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[peterbirks]

Boris Johnson may be a clown, but at least he is also a classical scholar. He is appearing on TV to present "After Rome". It's hard to imagine many of the 1990s class of UK politicians being able to do the same.

I thought of this when I heard on the radio yesterday that President-elect Obama would "look to Lincoln" in a bipartisan approach. Well, never mind the bipartisam approach, it's nice to hear that Obama actually knew what was going on in the US in the 19th century. He called in Doris Kearns Goodwin, the author Team of Rivals, to discuss exactly how her subject, Abraham Lincoln, had set about reconciling his former adversaries. Kearns had also written a book on Lyndon Johnson (which happens to be sitting on my bookshelf), which was why the name rang a bell.

It's nice to see scholarly people making a comeback in politics and not being embarrassed by it. There seems to me to have been a fad in the past 20 years for politicians to pretend that they are "just ordinary blokes" (political women seem to have had more sense -- you won't see Jacqui Smith or Harriet Harman comparing prices in Lidl) and to act the common man, even if they have firsts in PPE from Oxford.

This seems to stem from a probably misplaced and almost certainly focus-group-generated belief that the ordinary voter distrusts intellectuals. That, I suspect, may be a fad.


Robert Kennedy, when he heard that Martin Luther King had been shot, quoted Aeschylus. That he was speaking off the cuff is evidenced by the fact that he got the quote wrong. Curiously, the Kennedy quote is now better known than the original.

“In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God”

said Kennedy.

In fact it's "in our own despite". But Kennedy's is probably better.

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[(Anonymous)]

I was thinking about something similar this morning, as I went to a discussion last night including, among others, the French writer-philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy . Reading about him later, I saw that he has critics who consider him a self-promoting pseudo-intellectual. If this is true, I like what it says about France, that it's a place where someone who wants to be heard can increase his influence by posing as a philosopher. Over here, you'd be better off playing football or presenting a home decoration show.

DY

Alexander Hamilton's Little Sister

[real-aardvark.livejournal.com]

Well, Edith Hamilton's 1930 version, which is presumably the source, is:

And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart,
and in our own despite, against our will,
comes wisdom to us
by the awful grace of God.

This is nowhere near as fine a rhythmic translation as her 1937 translation:

Drop, drop – in our sleep, upon the heart
sorrow falls, memory’s pain,
and to us, though against our very will,
even in our own despite,
comes wisdom,
by the awful grace of God.

(I think the former is closer to an iambic trimeter, which would be a nice match; but the latter has a couple of lacunae in what seem to me to be the right places. Aeschylus was awfully fond of stress through lacunae.)

I've got a shitload of Greek sources downstairs, but sadly no time and (more importantly) no Agamemnon. Even in the Loeb edition, that would have been valuable. Some other time, some other bank account. However, I would suggest that contrasting "despair" with "will" is a distinct loss of meaning in comparison with "despite" and "will." RFK apparently hesitated on the second syllable, which would explain it. As great orators do (or did), he recovered magnificently.

He was not speaking off the cuff. He was quite clearly reciting a text prepared for him by his staff. I would point the finger at Schlesinger, who quotes the passage in his biography (well, he would, wouldn't he?), and was on the staff and had the requisite knowledge. Harvard boys were able to memorise this sort of thing on short notice, of course.

This is still a vast improvement on taking a brain-dump from Alaistar Campbell -- it goes without saying -- but I don't imagine a delusional twerp like Tony will ever realise this simple fact.

"Which" rather than "that" is also a dead giveaway that the thing was memorised.

At this point, most people would say "What the fuck is he on about?" but I agree with you. This stuff is important, in both the large and the small.

Well, you'll have to excuse me. I've just bought an HP 2133 at a recessional price, and I need to download emacs and gcc on to it.

Chi chi chi -- ArVee

Re: Alexander Hamilton's Little Sister

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

I know that Kennedy changed the meaning with "despair". I should have been clearer. I don't mean that Kennedy's version was a better translation, but that I thought it conveyed the feeling of the moment better.

I also suspect that Kennedy used "that" rather than "which" -- a factor which, so to speak, led me to think that he wasn't reciting a text prepared for him by his staff.

I mean, I honestly can't imagine any staffer suggesting the recitation of a Greek poet, not even a Kennnedy staffer in 1968, not even Schlesinger.

But it's an interesting area for exploration.

PJ