Gaya Scienza

Eyjafjallajokull, Rimbaud's Newly Discovered Photo and Tony Duvert

If you want to learn how to pronounce the name of the Icelandic volcano that has been paralyzing air travel in, to and from Europe for the past few days, take a look at the short funny paper Iceland Volcano Spews Consonants and Vowels in The New York Times. I believe it's a good investment as it seems probable that the Eyjafjallajokull will continue to create trouble for months to come...

In the meantime my daughters are stranded in Paris, unable to join me for their spring holidays, and instead of spending a few days in the Hamptons, as I had planned, I stayed, lonely, in the small town where I live, with my books as sole companions, and a gloomy weather...

Coincidentally the last issue of The New Republic features a good paper by Emily Wilson (Stoicism and Us) reviewing the new biography Marcus Aurelius: A Life (Frank McLynn, Da Capo Press, 684p). The book does not seem to be worth reading. It is "pasted together by a non-specialist freelance writer," "McLynn is no philosopher, and his account of the supposed contractions within Stoicism is unreliable and muddled." But Wilson's paper is good, despite her mentioning, dismissively, "tabloid-ish modern theories, including the idea - which has been suggested on the basis of the endearments expressed in their correspondence - that Marcus and his tutor Fronto might have been lovers." Amy Richlin, who published in 2007 a new translation of the letters of Marcus and Fronto (Marcus Aurelius in Love), is not a tabloid-ish journalist...

I am eager to put my hands on two books just published in France.

Jean-Jacques Lefrère has delivered the project he alluded to in the introduction of his masterly edition of Rimbaud's correspondance in 2007. He has now put together a thick volume of correspondance surrounding Rimbaud, between the poet's death in 1891 and 1900 (Sur Arthur Rimbaud : Correspondance posthume (1891-1900), Fayard, 1213p). The cover illustration is a newly discovered photography of Rimbaud (read Arthur Rimbaud revient, en photo in Le Monde to get more details on the discovery). It is the only known picture of Rimbaud as an adult, in addition to the fuzzy photo of an emaciated sick man, taken just prior to his death.

Cécile Guilbert, a French critic I respect, recommended during a radio show I was listening to on France Culture, a literary portrait of Tony Duvert by French novelist Gilles Sebhan, (Tony Duvert - l'enfant silencieux, Denoël, 2010, p). Duvert's story is sordid, yet fascinating. A very gifted precocious author, he won the Prix Medicis in 1973, and was a recognized literary figure in the 70s, published by the prestigious Editions de Minuit, despite the pedophiliac content of his books. I remember the shock when I discovered Journal d'un innocent in 1976. In the 80s he published only two books, and thereafter retired to a recluse life in a small village of the Loir-et-Cher where he died in 2008. His body was discovered several weeks after his death...

2010.04.18

Marcus Aurelius in Love

The reason I did not publish a post last week is that I had made the mistake - should I confess it? - to promise the girls to take them to Disney World. Not that the actual stay in Orlando, which almost killed me (but that's another story), was the problem... In fact the simple thought of having to go exhausted me in anticipation the week before we went... But, fine, my daughters enjoyed it, and that was the purpose of the whole thing...

I want to tell you about a surprising little book, Marcus Aurelius in Love: The Letters of Marcus and Fronto (Edited, translated, and with an introduction and commentary by Amy Richlin, University of Chicago Press, 2007, 167 pp.), which I read during my journey from New York to Miami.

It's a new translation of letters exchanged between Marcus Cornelius Fronto, the renowned Roman orator of the second-century AD, and Marcus Aurelius, the famous emperor and author of The Meditations later in his life. The letters included in the small volume are from an earlier period, when the future emperor was a young man and Fronto was his teacher in rhetoric: 45 letters from 139 to 148 AD, more than half from Marcus Aurelius. The latter was aged 18 at the start of the correspondence when Fronto, 39, was hired as his teacher.

