Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo”

A Review of Zora Neale Hurston’s

Barracoon: The Story of the

Last “Black Cargo”

Originally published in the

Rain Taxi Review of Books,

Fall 2018

Barracoon:
The Story of the Last “Black Cargo”
Zora Neale Hurston
Edited by Deborah G. Plant
Amistad ($24.99)

In 1931, anthropologist and future novelist Zora Neale Hurston attempted to publish Barracoon, her narrative of the life of Cudjo Lewis (aka Oluale Kossula), the last surviving passenger of the last slave ship to bring human cargo to America. It was to be her first book, but it received unanimous rejection because of her use of dialect to capture Cudjo’s remarkable voice. Hurston’s subsequent fiction and nonfiction revolutionized the literary use of dialect, however, transforming readers’ and scholars’ ideas of what kinds of American language could be considered artistically and intellectually acceptable, and so nearly ninety years later, Barracoon finally arrives in a landscape that Hurston herself helped create.

A barracoon is a seaside holding station for slaves on the coast of Africa and is thus the last transition between the slaves’ old and new worlds. It’s a curious turning point to use as the title for a book on this subject, but Hurston’s Barracoon is nearly unique among American slave narratives in that it portrays the worlds before and after capture, told by a native African who wasn’t born into slavery. The barracoon was Cudjo’s first glimpse of the enormous, malevolent sea, which in the terrifying account of his Middle Passage strikes the reader as a kind of Homeric monster, and while most slave narratives can only portray the dramatic transition from slavery to emancipation, giving the impression that emancipation equals freedom, Cudjo’s narrative encompasses the arc from freedom to slavery to a different and compromised kind of freedom, allowing him to focus at great length on the totality of the world that first created him. Hurston was initially frustrated by Cudjo’s reticence to answer her questions about the aspects of his story that she was looking for, and at his insistence on giving his full family history and painting an expansive picture of his lost world, but she quickly discovers that his memory of Africa is the goldmine that she didn’t know she was seeking.

Cudjo Lewis, photographed
by Zora Neale Hurston

Letting Cudjo (mostly) speak for himself, Hurston gives free rein to his astonishing memory and narrative power as he describes an entirely unknown universe to her. This is the book’s most arresting material, portraying a paradise lost that’s as complex and problematic as it is beautiful and fascinating and delightful. It’s uneasy reading to see Cudjo’s idealized society also include a savagery that led to his capture and sale by a rival tribe to the American slave-trading savages who dragged him across the sea to hell, but this ugly larger picture is a necessary part of the book’s enlarged scope, leading Hurston to some of her most important and disturbing conclusions about human nature.

Cudjo’s life in America stretches out much longer, with five years spent in slavery and more than sixty years spent scraping out an existence in postbellum Alabama, but he never stops thinking of himself as African. After emancipation he immediately starts planning to return home, and when this proves impossible he helps found an enclave of freed Africans called Africatown, which recreates a mini version of their homeland and buffets them a bit from the discrimination that they received from white and black Americans alike. He marries another African, has five children, and over the ensuing decades he buries them all in the family graveyard that mirrors some of the African death customs that he’d described to Hurston. Near the end of the book, when he allows Hurston to photograph him, he puts on his best American suit but leaves his shoes off, because he wants to be seen and remembered as African.

This is as heartbreaking a story as could ever be imagined, and in Hurston’s brilliant mimicking voice it sings as a kind of epic song. Her prose isn’t yet the silky instrument that it would later become, and she pads the story a bit with material gleaned from other sources and surreptitiously puts it into Cudjo’s voice, but Cudjo’s extraordinary mind and personality burst through the pages as the primary force of his narrative, even as Hurston’s artistry (and lapses) make themselves palpably apparent. While we feel Cudjo with the deepest immediacy, readers of Hurston’s later work will also see that her dense literary sensibility adds layers of reflective color and shading to how we perceive his story.

Hurston the enchanter.

