My feeling on the Iliad (which is apparently strong enough to get me to pay to comment) is that is somewhat better in Greek but basically a major drag. (Though my dad apparently used to point out that if you were around at the time, the catalog of ships would have been entrancing--"hey, that's my dad!") But then I love Moby Dick, so I think a lot of this is just that we all have books that grab us and ones that don't--and it's worth giving the ones that don't a shot, as you note, but I long since stopped beating myself up about not liking Important Works. Mostly.
People do say that about the catalogue of ships--I think it was also just a work of geography. Like, if a kingdom or place wasn't in the catalogue of ships, then would people even know it existed? Like...it was a way of learning about the world! Modern readers find maps and atlases to be entrancing--I assume the catalogue of ships was the same for the pre-modern reader.
What I imagine with the catalogue of ships and similar passages—which I have no scholarly evidence for, this is pure speculation—is that the rhapsody would come to some place and tell everyone about the heroes who came from that particular place. Maybe when you heard your hometown heroes mentioned you would get up and cheer. But then they had to turn it into a book—writing does have some disadvantages as a medium—and editors just decided to write everything down, presentation be damned, because by that point the collective wisdom of Homer had become sacred.
I wonder if a similar process could have been at work in the compilation of material that got into the Mahabharata…
When I read The Brothers Karamazov, I got so sick of Ivan brooding for page after page when it was obvious what he was going to do. Just get on with it! I thought on more than one occasion. I like to tell people it's a great book because it has three great chapters.
I also resonate with what you said about flow states and appropriately challenging reading. It explains why a certain class of fantasy reader is excited by the challenge entailed in piecing together what's going on in Malazan Book of the Fallen or The Locked Tomb, and then usually becomes insufferably pretentious about what a genius they must be compared to people who like whatever category-killer is hot at the moment.
1. One stylistic identifier you have is your use of exclamation points. they're usually at precisely the wrong point and it works wonderfully.
2. I found Fitzgerald a more exciting read than Fagles, but I know I'm in a minority. I've just started reading Emily Wilson's translation because I was amazed a new translation of the Iliad could be a major cultural event (well, among a certain subset of the population.)
3. Your excerpt from the Mahabharata is exceedingly dull, and as I had said in a previous comment is I find most Eastern Great Books that way. I'm sure they're not but they have very little of the basic structure we've been trained to expect. So when I read one I feel like it's repetitive, and pointless as in without an obvious point. I'm always taken by the feeling because I'm reading it because I'm supposed to rather than I want to.
4. As you say there are lots and lots of Western great books that have incredibly boring sections. The Iliad's Catalogue of Ships is famous in that regard, the Old Testament's love of genealogy, Moby Dick's cataloging of whales, War and Peace's interminable description of the Battle of Boromino, and I know I'm in a small minority here, but almost the entirety of Dante's Inferno with the endless list of bad people. It always makes me wonder why an author would want to put that sort of stuff in. They must know how interesting they would find a conversation with someone who read the phone book to them, and then they decide to throw it in there anyway.
I have not found most Eastern Great Books to be dull. They are often a bit slow and episodic, but no more so than their western contemporaries. Like Tale of Genji is basically a picaresque, same with Water Margin or Dream of the Red Chamber. But if you're not into it, then you're not into it, I suppose =]
With stuff that's really old, like the Old Testament or the Iliad, I figure they put this stuff in because they knew that whatever was in this book is what'd be preserved. They wanted all these names to exist forever. They felt some kind of duty to the knowledge that'd come before, and they wanted to pass it on. That's why, for instance, the Bible sometimes has two mutually contradictory stories about the same events. Both had been preserved, and the chroniclers didn't want to just get rid of one, and have it be lost forever.
With newer books, it does seem a bit much at times. I mean with Melville, the guy was trying something new! Not everything can be a hit. And obviously some people like it. Personally, although War and Peace is slower than Anna Karenina, I didn't find any of it to be interminable, though I've no doubt it could've been shortened in places without losing the overall effect.
Re #4, I think it's the authorial version of infodumping. Every once in a blue moon, a reader with the same special interest (or an internal void that needs to be filled by someone who impresses them) will pick up one of those books and geek out over the same stuff. (I also think of Tom Clancy and descriptions of military hardware, George MacDonald and sermonizing, or Neal Stephenson and odd rants.)
