Chwast hits a Homer: new in bookstores

A gift horse: from "Homer: The Odyssey" adapted by Seymour Chwast (Bloomsbury) Can you handle epic poetry only in small doses?

Recent books by renowned graphic designer and illustrator Seymour Chwast may be your answer. In his latest, "Homer: The Odyssey" (Bloomsbury), Chwast has given us a visual sibling to that famous series of classic condensations, "Cliffs Notes."

Ok, that's a bit too reductive and unfair: Chwast does far more here -- he truly achieves an original interpretation of an ancient tale.

On the other hand, he does perform a wonderful service for a great work of epic poetry that's long on praise and short on readers who aren't in 12th -grade English class. He strips away the intimidation factor while preserving the original work's integrity.

chwast-odyssey-cover"Listen, Calypso, you've held me prisoner here too long," says Odysseus, laying on a lounge chair beside the temptress, sipping a cocktail as though they were on the Riviera. At another point -- which I have to highlight, for an obvious reason (see, uh, the name of this blog and the Waterhouse painting in the banner) -- Odysseus stands atop a "Flash Gordon" rocket ship and explains, "I wanted to hear the Siren's song. The crew lashed me to the ship so I could hear it but not go mad." That image also adorns the cover of the book.

Chwast has a deft ability for touching on the key points of the action and the key monologues -- a skill he demonstrates in two previous adaptations of classic epic poetry, Dante's Divine Comedy and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

I've seen other illustrated versions of this story -- you may have, too -- but most seem so static, so flat.  They try to give us a realistic representation of what Odysseus must have looked like, but so much vitality and life drains from the story in the process.

But Chwast follows the lead of other revolutionary versions of this eternal story (James Joyce's "Ulysses," for instance, and the Coen Brother's movie "O Brother, Where Art Thou?") to create his energized interpretation.

In Chwast's adaptation, you witness a cast of thousands, like you'd find in a Cecil B. DeMille epic. His black-and-white sketches are clean, bold reinventions of a story first sung by the blind poet of Chios.

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Making Dante go Bang: new in bookstores

Does Dante Alighieri look  mad in this picture?  Well, if he is, it's not because he just finished reading a new "translation" of "Inferno" (Graywolf Press) by poet Mary Jo Bang. On the other hand, it wouldn't surprise me if that was the reason behind his surly expression.

Bang's new translation of "Inferno" either impresses or irritates -- there is nothing in between. No Limbo. No Purgatory. You have no choice: It's either Heaven or Hell.

Bang has turned the Florentine maestro's epic into a poem for our time, replete with cultural references to our world, notes and news headlines. It's an exhilarating tour de force that takes the reader by surprise. The opening lines, for instance, in which Bang gives us her own version of Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura are:

Stopped mid-motion in the middle

of what we call our life, I looked up and saw no sky--

That opening seems fairly tame. The reader -- this reader, I mean -- easily assumes that Bang's translation will be mostly an interesting exercise in basic modernizing of an old story.

Soon enough, the reader realizes it is hardly that. Bang is up to far more than providing a translation to join those by Sinclair, Singleton, Mandelbaum, Musa, the Hollanders, etc.

In the eighth circle, for instance, where the sin of fraud is punished, Bang's Dante-pilgrim encounters ... get ready for this .... Colonel Qaddafi as well as a former U.S. Secretary of Defense referred to as "Crazy Rummy":

I knew all their names by now,

Having heard them once when they were selected

And again on the ridge when they called to each other.

***

"Work those talons, Crazy Rummy,"

The whole disgusting group was cheering.

"Rip every last ounce of flesh off his back!"

***

Does this poem succeed?  Mark Ford doesn't think so, in the pages of BookForum. Its success, I think, all depends on expectation and point of view.   The main issue I have is with the title on the cover of the book -- there's the word "translation."   Why call it that when "An Interpretation" or "After Dante" would more accurately describe what Bang does?    If you're going to give an old poem a fresh new update, you're not exactly translating anymore, are you?  That's no criticism against the author: This book shows Bang at her most provocative and startling. But if you're expecting to find Dante, you should really look elsewhere.