A writer of the highest sophistication, Hurston has the ability to tell a story that’s entirely original and moving and “real” while also weaving itself into a dazzling tapestry of literary allusions and games, as when in her 1937 masterpiece Their Eyes Were Watching God she has brilliant fun playing with the Bible and Dante and Cervantes and Proust. Arriving at the end of Barracoon’s last chapter, entitled “Alone,” Proust’s woundedly nostalgic ghost seems to whisper through Hurston as the final words of the book leave Cudjo “full of trembling awe before the altar of the past.” Cudjo strikes the most resonant and lasting chords in the reader’s mind, but as in Don Quixote, where we realize that it’s Quixote who’s the enchanter who has himself and Sancho under a narrative spell, and that as an enchanter he’s also a reflection of the larger enchanter, Cervantes himself, Hurston’s readers will see her embarking here on this same kind of artistic odyssey. Cudjo couldn’t be more real to us, but in this first sally Hurston the enchanter begins to make her presence nearly almost as real.

—David Wiley

Marcel Proust’s Letters to His Neighbor

A Review of Marcel Proust’s

Letters to His Neighbor

Originally published in the

Rain Taxi Review of Books, Spring 2018

Letters to His Neighbor

By Marcel Proust

Translated by Lydia Davis

New Directions ($19.95)

Marcel Proust, author of the world’s longest and perhaps greatest novel, In Search of Lost Time, was a near-invalid who sequestered himself during most of his novel’s composition inside a cork-lined, shuttered bedroom, banishing pollen, noise, sunlight, people, and everything else in the world other than his own voluminous memories. Stories of his reclusiveness have become so legendary and proverbial that inside views of his life—such as his housekeeper Céleste Albaret’s profoundly illuminating memoir, Monsieur Proust—read like gospel to pilgrims in search of more shards of the true Proust. He didn’t write any memoirs himself, unless you count his great roman à clef as a memoir, but his epic correspondence forms a kind of double mirror to his endlessly refracting novel, and so when any new artifacts documenting this monster of neurotic hermeticism come to light, it’s like the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the caves of Qumran. Who knows how much of Proust’s correspondence lies unread in private collections, or lost in someone’s attic, but the latest discovery of twenty-six of his letters to his upstairs neighbor, written over a decade during the composition of his novel, will delight any Proustian and will tide the faithful over until new relics come to light.

An American dentist named Charles Williams lived and worked in the flat just above Proust’s—a nightmare for any sensitive person, let alone one who only slept during the day—and nearly all of the letters in this volume are hilariously labyrinthine requests for quiet. Three are addressed to Dr. Williams himself, while the twenty-three others are addressed to his wife, Marie, who like Proust also had ongoing health problems and whose sensitivity and intelligence very slowly made their mark on her complaining neighbor’s empathy. Some of these letters are simply ingenious in how they wend their way toward their true purpose—quiet, please!—but Proust couldn’t help becoming connected to his fellow sufferer upstairs, and while almost never actually coming into contact with her he nonetheless gave her much of himself, and he received perhaps just as much in return. Responding to a letter she wrote him while she was on vacation (and thus not even around to complain to), he revels in her perceptive descriptions and reflects his own crepuscular experience right back at her:

You, with your pictorial and sunlit words, have brought color and light into my closed room. Your health has improved you tell me, and your life become more beautiful. I feel great joy over this. I cannot say the same for myself. My solitude has become even more profound, and I know nothing of the sun but what your letter tells me.

Gradually recognizing each other’s finely attuned minds, the two eventually began exchanging books—always through intermediaries, despite being a floor apart; in fact, he even sent some of his letters to her via the mail—and early on he began offering her published samples of his ongoing novel, despite his qualms about their level of polish and completion. Sending her magazine excerpts of what eventually became the work’s second and third volumes, he illuminates his expansive method as he subtly impresses her with why she and her husband need to give him the quiet that his labors require:

But will these detached pages give you an idea of the 2nd volume? And the 2nd volume itself doesn’t mean much; it’s the 3rd that casts the light and illuminates the plans of the rest. But when one writes a work in 3 volumes in an age when publishers want only to publish one at a time, one must resign oneself to not being understood, since the ring of keys is not in the same part of the building as the locked doors.

Those Daedalian keys eventually took seven volumes to become almost integrated into the novel’s full ground plan, Proust’s fully articulated vision halting just short of completion when he died eight years later, his revisions and expansions having ballooned the three volumes that he mentions in this 1914 letter into seven nearly perfect halls of mirrors.