And when Uncle Stevie said "kill your darlings" those are probably the things he was talking about. This sort of infodumping is what I think of as indulgent writing -- but for readers who want to "get to know" the author, they are also one of those quirky things that puts a unique stamp on a person's work.
As you're probably aware, Emily Wilson is talking about the problems, challenges, decisions she confronts as a translator. I'm not in a position to judge much, but it's a fascinating meta-discourse or even introduction to the text. I hope to read her translation.
So I’m a little biased because I’ve done a PhD on the Mahābhārata (primarily reception, but its reception as a work that is read), but the Debroy translation isn’t great, which doesn’t help. But the battle books are famously dizzying and repetitive, but there are still good bits in between. In the classroom I almost always assign from abridged translations or Carole Satyamurti’s adaptation of the Sanskrit.
But you’ve raised an interesting question as to whether the Mahābhārata was ever read as a cover-to-cover experience. I think those would’ve been rare.
I've read several abridged versions over the years, I just want to know what got left out! I don't find Debroy’s translation to be particularly bad. It's only boring when the underlying text seems to be quite, well, boring. I definitely find the arc of the Bhishma Parva to be interesting. There is a lot of pathos in how he's constantly being pressured to win this war he really doesn't want to win. There's just a lot of it! With some heavy skimming over the more repetitive parts it's still pretty readable
With really old stuff I find I can keep myself interested if I ask, why was this thing that feels boring to me engaging to readers at the time that it was written? This question seems to facilitate a different kind of immersion that I find really valuable.
Also, currently rereading the Iliad in full for the first time since undergrad and I'm finding it very economical and effective. I'm reading some sections in English and some in greek and the greek is undeniably propulsive.
With the Mahabharata I kinda think...was this actually engaging to readers? The book is so long that it's hard to imagine anyone even two thousand years ago actually read it in full! It's preserved for some reason, but maybe not because anyone actually liked to read it. Maybe it was just preserved because...it existed. A lot of different versions of this story existed, and they're all supposed to be sacred, so people collated all of them together, and then nobody felt comfortable dropping any of the bits (at least in the original), which is why today the Mahabharata is almost always read in abridged translations (some of which are themselves hundreds of years old and are classics in their own right)
But who knows? Like I said, this is the first truly boring section I've arrived at in four thousand pages of reading. Maybe it's an outlier--but I have a feeling the next six thousand pages will be much slower going.
The 18th century philosopher and novelist Montesquieu's idea about what he called "works of thought" was that you should say something paradoxical and brilliant that makes the reader see things differently and make connections between matters that seemed to have nothing to do with one another. You are then supposed to say other equally shocking things but you don't explain what connects your observations to one another. This forces the reader do half the work, figuring out the "intermediate ideas" that make the author's argument hold together. If you don't do this he claims the reader will become bored...
It certainly works for Montesquieu, but you have to have a lot of confidence both in your audience and in your own brilliance to write like that. (At least in his novel Persian Letters he also includes a lot of sex, which is another way of getting the reader's attention!)
A few years ago, I abandoned the 10-volume Bibek Debroy translation (the same that you are reading, I think), at about this point, just when the war begins. I was bored (and also a bit sick of it). I used to write a weekly column on my Mahabharata reading, for the New Indian Express. Had to let that go as well.
I just read the Iliad recently and when it got to the catalogue of ships I braced myself because I had heard it was so interminable, but it's only like ten pages? Some of it is just a list of names you can skim but in some of it the poetry of the names themselves and the list of far off places is quite beautiful in its way. Maybe it's drastically shortened in the Wilson translation but it was 15 minutes of my life at most, really no big deal. I like the cetology chapters in Moby-Dick though so maybe I'm just a sicko.
I liked this, Naomi. But let me mention a reading problem at the other end of the spectrum, as it were. I've been struggling to read Don Quixote (in English) straight through, as opposed to read "in" it, which I've done over the years. And I'm finding it really difficult. Many critics that I respect have said crazy extravagant things about it, the alpha and omega of the novel as a form, encapsulates modernity, and so on. And what I'm getting is a surfeit of tales. Sometimes Don Quixote & Sancho Panza. Sometimes they meet somebody, and the third party tells . . . another tale. It's not like the lists in the Iliad or all those arrows, lists of things, it's instead an accumulation of narratives. Hundreds of pages in, I think it is starting to build a kind of resonance, an climate. Trilling, I think it was, talked about something similar in Tolstoy. Maybe.
