Nella Larsen’s Passing

A Review of Nella Larsen’s Passing

With an Examination of the

Literature of Passing 

Originally published in the

Rain Taxi Review of Books, Spring 2019

Passing

Nella Larsen

Restless Books ($19.99)

In 1922, a year before publishing his monumentally unclassifiable “holy avalanche of words,” Cane, Jean Toomer responded to a query by the editors of the literary journal the Liberator asking him to describe his background and history, which like his fiction also defied simple classification:

Racially, I seem to have (who knows for sure) seven blood mixtures: French, Dutch, Welsh, Negro, German, Jewish, and Indian. Because of these, my position in America has been a curious one. I have lived equally amid the two race groups. Now white, now colored. From my own point of view I am naturally and inevitably an American.

It’s telling that Toomer, who had such a broad American mix of bloodlines, would refer to living amid just two race groups, white and “colored,” a brutally simplistic but also blurry divide that he was to pass back and forth between again and again. He describes himself in this biographical letter as a spiritual fusion of the races, but in discussing the literary exploration that was leading him toward Cane he was clear about which connection most nourished his art:

Within the last two or three years… my growing need for artistic expression has pulled me deeper and deeper into the Negro group. … It has stimulated and fertilized whatever creative talent I may contain within me.

Jean Toomer

Forced to live as a complex mix in a country that only saw black and white, it’s no surprise that Toomer’s art leaned toward the demographic and aesthetic that encompassed the most number of shades and that wasn’t singularly bent on excluding him. In the early twentieth century a number of novels addressed the subject of African Americans “passing” for white, and the personal and artistic gravitation that Toomer describes in his letter mirrors and defines one of the most striking aspects of this very American mini-genre. “Passing” as a concept derives from the act of passing from one race (usually black) into another (always white), so that a mixed-race person “passes” for white. But there’s much more to the term, both personally and artistically, and the fiction work that has not surprisingly come to represent this subject matter most to later readers, Nella Larsen’s succinctly named 1929 novel Passing, traces this arc out of and then back toward blackness, as do nearly all the other novels dealing with this subject.

Nella Larsen

In Larsen’s Passing, which has been newly republished by Restless Books, one of two light-skinned childhood friends, Clare, has passed into white society and married a wealthy white man, and after a chance reunion with Irene, who occasionally passes for white when going to restaurants and stores, the two adult women rekindle an uneasy friendship. Despite living a luxurious life as a white woman, Clare is lonely for the community she grew up with, and she spends more and more time with Irene and Irene’s husband, Brian, and probably (but not definitively) begins an affair with Brian. Just as Irene starts to get suspicious and has fantasies of outing Clare to her shockingly racist husband, John, she and another clearly black woman run into John in downtown Manhattan, which makes him realize that Irene is black too, and that by extension his wife Clare may be as well, which quickly leads to a disastrous denouement.

The timing of this episode’s unlikely coincidence challenges the novel’s believability, but what’s fascinating is that along with the theme of characters passing for white and then yearning to pass back into blackness, this narrative contrivance appears in all four of the major novels on this subject written by early-twentieth-century African-American authors. A novel about passing has to have a scene of exposure, or near exposure, and Passing employs the device of coincidence to bring about this crucial scene in much the same way that Jessie Redmon Fauset did in her 1928 novel Plum Bun, which imported many of the themes and devices of James Weldon Johnson’s 1912 novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, which in turn derived much of its method from Charles W. Chesnutt’s 1900 novel The House Behind the Cedars. This is not to dismiss these landmark novels at all, but rather to examine their artifices seriously, because the study of art is all about pattern recognition, and it’s fascinating to trace the design of theme-and-variation though each of these four radically different works.

In Fauset’s Plum Bun an African-American family of four has two light-skinned members, the mother and the protagonist daughter, and two who are much darker, the father and the other sister, and when the protagonist, Angela, recognizes what access to the world this gives her, she moves from Philadelphia to New York, changes her name, and begins her adult life as a white woman. As she explores both the outer world and her inner self from this new vantage point, however, she becomes increasingly isolated and yearns to reconnect with her roots. A coincidence almost exactly like the one in Passing, which was published a year later and which was clearly riffing on Fauset’s version, nearly outs her in downtown Manhattan to her shockingly racist beau, and then another astonishing coincidence that same day sets in motion the events that lead to the novel’s final re-shuffling of connections, which while being a bit overly neatly arranged is nonetheless deeply moving and satisfying. While Passing is a tightly controlled and formally deliberate Jamesian novel of manners, Plum Bun is a luxurious and expansive work, with a luscious prose style and a narrative voice whose freshness and verve overwhelm all of its shortcomings. Of these novels on the subject of passing, Blum Bun is the deepest pleasure to read, because Fauset’s voice and mind are the most alive and modern and generous, seizing all the newness of the literature of the 1920s and leaving behind the labored weight of the Victorian era, which Larsen curiously returns to the next year in Passing.