Renowned Proust translator Lydia Davis reproduces the author’s idiosyncratic usage and orthography faithfully, mimicking the improvised quality of these dashed-off letters with a slashing verve, and she includes photographs of many of the letters so that readers can see their slapdash nature for themselves. The volume’s original French editors Estelle Gaudry and Jean-Yves Tadié contribute helpful endnotes, which Davis translates, expands, and emends to great effect, although Davis unfortunately has her hands tied with Proust-biographer Tadié’s labored foreword.

Davis’s afterword also indulges in a few too many of her own peccadillos, such as way too much extra-Proustian information about what the bank that occupies Proust’s former apartment looks like now, which is totally irrelevant to what Proust experienced himself. The real magic of her afterward comes in its coda, which tells the story of the grandson of a Norman florist reading extracts from these letters online and subsequently disclosing Proust’s flower-buying habits and etiquette with the Williamses and others, noting the thirty-two times that he visited the shop between 1908 and 1912. Unearthing these intricately revealing records is the true Proustian pursuit, redeeming Davis’s mini-gospel of its few apocryphal lapses and elevating this volume’s host of testamentary material to nearly the level of the letters themselves. A tiny reliquary, this book’s illuminated codex now serves as a minor pilgrimage site for all true Proustian communicants.

—David Wiley

Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey

On First Looking into Wilson’s Homer

A Review of Emily Wilson’s Translation of Homer’s Odyssey,

Including a Discussion with the Translator

Originally published in the

Rain Taxi Review of Books, Spring 2018

The Odyssey

Homer

Translated by Emily Wilson

Norton, $39.95

Book clubs have always had a dubious reputation among elite readers and writers. From soi-disant elitist Jonathan Franzen deriding the Oprah Book Club for picking what he called “schmaltzy, one-dimensional” novels (note that Oprah’s second selection for the club was Toni Morrison’s staggering Song of Solomon), to bona fide elitist Vladimir Nabokov mocking book clubs in the introduction to his second English-language novel, Bend Sinister, serious literary folk have always turned their noses up at the amateur reading public, despite greatly profiting from it. Being almost totally antisocial, my own proclivities have mostly leaned in that direction too, but after moving to the East Coast a few years ago with no job, no contacts, and no plan—and being the virtual definition of the word amateur myself—I cautiously dipped my toe into a few area book clubs as a way of meeting likeminded people, and the results have been illuminating. A few groups were just people who wanted to get out of the house and gossip, with some attendees not even having read the book, while a few other groups treated the books with more seriousness and sophistication, and after some trial and error I eventually discovered a magic cabal of serious readers who were devoted to examining classic literature in profound depth. The first discussion I attended with this group was for Dante’s Inferno, and I was amazed to discover that the group’s facilitator had named her only child Dante. These were my people.

Homer and his homeys on Mount Parnassus
(detail), Raphael, 1509–10

We immediately went on to read the rest of Dante’s Comedy, which I was thrilled to reread along with such a diverse crew of barkmates, and since then we’ve gone on to discuss a virtually Dantean panoply of my old favorites: Virgil’s Aeneid, Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Nabokov’s Lolita, among many, many others. We’ve also surged forward into territory that’s been new to me, finally getting me around to Andrei Bely’s Petersburg, Jean Toomer’s Cane, Karel Čapek’s War with the Newts, Adolfo Bioy Casares’s The Invention of Morel, Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers, as well as the aforementioned Bend Sinister. The general trend these past two years with them has been toward digging deeper into the foundations, though, as the three-meeting Dante discussion eventually led us to a two-meeting discussion of the Aeneid, which has now finally led us back to Homer. We spent two pitched meetings on the Iliad, and then we went straight into the Odyssey, and in an amazing stroke of authorly coincidence, a new version of the Odyssey came out in the short time between our two meetings, and it was by a translator who works just blocks from our meeting-place: University of Pennsylvania Classics professor Emily Wilson. So we invited her to our second Odyssey discussion, and she agreed to attend, seemingly descending from the skies as if she were Athena.

