The world is in the grip of a deadly resurgent pandemic. People are rising up in the streets of the US against structural racism. The country is led by a megalomaniac with borderline personality disorder. So, I’m doing what any poet would do in such a situation: I’m translating an ancient poem that’s written in a language I can’t read.
That’s right: I’m part of a cast of thousands (well, dozens) of writers and classicists who are translating (or, in my case, “translating”) the Dionysiaca, by Nonnos of Panopolis. Nonnos was a Hellenized Egyptian, thought to have lived some time around the year 400 c.e. He is known only through the Dionysiaca and, weirdly enough, a paraphrase of the Gospel of John. But the Dionysiaca is his opus: it is the last, the longest, and probably the worst, epic of antiquity. He wrote all 30,000 or so lines of the poem in Homeric Greek, which would be like me writing in Old English. The story follows the story of Dionysos from his birth, through his invasion of India, various other adventures, and final enthronement on Olympos. It is overwritten, highly conventional, and has been described as baroque (or rococo), or simply “bad.” We are trying to have fun with it. And that’s part of the attraction: distraction. At the start of the pandemic, a lot of people were reading spec-fic about pandemics. Now they just want to binge-watch comedies on Netflix. So, I guess the Dionysiaca is my comedy on Netflix. But then I thought of Amitav Ghosh’s argument, in The Great Derangement, about the history of narrative, as it relates to the climate crisis. Back in the day, Ghosh notes, epics, fables, chronicles, romances, miracle plays, wonder tales, etc. were filled with “prodigious happenings”; they delighted in “the unheard of and the unlikely.” As for prose narrative, he cites the Decameron, Arabian Nights, and Journey to the West (we might add The Golden Ass) as being among this type, which “ranges widely and freely over vast expanses of time and space. It embraces the inconceivably large . . . .” However, with the “Enlightenment,” the rise of capitalism and its protagonist, the Bourgeoisie, the empirical replaced the miraculous as the focus of explanatory stories. Moreover, in physical sciences, particularly geology, a consensus arose that large-scale changes happen very very slowly, over vast expanses of time — not in sudden cataclysms; this view is known as “gradualism” or “uniformitarianism.” All of this came about at the same time — and possibly led to — the emergence of the realist novel. The unstated assumption of “the regularity of bourgeois life” in the mid-19th century is reflected in a type of fiction that de-emphasizes plot, restricts itself to the realm of "everyday life," and foregrounds description and inner psychological states. If something is “stranger than fiction,” this, for Ghosh, is only a way of saying that fiction should contain nothing that is too strange. The gradualist view of science held sway well into the 20th century (hence the difficulty in getting scientists to accept that an asteroid may have extincted the dinosaurs); and the gradualist view is still precisely the dominant mode of narrative to the present, in his view. This history bears upon climate change in several ways. First, the time period is the same in which the growth of the carbon economy — and, hence, the build-up of greenhouse gases — took off; that economy became normalized via cultural forms (such as realist novels). Secondly, miracles, prodigies, monsters, and cataclysms were banished from prose fiction; the novel of "bourgeois predictability" replaced them. Thirdly, and most importantly, because the dominant cultural narrative became gradualist, the very idea that sudden shifts or disasters could account for history — let alone happen in the present — came to seem somewhat absurd and primitive. So if, for instance, mean global temperatures started rising, it had to be part of very long-term climate patterns that had happened thousands of times before in the history of the earth. Nothing to see, folks. . . . to be continued Friday . . . Next week: Craig Santos Perez
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June 2021
Kristin Prevallet Author/Editor
I'm a writer & teacher in Lawrence, Kansas who actually believes the scientists. I wrote a book of poems called Of Some Sky that seems to have something to do with all this. |