Plum Bun’s immediate (and also somewhat distant) precursor, Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, was originally published in 1912 as an anonymous memoir purporting to be true. Then in 1927, at the height of what for lack of a better term we call the Harlem Renaissance (see Langston Hughes’s 1940 memoir The Big Sea for an astute criticism of this problematic designation), he republished the book as a novel, and under his own prestigious name, just a year before Fauset published Plum Bun. Johnson was one of the few polymaths of his era who can legitimately be compared to the towering Paul Robeson, and this far-ranging novel captures an extraordinary amount of his vast scope.

Johnson’s unnamed narrator is the natural son of a southern black mother and a white patrician father who sends mother and child away to the north when he plans to marry. Apparently white, the narrator discovers at school that he’s in fact considered black, and he subsequently learns how to navigate the color line when needed as he pursues a life as a pianist who can play both concert music and ragtime. Becoming the personal musician and confidante to an unnamed millionaire, the two go to Europe, where the narrator has an epiphany and decides that his calling is to go back to the American south to study black musicology as a black man and to transform it into a new kind of formal concert language. It’s this profound calling that most matches Toomer’s description of finding his artistic nourishment in African-American culture, and in how he recasts it into complex new voicings, but then as Johnson’s narrator is collecting source material in the south he witnesses a lynching, which the book describes in excruciating detail, and as a result he abandons his blackness entirely. He then goes to New York, eventually becomes a successful businessman, marries a white woman, and has two children. The two coincidences that warp the thread of this exceptional novel come when the narrator happens to be seated next to his white father at an opera in Europe, and again later when with his white fiancée at a New York museum he runs into a black childhood friend from the south, which leads him to admit his history. In the end his fiancée accepts him but later dies during childbirth, and as the narrator looks back on his life he deeply regrets abandoning his musical mission and the race that fostered it, having exchanged his birthright, like the Biblical Esau, “for a mess of pottage.”

Like biological life, art replicates itself in fascinatingly mimetic ways, and Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars seems to serve as all of these later novels’ structural blueprint and precedent, even as each of their styles and voicings radically diverge. Wildly outdoing all of the later novels’ improbable aspects, to the point where the pattern of stagy coincidence seems to have become unshakably embedded within with the theme of black return in novels that take up this subject, The House Behind the Cedars reads like a no-holds-barred gothic extravaganza as it builds its outrageously artificial hall of mirrors around its very real and very grave subject matter.

Born the lefthand son of a black mother and a rich white father in an obscure town in North Carolina, the light-skinned John Walden changes his name to John Warwick and leaves for South Carolina, where he becomes a successful white lawyer. Surreptitiously returning home ten years later, he induces his sister Rena to leave their mother alone and join him in South Carolina to help raise his newly motherless children. After a nine-month interim at finishing school, so that she can plausibly join her brother in living among the codes of white people, Rena arrives in John’s South Carolina town just in time to become the belle of a mock-chivalric jousting tournament, attracting the favor of the knight who takes all the honors and who in triumph crowns her the Queen of Love and Beauty. This faux knight, George, happens to be John’s client, and he’s in town from North Carolina for an extended legal entanglement, and when Rena dreams that her mother is dying and then receives a letter confirming her mother’s sickness, she writes George a cryptic letter and rushes home. Left alone for a while with time on his hands, George decides to go take care of some unfinished family business in the selfsame North Carolina town where Rena and John come from, ushering in a dizzying series of coincidences that involve several mislaid letters, including one that’s blown by a gust of wind into a neighbor’s hands, and a flurry of other letters that have to wait to be read by someone present who’s literate. A tragicomedy of errors of course leads to Rena being outed to George, which leads her to renounce her whiteness and to dedicate her life to teaching black children in the south’s newly established black post-bellum schools. But the school where she’s assigned happens to be in the vicinity of George’s distant hometown, which leads to a labyrinth of even more outrageous artifice, including a case of Brontëan brain fever that ultimately leads Rena back to her hometown to die among the only people who really love and understand her. It’s perfectly outlandish, and a bizarre prelude to Chesnutt’s gravely harrowing 1901 novel, The Marrow of Tradition, but as things keep forging forward, the reader eventually realizes that this novel is a mirrory maze of words and letters, and despite the very real gravity of what’s at stake—or perhaps multiplied by it—it’s a riot to sit back and watch Chesnutt’s mad puppet show play out.