With regard to the musical: I think it must be appreciated in different ways from the novel (or the epic). In a musical, two strangers meet on a street corner and they already know the words. And they can sing! And dance! Even at its most "real," it's an extremely idealized, and in that sense fantastic form of art, a dream of a world too perfect. It's worth remembering, and makes sense on reflection, that P.G. Wodehouse, of the perfect English house comedy, was vital to the establishment of the form, worked with Kern and others.
Anyway, keep up the good work and I look forward to the novella.
OMG the stories in Don Quixote are EXTREMELY boring. Like, exceptionally dull. The only one that's good is the tale of the curious impertinent. I had the same experience as you--I felt lied-to quite frankly! In its unabridged form it is amongst the MOST boring of the great books
I had the same experience with Don Quixote. In addition to feeling bored, I spent a lot of time worried that I was an idiot and missing something. In the context of what it was for it's time, fine, but I wish I got more from it than being able to say I read the primary source of "tilting at windmills."
I think Don Quixote is a tad overrated, as a book that people should read now, at least in unabridged form. Other collections of nouvelles--the genre that DQ comes from--are much more interesting. The stories in Chaucer and Decameron are significantly more interesting than those in Don Quixote. I think the frame tale in DQ is a lot better than the frame tale in Chaucer or the Decameron, and that's why the former is more famous. Don Quixote is definitely a great character--but the work itself, at least in English, is quite hard to read. Honestly, even the ancient Greek fictions--the Alexander Romance, the tale of Callirhoe, and other stories in that genre--are more readable than Don Quixote. I consider it to be exceptionally boring. Like...up there with Moby Dick as one of the most boring Great Books I've ever read. I do not think you were missing anything! I've never heard a single person argue that these tales that compose the bulk of Don Quixote are at all worth reading, but most people who write about the book pretend like those tales don't exist!
My feeling on the Iliad (which is apparently strong enough to get me to pay to comment) is that is somewhat better in Greek but basically a major drag. (Though my dad apparently used to point out that if you were around at the time, the catalog of ships would have been entrancing--"hey, that's my dad!") But then I love Moby Dick, so I think a lot of this is just that we all have books that grab us and ones that don't--and it's worth giving the ones that don't a shot, as you note, but I long since stopped beating myself up about not liking Important Works. Mostly.
People do say that about the catalogue of ships--I think it was also just a work of geography. Like, if a kingdom or place wasn't in the catalogue of ships, then would people even know it existed? Like...it was a way of learning about the world! Modern readers find maps and atlases to be entrancing--I assume the catalogue of ships was the same for the pre-modern reader.
What I imagine with the catalogue of ships and similar passages—which I have no scholarly evidence for, this is pure speculation—is that the rhapsody would come to some place and tell everyone about the heroes who came from that particular place. Maybe when you heard your hometown heroes mentioned you would get up and cheer. But then they had to turn it into a book—writing does have some disadvantages as a medium—and editors just decided to write everything down, presentation be damned, because by that point the collective wisdom of Homer had become sacred.
I wonder if a similar process could have been at work in the compilation of material that got into the Mahabharata…
I greatly enjoyed this article.
Also? Money Matters sounds fun!
When I read The Brothers Karamazov, I got so sick of Ivan brooding for page after page when it was obvious what he was going to do. Just get on with it! I thought on more than one occasion. I like to tell people it's a great book because it has three great chapters.
I also resonate with what you said about flow states and appropriately challenging reading. It explains why a certain class of fantasy reader is excited by the challenge entailed in piecing together what's going on in Malazan Book of the Fallen or The Locked Tomb, and then usually becomes insufferably pretentious about what a genius they must be compared to people who like whatever category-killer is hot at the moment.
1. One stylistic identifier you have is your use of exclamation points. they're usually at precisely the wrong point and it works wonderfully.
2. I found Fitzgerald a more exciting read than Fagles, but I know I'm in a minority. I've just started reading Emily Wilson's translation because I was amazed a new translation of the Iliad could be a major cultural event (well, among a certain subset of the population.)
3. Your excerpt from the Mahabharata is exceedingly dull, and as I had said in a previous comment is I find most Eastern Great Books that way. I'm sure they're not but they have very little of the basic structure we've been trained to expect. So when I read one I feel like it's repetitive, and pointless as in without an obvious point. I'm always taken by the feeling because I'm reading it because I'm supposed to rather than I want to.