Fronto's correspondence was discovered in Italy at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The first French translation was published in 1830 while the first into English is the Loeb Classical Library translation of C.R. Haines from 1919-20, still in print. Scholars were disappointed by Fronto's correspondence: "The long-awaited Fronto was not at all what his nineteenth-century audience had expected, and his reputation immediately sank to a low that has persisted for almost two hundred years and kept most scholars from paying any attention to him at all," writes Amy Richlin in her introduction.

Amy Richlin, a respected professor of classics at the University of California, stumbled on these letters while doing research for a book on Fronto and his relationship with Marcus Aurelius. She decided to publish them separately in a new 'modern' translation in order to make them more readily available. She has done a great job, making the text very accessible to a contemporary audience, although by moments she displays boldness (for instance when she translates pulpamentum, 'bits of meat eaten as snacks', by 'hot dog'...). I was also surprised by her decision to use French to translate the Greek segments of the letters... The introduction, by a leading scholar in Latin and Greek sexuality, is a very good text.

"The letters between Marcus and Fronto provide what appears to be direct evidence of a loving relationship of some kind." Were they in love? Were they lovers? Why have the letters not been noticed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, "when so much else was noticed"? Amy Richlin provides interesting answers.

Read the letters yourself to make your own opinion. Maybe you will need to read them several times. I would have liked to look at the English commentary of Fronto's correspondence published by Michael van den Hout in 1999, as well as the notes and introduction of a new French bilingual edition in French published by Pascale Fleury and Ségolène Demougin in 2003 (Paris, Belles Lettres, Collection Fragments) to get other points of view. But here, at the southern tip of Florida, books are mainly used as towel weights...

2008.07.20

Summer Leave

It's summer reading season. The question, as always, is: What am I going to read this summer? I always try to reread a classical novel. This year, as far as the field of this blog is concerned, it's Le Cousin Pons. I am also bringing with me a new translation of the letters exchanged between Marcus Aurelius and Fronto. The book is published by Amy Richlin (Marcus Aurelius In Love,The University of Chicago Press, 2006) and is intriguing. I also have a sentimental novel, The Story of a Marriage (Andrew Sean Greer, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008, 208 pp.), for the waiting lines at Disney World, downloaded to my eReader.

Isherwood and his long-term relationship with Don Bachardy are the topics of a recent documentary by Guido Santi and Tina Mascara (Chris & Don: A Love Story). I watched it at the Quad Cinema in the Village, before leaving New York for Miami, a small auditorium which reminded me of the 'cinemas d'art et d'essais' of my youth in Paris... The movie is puzzling... At the start, someone begins to talk. It's the voice of an old lady... until you realize it's Don's voice, today aged 74. Unfortunately a very unpleasant voice, worsened by the mimics of his mouth, when he is being filmed... The film is confusing: old home movies showing scenes remembered out loud by Don... are mixed with scenes played by actors, as the credits at the end of the movie seem to indicate... Isherwood remains physically more or less the same during the time span showed in the movie. He was almost fifty when they met. But Don evolves from a charming and beautiful teenager - he was not even twenty- to a dry old man desperately trying to remain fit through regular workouts at the gym... Sad... But nonetheless a document. Short sequences show Auden, Stravinsky, Burt Lancaster, Tennessee Williams, among others. As Stephen Holden writes in his review for the New York Times, it "is one of the ultimate true stories of a proto-gay-marriage succeeding in a forbidding climate."

Charlie Crist the Republican governor of Florida who is regularly mentioned as a potential running mate for Senator McCain was interviewed by Deborah Solomon for her weekly page in the New York Time Magazine. Rumors about him being gay have surfaced from time to time, influencing some of the questions - nasty - asked by Ms Solomon to this atypical Republican who does not own any property ("I just never found a need for it") and answers with a certain sense of humor: "You were married nearly 30 years ago, but the marriage lasted less than a year. Do you prefer living alone? I got married and divorced because it didn't work out. I haven't found the right one since. It's really that simple. You can't find one woman in all of Florida? Maybe I have. Stay tuned."

Meanwhile the CDC reported this week that HIV infection and AIDS in men who have sex with men rose significantly from 2001 to 2006.

2008.06.29