Emily Wilson

Five years in the making, Wilson’s Odyssey stands unique among modern Homer translations—as well as among all English translations of the poem. Written in unrhymed iambic pentameter, upending the entrenched modern practice of creating a more freeform Homer, Wilson’s is also the world’s first translation of the Odyssey into English by a woman, an astounding anachronism in a time when there are more women than men in the Classics field, as well as far more women book-buyers and readers in general, with women being statistically more educated overall now than men. This Odyssey is a much belated achievement, and in Wilson’s bold hands it slashes through decades and centuries of overgrown brush to create a dramatically fresh and relevant Homer for the Trump/#MeToo era. Eschewing the circumlocutions that English translators have long used to mask much of Homer’s most unsettling elements, Wilson calls a slave a slave (rather than a “thrall” or a “maid”) and makes no attempt to soften the poem’s brutal sexism, classism, and imperialism. Our hero marauds and pillages, happily destroying cities and tearing apart families in his quest for fame and riches, and even in his own hometown his closest friends are merely his property.

Wilson also deliberately leaves in the narrative gaps and inconsistencies that other translators usually try to minimalize or smooth out. Answering the group’s questions about some of the poem’s imperfectly organized power relationships, Wilson stressed how she let the poem stand as close as she could to the original, letting Homer make his own mistakes:

It’s unclear how much you are supposed to interrogate the central fantasy of the poem, that Odysseus is going to be always in exactly the same position in his household, as the father, son, husband, slave-owner, and dominant member of the community on Ithaca…. In real life, things change; fathers get older, sons inherit, relationships change. The poem is in some ways committed to obscuring that fact, but it also reminds us of it. Odysseus, in his “disguise” as a wrinkled, bereft old beggar, looks the way he might in real life, if twenty years have passed; yet Athena, the goddess who steers the plot, insists that his “real” self is immune from time or age. I wanted readers of my translation to be able to see where the gaps are in the narrative, to notice the interesting tensions and contradictions.

Of course, Odysseus is also returning to Ithaca to become the things that he never really got to be before departing for the Trojan War twenty years earlier—he’d been a very young man then, with a newborn son and a still-active father, so he’d never really gotten to be a father, patriarch, or king yet—but Wilson allows us to debate these points ourselves by letting all the text’s confusions stand. Why isn’t Odysseus’s father, Laertes, still the king of Ithaca? And how would the line of succession work if Odysseus’s wife Penelope married one of her suitors? Would that man become king, or would Odysseus’s son Telemachus merely pay a dowry and become king himself? We asked Wilson all these questions, and she told us that her translation leaves these points deliberately unresolved because Homer doesn’t clear them up himself and in fact often implies widely contradictory lines of resolution.

Athena and Owl (detail), Mycenaean

In contrast to this laissez-faire attitude toward the original text’s foibles, Wilson necessarily has to make her own active decisions about how to marshal Homer’s farrago of Greek dialects—which in its Babel Tower of inherited lines and phrases ranges over hundreds of years and miles of ancient Greek culture—into a modern English that holds together as a unified and pleasurable reading experience. Her decision to recast Homer’s dactylic hexameter into blank verse is a bold and fascinating move, because like her choice to leave in all the poem’s archaic textual and moral problems, the form of her translation also stands as both a modern and a fascinatingly old-fashioned statement. Her cadences read as freshly as the latest Internet gossip, allowing readers to devour her seamless song in headily intoxicating gulps, but her deliberate and mesmerizing rhythms constantly remind us that this poem is also pure artifice, reproducing for modern readers a good portion of the formal artistic experience that ancient Greek listeners and readers would have had with the original. Discussing how as a pan-Greek poem Homer’s text would have sounded wholly artificial to every single person it attempted to encompass within its linguistic sphere, Wilson described to us how outlandish and archaic this work would have seemed even the day it was completed:

Imagine that there are some phrases which are Chaucerian English, and then there’s a little bit of Brooklyn English, and then there’s a little bit of Cockney in here, and then a little bit of Irish. Homeric Greek is a mix of different dialects, from different time periods and different places in the Greek-speaking world. . . People must have got accustomed to this artificial language, which was how poetry sounded.