4. As you say there are lots and lots of Western great books that have incredibly boring sections. The Iliad's Catalogue of Ships is famous in that regard, the Old Testament's love of genealogy, Moby Dick's cataloging of whales, War and Peace's interminable description of the Battle of Boromino, and I know I'm in a small minority here, but almost the entirety of Dante's Inferno with the endless list of bad people. It always makes me wonder why an author would want to put that sort of stuff in. They must know how interesting they would find a conversation with someone who read the phone book to them, and then they decide to throw it in there anyway.
5. Looking forward to the novella.
I have not found most Eastern Great Books to be dull. They are often a bit slow and episodic, but no more so than their western contemporaries. Like Tale of Genji is basically a picaresque, same with Water Margin or Dream of the Red Chamber. But if you're not into it, then you're not into it, I suppose =]
With stuff that's really old, like the Old Testament or the Iliad, I figure they put this stuff in because they knew that whatever was in this book is what'd be preserved. They wanted all these names to exist forever. They felt some kind of duty to the knowledge that'd come before, and they wanted to pass it on. That's why, for instance, the Bible sometimes has two mutually contradictory stories about the same events. Both had been preserved, and the chroniclers didn't want to just get rid of one, and have it be lost forever.
With newer books, it does seem a bit much at times. I mean with Melville, the guy was trying something new! Not everything can be a hit. And obviously some people like it. Personally, although War and Peace is slower than Anna Karenina, I didn't find any of it to be interminable, though I've no doubt it could've been shortened in places without losing the overall effect.
Re #4, I think it's the authorial version of infodumping. Every once in a blue moon, a reader with the same special interest (or an internal void that needs to be filled by someone who impresses them) will pick up one of those books and geek out over the same stuff. (I also think of Tom Clancy and descriptions of military hardware, George MacDonald and sermonizing, or Neal Stephenson and odd rants.)
And when Uncle Stevie said "kill your darlings" those are probably the things he was talking about. This sort of infodumping is what I think of as indulgent writing -- but for readers who want to "get to know" the author, they are also one of those quirky things that puts a unique stamp on a person's work.
As you're probably aware, Emily Wilson is talking about the problems, challenges, decisions she confronts as a translator. I'm not in a position to judge much, but it's a fascinating meta-discourse or even introduction to the text. I hope to read her translation.
So I’m a little biased because I’ve done a PhD on the Mahābhārata (primarily reception, but its reception as a work that is read), but the Debroy translation isn’t great, which doesn’t help. But the battle books are famously dizzying and repetitive, but there are still good bits in between. In the classroom I almost always assign from abridged translations or Carole Satyamurti’s adaptation of the Sanskrit.
But you’ve raised an interesting question as to whether the Mahābhārata was ever read as a cover-to-cover experience. I think those would’ve been rare.
I've read several abridged versions over the years, I just want to know what got left out! I don't find Debroy’s translation to be particularly bad. It's only boring when the underlying text seems to be quite, well, boring. I definitely find the arc of the Bhishma Parva to be interesting. There is a lot of pathos in how he's constantly being pressured to win this war he really doesn't want to win. There's just a lot of it! With some heavy skimming over the more repetitive parts it's still pretty readable
With really old stuff I find I can keep myself interested if I ask, why was this thing that feels boring to me engaging to readers at the time that it was written? This question seems to facilitate a different kind of immersion that I find really valuable.
Also, currently rereading the Iliad in full for the first time since undergrad and I'm finding it very economical and effective. I'm reading some sections in English and some in greek and the greek is undeniably propulsive.
With the Mahabharata I kinda think...was this actually engaging to readers? The book is so long that it's hard to imagine anyone even two thousand years ago actually read it in full! It's preserved for some reason, but maybe not because anyone actually liked to read it. Maybe it was just preserved because...it existed. A lot of different versions of this story existed, and they're all supposed to be sacred, so people collated all of them together, and then nobody felt comfortable dropping any of the bits (at least in the original), which is why today the Mahabharata is almost always read in abridged translations (some of which are themselves hundreds of years old and are classics in their own right)
But who knows? Like I said, this is the first truly boring section I've arrived at in four thousand pages of reading. Maybe it's an outlier--but I have a feeling the next six thousand pages will be much slower going.
