gems in a crown, Oswald gives us only the gems—no crown. She empties the Iliad’s deaths out on the table like a bag of jewels for inspection. Each one implies a narrative, has a secret story locked within, but only offers us glimpses.

their father
was a little whisp of worries
waiting at home what could he do
now all his savings will go to other people's children

It’s a good idea and executed well enough. Oswald is not ham-fisted with her language. She allows the ancient text’s archaism to come through and this adds some welcome ballast to the language. With that said, her translation did not strike me as illuminating or inspiring. It gets the job done, if you will, but does not provide any flashes of insight. Perhaps it’s just that when you join Homer’s team, Homer does most of the heavy lifting.

falling like snow
when the living winds shake the clouds into pieces
like flutters of silence hurrying down
to put a stop to earth at her leafwork.