Few modern translators attempt to cast Homer into a line-by-line mirror of the original, instead letting their verses spill over onto each other and spread out as they endeavor to capture the full scope of each line’s and book’s meanings. Robert Fagles’s acclaimed translation exemplifies this freeform/free-verse expansiveness, creating a prosy but very useful and enjoyable edition that captures much of Homer’s resonances within its brimming-over verses. Before Wilson’s version, the only line-by-line translation I’d read was by Richmond Lattimore—another poet-scholar who worked and taught just a few miles from where I live now—but his version doesn’t stick to any kind of regular meter. Compared to the approximately eighteen syllables of Homer’s dactylic hexameter (which includes leeway for occasional spondaic substitutions), Lattimore usually sticks to a mere fourteen syllables, and so despite giving himself great freedom with the rhythm, he necessarily has to condense Homer’s sense into a consistently tighter line each time. Taking this approach to an even further extreme, Wilson’s iambic pentameter telescopes this already dense condensation into a pithy ten syllables per line, making her identical number of lines about 5/7ths the length of Lattimore’s syllable-count, and about 5/9ths the length of Homer’s, but as with every other aspect of her translation, Wilson’s meter is a slashing knife that clears the area of many of her readers’ preconceived notions and expectations. Not everyone will approve of this highly pointed version of Homer, but the readers in our group—many of whom had read several other versions before, including the original Greek—were unanimously enthralled by her poetry’s intense economy.

Odysseus and the Sirens (detail)
Carthaginian mosaic, 260 CE

Another big departure in this translation is how Wilson eschews most of Homer’s ubiquitous metrical repetitions (“rosy-fingered dawn,” “the wine-dark sea,” “wily Odysseus,” etc.), instead creating a fresh and varied look at each epithet and cliche each time it comes up, which allows the reader to experience a different shade of it each time—shades that are all accounted for in the original but that get lost when a translator picks just one color and sticks with it for the entire poem. “Everyone knows Homer repeats,” Wilson told us as she explained her license with Homer’s deep-rooted rhythms:

Each of the epithets means multiple different things, and I translate them one way here and a different way somewhere else…. I think there’s a fake authenticity evoked by translators who say to themselves, “I’m going to just do it like this, because that’s what the dictionary says,” or who try to replicate Homeric repetition by a rigid repetitiveness of their own. You can still tell that it’s a repetitive text in my translation, and that’s still central to the experience of reading the Odyssey.

In addition to their function as conveniently snug metrical plug-ins, Homer’s repetitions served as a way of remembering, and of stressing to the readers and listeners of a much less literate epoch than ours what was important to remember. Repetitions in our era often serve a diametrically different purpose, both artistically and rhetorically, and Wilson made some of her most compelling points about the thrust of her new translation as she teased out its aggressive stress on fresh verbal expression: “I want to feel that you can feel every word,” she told us, in part addressing the poetic demands of her exceptionally keen and modern ear, which refuses to bore her readers with rote recitation, but her approach also strives to keep her readers awake and engaged in how it frames the things that it actually says:

If somebody says for the gazillionth time, “Crooked Hillary,” you’re not pausing and thinking, “What exactly does he mean by that? Let me go check some facts.” No, the purpose of repetition in that instance is, “Let me not check any facts. Let me glaze over.”

Judgement of Paris (after Rubens), by Eleanor Antin,
from the Helen’s Odyssey series, 2007

As the first woman to translate the Odyssey into English, Wilson refuses to glaze over the elements of Odysseus and his world that earlier translators have either tacitly given a pass to or deliberately manipulated into self-perpetuating misnomers. Many translators fallaciously have Helen accuse herself of being a “slut,” while Wilson points out that Homer has her use the word “Dog-eyed,” a term that’s generally used to describe powerful female deities, such as the Furies, who “hound” people in the same way that Helen can. Not everyone will like Wilson’s stress on original expression, because it doesn’t reproduce Homer’s relentless refrains, a decision that elides a major part of his songs’ hypnotic songiness—a musical effect that’s now largely lost anyway, as a modern reading public won’t be hearing the poem performed with musical accompaniment—but no serious contemporary reader will miss the sedimentary accretions that centuries of male translators have spuriously built up around their own biases.