Brilliantly shrugging off all of these thematic and formal skins, it’s naturally the groundbreaking maverick Toomer who disregarded all precedent as he addressed the subject of passing in “Bona and Paul,” one of his quasi-novel Cane’s oneirically interrelated vignettes. Building on the overwhelming influence of Sherwood Anderson’s 1919 story cycle Winesburg, Ohio, Toomer imports a disorienting and revitalizing dose of Gertrude Stein and James Joyce into the conversation, just the way that fellow Anderson acolyte William Faulkner would do years later, but with a rigorous artistry on Toomer’s part that preempts and undercuts Faulkner’s first-draft versions of Joycean Modernism. Dreamily and nightmarishly following a light-skinned college student, Paul, as he and his Nordic roommate Art go out to a fancy Chicago restaurant with their dates, Bona and Helen, the episode elliptically weaves Paul in and out of connection with his companions, who all suspect that Paul isn’t really white. After a series of contretemps that may or may not actually take place, the group leaves together, but Paul stops to confront the restaurant’s black doorman, who seems to understand and judge all of what’s happening. Reluctantly and angrily caught up by his connection to blackness, Paul loses sight of Bona, and when he goes out to look for her afterward, she’s gone. It’s an untidy and unresolved ending, but one that fits both the complexity of the subject matter and the disorientating technique of the new Modernist aesthetic.

An illustration from Passing
by Maggie Lily

Regarding the new edition of Passing, Restless Books has commissioned a solidly useful introduction by novelist and critic Darryl Pinckney, as well as beautifully surreal illustrations by the artist Maggie Lily of the novel’s stole-and-cloche-clad flapper characters, but the text unfortunately lacks explanatory notes, which in the current Penguin edition fill in much of the book’s missing referents and contexts and assumptions. This is not a novel or a subject or an era of literature to be taken lightly, and every nuance matters when unfolding its portrayal of the insane and mutating relativity of our country’s brutal racism. Looked on from an outside observer, books on the subject of passing must seem like some kind of bizarre dystopian science fiction, where pasty white people are considered to be black because they have a single drop of black blood in them, and where in order to escape the stigma of blackness they have to live a lie as a white person, which by all objective measure they actually are, and then despite their pallid hue they end up finding their native integrity among the black people they’ve tried to leave behind and don’t at all resemble. It’s absolute lunacy. But that’s life on Earth, where the madness of reality outstrips the madness of any art we could ever invent, so that even the theatrical artifices that Larsen and her peers employ in dealing with this subject read like pale-fire reflections of the wholly artificial roles that we all walk through every day. Should these novels all be more realistic? Perhaps. But so should reality.

—David Wiley

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

Sholeh Wolpé’s translation of Farīd ud-Dīn Attār’s The Conference of the Birds

A Review of

Sholeh Wolpé’s Translation of

Farīd ud-Dīn Attār’s The Conference of the Birds

Originally published in the

Rain Taxi Review of Books, Fall 2017

The Conference of the Birds

Farīd ud-Dīn Attār

Translated by Sholeh Wolpé

W.W. Norton & Company, $25.95

The Persian poet Farīd ud-Dīn Attār’s twelfth-century Sufi epic The Conference of the Birds stands alongside Dante’s Comedy and John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress as one of the great creative works of spiritual self-discovery. Straddling a place somewhere between Dante’s high fantasy and Bunyan’s naked allegory, The Conference of the Birds is also one of the most ingeniously conceived and plotted narratives in all of world literature, the denouement of its quest as astoundingly transformative as Oedipus the King, but without the horrific eye-gouging. Exactly the opposite, in fact: Like Dante’s Comedy (which had the working title Vision), Attār’s poem leads from near blindness to all-encompassing sight, its self-revelation a wholly moving and satisfying transfiguration. The poem has only been translated into English a few times in the past half century, with wildly differing results, and the Iranian-American poet Sholeh Wolpé’s new translation now brings it for the first time into the third millennium.

It’s impossible to discuss The Conference of the Birds without spoiling its surprise ending, which is by far the poem’s main feature and selling point. In brief, a conference of the world’s birds meets to decide upon who should be their king, and their avian adviser the Hoopoe tells them of the Simorgh, a legendary bird whose name means “thirty birds.” The Simorgh was first spotted soaring over China, where a single one of its feathers fell to earth and “triggered a titanic tumult in every land.” A single drawing of the feather that was mounted in China’s national art gallery subsequently became the wellspring of all wisdom, and also of all the world’s confusion:

Had the image of that feather not been recorded,

all of the world’s agitation would not have occurred.