The 18th century philosopher and novelist Montesquieu's idea about what he called "works of thought" was that you should say something paradoxical and brilliant that makes the reader see things differently and make connections between matters that seemed to have nothing to do with one another. You are then supposed to say other equally shocking things but you don't explain what connects your observations to one another. This forces the reader do half the work, figuring out the "intermediate ideas" that make the author's argument hold together. If you don't do this he claims the reader will become bored...
That does seem to be what a lot of philosophers in the years since have done (am thinking mostly of Nietzsche).
It certainly works for Montesquieu, but you have to have a lot of confidence both in your audience and in your own brilliance to write like that. (At least in his novel Persian Letters he also includes a lot of sex, which is another way of getting the reader's attention!)
A few years ago, I abandoned the 10-volume Bibek Debroy translation (the same that you are reading, I think), at about this point, just when the war begins. I was bored (and also a bit sick of it). I used to write a weekly column on my Mahabharata reading, for the New Indian Express. Had to let that go as well.
HELLO that "Alive Inside" story sounds fascinating I would like to read it if it's out there anywhere???
(Also: excited for the novella!)
I just read the Iliad recently and when it got to the catalogue of ships I braced myself because I had heard it was so interminable, but it's only like ten pages? Some of it is just a list of names you can skim but in some of it the poetry of the names themselves and the list of far off places is quite beautiful in its way. Maybe it's drastically shortened in the Wilson translation but it was 15 minutes of my life at most, really no big deal. I like the cetology chapters in Moby-Dick though so maybe I'm just a sicko.
I liked this, Naomi. But let me mention a reading problem at the other end of the spectrum, as it were. I've been struggling to read Don Quixote (in English) straight through, as opposed to read "in" it, which I've done over the years. And I'm finding it really difficult. Many critics that I respect have said crazy extravagant things about it, the alpha and omega of the novel as a form, encapsulates modernity, and so on. And what I'm getting is a surfeit of tales. Sometimes Don Quixote & Sancho Panza. Sometimes they meet somebody, and the third party tells . . . another tale. It's not like the lists in the Iliad or all those arrows, lists of things, it's instead an accumulation of narratives. Hundreds of pages in, I think it is starting to build a kind of resonance, an climate. Trilling, I think it was, talked about something similar in Tolstoy. Maybe.
With regard to the musical: I think it must be appreciated in different ways from the novel (or the epic). In a musical, two strangers meet on a street corner and they already know the words. And they can sing! And dance! Even at its most "real," it's an extremely idealized, and in that sense fantastic form of art, a dream of a world too perfect. It's worth remembering, and makes sense on reflection, that P.G. Wodehouse, of the perfect English house comedy, was vital to the establishment of the form, worked with Kern and others.
Anyway, keep up the good work and I look forward to the novella.
OMG the stories in Don Quixote are EXTREMELY boring. Like, exceptionally dull. The only one that's good is the tale of the curious impertinent. I had the same experience as you--I felt lied-to quite frankly! In its unabridged form it is amongst the MOST boring of the great books
I had the same experience with Don Quixote. In addition to feeling bored, I spent a lot of time worried that I was an idiot and missing something. In the context of what it was for it's time, fine, but I wish I got more from it than being able to say I read the primary source of "tilting at windmills."
*its time. Sigh.
I think Don Quixote is a tad overrated, as a book that people should read now, at least in unabridged form. Other collections of nouvelles--the genre that DQ comes from--are much more interesting. The stories in Chaucer and Decameron are significantly more interesting than those in Don Quixote. I think the frame tale in DQ is a lot better than the frame tale in Chaucer or the Decameron, and that's why the former is more famous. Don Quixote is definitely a great character--but the work itself, at least in English, is quite hard to read. Honestly, even the ancient Greek fictions--the Alexander Romance, the tale of Callirhoe, and other stories in that genre--are more readable than Don Quixote. I consider it to be exceptionally boring. Like...up there with Moby Dick as one of the most boring Great Books I've ever read. I do not think you were missing anything! I've never heard a single person argue that these tales that compose the bulk of Don Quixote are at all worth reading, but most people who write about the book pretend like those tales don't exist!
I think I have a defense of Quixote, but I won't get to it for MONTHS if ever . . . :). I'm hanging tough.