In forcing us to see and hear Homer afresh, Wilson conversely accentuates many of Homer’s own biases, and without at all detracting from his artistry’s thrilling grandeur or making us childishly resent his overwhelming poetic achievement, she allows her readers to interrogate the text much more clearly, because we can see and hear it so much more clearly now. Rather than trying to get us to accept Odysseus’s impious cruelties without question, and rather than assuming that we’re all signed on for the archaic assumptions of Homer’s warlord state, Wilson confronts her readers with a world that’s starkly unsavory and unfair:

It’s important to make sure that the poem’s double standards are visible, just as they are in the original. One set of double standards has to do with poor people, beggars, outlaws. We think that if they’re elite people or gods in disguise, they’re great, and we should be super nice to them, and if they’re real beggars… then we should beat them to a bloody pulp and humiliate them.

Charybdis, aka Vagina Dentata,
which is also the name of my favorite album
by the Police, artist unknown

Pointing out how many of the poem’s repeating tropes and images are deeply misogynist, Wilson told us, “I think there is also a focus on ‘How are women’s mouths dangerous?’” Addressing the Sirens, who lure seamen to their death with their voices, and Scylla, who devours passersby with her six heads, and Charybdis, a devouring whirlpool who’s all mouth, Wilson draws attention to the poem’s portrayal of the seductive and destructive power of feminine orifices. She also notes how at the end Telemachus slaughters the slave women who’d ostensibly betrayed their master by sleeping with Penelope’s suitors: He draws a rope around all their necks and hangs them as a group, silencing them in the most immediate and final sense. Nodding to Homer’s grotesquely clever artistry, Wilson also points out how this is part of his way of “tying up” the narrative’s loose ends.

A poster for a production of
Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, 2012

Another of Wilson’s Herculean feats with this new edition is that she wrote all of its nearly one hundred pages of introductory material, added twenty-five pages of illuminating endnotes, compiled an erudite and handy glossary of every proper name found in the book, and consulted with a cartographer who contributed maps of Homer’s fantastical geography, essentially ushering this entire project into existence under her own aegis. It’s a staggering accomplishment, and each facet of it is superlative. Few verse translators should ever be trusted to write their own extra-textual material, because they’re either not scholarly enough, are too scholarly, are not good at organizing their ideas, or are simply not good prose writers. The go-to English-language team for the past few decades has been Robert Fagles’s lucid verse translations highlighted by Bernard Knox’s luminous prose, but Wilson’s voice and approach dazzle from page one of her introduction, making it seem difficult to believe that she could maintain such a momentum in the actual translation itself, which is in fact even more captivating.

Wilson’s combination of translation and extra-textual material opens such a window into the original text and reveals so many of the nuts and bolts of her creative and intellectual processes in transforming it into English that it allows even lay readers to come up with their own alternate solutions. She explains in her notes that Odysseus’s name derives from the word odussomai, which means “to be angry at [somebody]” or “to hate,” so why not refer to him as “odious” one of the four times that she notes Homer punning on his name? Likewise, when Odysseus is trying to pull himself out of the sea and onto the beach at Phaeacia, a wave washes over him and pulls him back, and Wilson notes that the verb for “covered” is kalypsen, a pun on Calypso, whom Odysseus has just escaped. Wilson translates the line as “A mighty wave rolled over him again,” but why not use the word “eclipsed,” to pun on Calypso’s name in English? As with all of the large-scale aspects of this edition of the Odyssey, not everyone will approve of every single one of Wilson’s word choices, but such is her illuminating power that she allows even us amateurs to see what she did and why, and to feel such a rich impression of what Homer intended us to feel.

Odysseus and Calypso, Max Beckmann, 1943

Because no translation could ever encompass all the contents and valences and effects of Homer’s vast and vastly alien poetic universe, there could never be a translation that could mirror all of his songs’ realms of gold, or that could fully satisfy every individual reader or scholar, or that could be in any way definitive or lasting, because translations are entirely ephemeral, as all things are, but Wilson has captured so much of him and us in her edition that it will likely make her the new go-to Homer translator of our time as she eclipses all of her gasping predecessors in her wavely surge. Both a Hercules and an Athena, Wilson left our book club overwhelmed and enlightened and eager for more. Feeling our enthusiasm—a word that in the original Greek means “possessed or inspired by a god”—she teased us at the end of the meeting by confirming that she’s now diving into the Iliad to complete the full Homeric picture. All we can say is, “Please come back and sing us another one.”

—David Wiley