All of science and art is but the impression

of that single feather.

A Negar Gari (miniature painting) of the Simorgh
by contemporary artist Nadia Ostovar.

Because nobody can comprehend even the drawing’s attributes—let alone the feather itself—the Hoopoe urges the birds to seek the Simorgh themselves on the distant Mount Qaf, an emerald crag that surround the world and is the place where the sun both rises and sets. The birds all offer up excuses and objections, and after a lengthy harangue from the Hoopoe instructing them on the Sufi path of self-abnegation, the Wayfarers set out to traverse the seven valleys that purify them and ready them to meet their Beloved. Each valley strips away an impeding aspect of their ego, purging the birds of their worldly attachments and radically thinning out the wayfaring flock at each step. Finally, of the initial group of 100,000 only a remaining core of thirty purified birds reaches Mount Qaf to discover that they, the thirty birds, are the Simorgh.

Like King Oedipus, they were the very one that they’d been seeking, but like Dorothy in Oz, they first needed to make the journey toward the emerald horizon in order to discover this fact. It’s not conceivable that Dante could have read this Persian poem, but its similarities to his Comedy are striking, and since much of the thinking of Europe’s high Middle Ages derived from Arabic commentary upon Aristotle and other classics, perhaps the two poems evolved from similar influences. The most startling similarity is how, like Attār’s seven valleys, Dante’s Purgatory cleanses the pilgrim in seven distinct steps of each of the seven deadly sins, leaving him immaculate and ready for the stars. As a crowning pinnacle, and as an encircling frame, Mount Qaf also fascinatingly prefigures both the peak of Mount Purgatory and the Paradiso’s heavenly Empyrean, which exists outside of space and time and is at once the epicenter and the universe’s encompassing outer limit.

From Peter Sis’s 2011 illustrated version

of The Conference of the Birds

Despite Attār’s brilliantly inspired concept for this poem, its composition and execution unfortunately fall far short of its Florentine counterpart. Attār shows remarkable resourcefulness in his parabolic approaches to the poem’s themes and concepts, and his tone and mindset are also much more sympathetic and welcoming than Dante’s harsh obsession with rules, but Attār lacks a dramatic and descriptive and organizational power that would continuously thrust the enthralled reader toward the poem’s astonishing end. The first two hundred pages (in Wolpé’s translation) are all preamble, with the Hoopoe first countering the birds’ complaints and objections and then answering their questions about the nature of their Beloved Simorgh. Then the seventy-or-so pages that address the seven purifying valleys of their journey are also all prospective preamble, describing what they’ll be like rather than actually describing their advent. Then the birds’ journey itself only fills a page and a half, followed by ten precious pages describing their transcendent transformation. These few dozen mind-bending lines make the entire poem, though. Attār then ends with a fascinating exploration of his own ego, vacillating between shocking artistic braggadocio and profoundly humble self-effacement, a meditation that revealingly illustrates the paradox of the ambitious sage who preaches humility. It’s like that old Onion article about the cocky yogi who declares, “I am the serenest!”

Compared to the two most readily available English translations of The Conference of the Birds, Wolpé’s version alights somewhere between Dick Davis & Afkham Darbandi’s 1984 Penguin edition and Peter Avery’s more scholarly 1998 version. Davis & Darbandi’s translation mimics Attār’s rhymed couplets with English rhymed couplets, to distractingly sing-song effect, and it also unfortunately elides Attār’s self-examining/self-praising epilogue. The more meticulous Avery includes the entire poem and thankfully eschews rhyme while sticking to a strictly lined verse translation, and he also provides extraordinarily helpful and thorough notes. Wolpé varies her translation’s format between verse for the narrative and prose for the Hoopoe’s parables, breaking each section up in a way that’s helpful for uninitiated readers but not exactly faithful to the original. She also elides Attār’s opening invocation to Allah, which Avery includes to gorgeous effect. In all, Wolpé has crafted a fine reading experience with her new translation, breaking up some of the monotony of the poem’s first three quarters with format shifts and chapter breaks and rubric descriptions that keep the reader turning the pages. Her version of The Conference of the Birds may not be absolutely true to the poem’s totality, but it serves as an exceptional initiation for modern lay readers into the Path of the Wayfarer.

—David Wiley