Love Poems of Ovid

Love Poems of Ovid selected and translated by Horace Gregory, Mentor Books, Toronto, 1964

Ovid (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ovid) - full name Publius Ovidius Naso - is considered one of the greats of Latin literature, up there with Virgil and Horace. Certainly his 'Metamorphosis' is a great work, one that has influenced many other authors, Dante, Boccaccio, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Marlowe, Milton, Chaucer and so on. It's been some time since I have read that book, and I pulled this selection to see if it was of equal worth. I'm afraid not.

The writing of the 'Metamorphosis' was interrupted by Ovid's exile to a small city on the Black Sea in CE 8. There have been endless suggestions and disputes about the reason for this exile, pronounced by Emperor Augustus personally without the intervention of any court. Near the same time Augustus exiled two of his own grandchildren and had the husband of one of them executed for a conspiracy against his life. Perhaps Ovid was a minor player in a conspiracy, or perhaps there are other reasons that might be suggested by his writings prior to Metamorphosis, writings such as the selection presented here.

Augustus was something of a puritan, and it is on record that he struggled mightily to restore what he saw as the moral standards of an earlier Rome. Scandal touched even his own family as he publically complained about the infidelity of his children and grandchildren.

No doubt Ovid could be seen as a contributor to this licentiousness. Before the 'Metamorphosis' his works consisted of love poems with a heavy emphasis on adultery. In fact it seemed to be his only subject. Aside from an excursion into a handbook on women's cosmetics all of his works dealt with love affairs. The book in question here contains selections from three of his works, the "Amores', the 'Art of Love' and the 'Cures for Love'. There were others left out of this collection.

The poems presented are good in parts but nowhere even approaching great literature. Ovid seemed to take himself as some sort of 'expert' on love affairs, the getting into them and the getting out of them. That and the detailing of the psychological manipulation practiced in what makes Rome seem like a gigantic pick up bar. He's quite proud of his accomplishment, but the repetition gives it a 'sameness' that one might get from listening to a braggart talk of his pickups in our time. It also comes across as the height of triviality and boastfulness.

Perhaps the author would play better if a reading was restricted to a very few of his poems or, alternatively, if the full corpus was presented. This selection doesn't work very well. Certainly there are flashes of insight into human motivation, but nothing very great. His devotion to his 'Corinna' often comes across as cloying and exaggerated. The gloating over sneaky past husbands seems quite juvenile.

So... is this a 'must read' book ? Definitely not. Its greatest virtue is that it is short enough to digest in one sitting.

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MOTHER JONES   Charles H Kerr Publishing Company, Chicago, 1974

This is one of those 'should read' books that I should probably have read decades ago. Better late than never I guess. Mother (Mary) Harris Jones was one of the greats of the 'golden age' of American labor. It's a select company, Lucy Parsons, Big Bill Haywood, Joe Hill, Eugene Debs. Elizabeth Gurly Flynn, Ralph Chaplin, etc.: It's a bright galaxy to which she belongs.

 She may or may not belong to yet another exclusive club. She as born in Cork Ireland sometime in the 1830s. Today a monument to her memory stands in that city. Her family emigrated to Canada some years later where she initially trained as a teacher in a Toronto Normal School. The actual date of her birth is uncertain. As to her birthday being May 1, May Day, it seems almost too convenient. In terms of the year shortly before her death in 1930 she claimed that the birthday marked her as 100 years old. That would put her in the other exclusive club - of centarians. The question of her birthday has never been resolved. As to her claim remember where she was born. Blarney Castle is not that far from Cork.

In any case she had a long life, and was an outstanding labor militant from the days of the Knights of Labor until the agitation of the Depression. This life was filled with exciting struggles, and it is well worthwhile to hear her description of having guns pointed at here with a death threat attached, of hiking it up mountains via creek beds in the cold to come to the aid of miners surrounded by armed goons in the employ of the mining bosses. Her ability to 'string pull' was perhaps just as interesting as her physical courage. Politicians listened to her.

Her major focus of organizing was in the mining industry, and she became so prominent that the nickname 'the miners' friend' stuck. Her scope in such campaigns was wide, not just the men themselves but their families, local communities and, as mentioned, the far away politicos. She also organized in the silk mills, railroad shops and for the campaigns against child labor.

To here the abstract world of politics was less important than the more mundane everyday life of working men and women. She took part in the founding of the IWW, having signed the call for the Convention (the only woman amongst the signers), and she attended it in Chicago. Other than this she seemed unimpressed with the prospects of the IWW. She did campaign for the Western Federation of Miners and for clemency for various class war IWW members, but her major focus remained the miners of the United Mine Workers, and there was surely enough scope there to occupy anybody's time. She did, however, share the IWW's contempt for many union 'leaders' who feathered their nests at the expense of the interests of the workers. As she says in her autobiography;

"Those ere the days of sacrifice for the cause of labor. Those were the days when we had no halls, when there were no high salaried officers, no feasting with the enemies of labor. Those were the days of the martyrs and saints."

The last chapter of her autobiography is titled, appropriately, 'Progress in spite of leaders'.

Jones faced her share of tragedy during her life. Personal as when she lost her husband and four children and those of the many workers she had met and befriended over the years. Labor disputes often took a fatal toll in those days.

The book is prefaced with an introduction by Fred Thompson and a foreword by Clarence Darrow, both very useful in setting Jones' book it a wider context and pointing out here very occasional errors. All told the book was captivating, and I wish I read it long ago.

'EARLY ENGLISH' BY JOHN W. CLARK : The Norton Library, New York, 1964

I have a small interest in languages and linguistics in general. Not that I could claim to be even moderately expert on the subject, but I've always found the field fascinating. The history of language is a field to itself, and this book makes a claim to introduce the reader to the development of the English language from Anglo-Saxon/Old English Middle English and on to Early Modern English. I hardly think I am an expert judge, but I think the author did a competent job.

He begins in the middle so to speak with some selections of English texts from various periods. The Bible is always convenient for this sort of thing, and the author tabulates Latin, Old English, Middle English and Modern English versions of a selection from the Vulgate New Testament. The similarities, differences and development are presented, and he sets to work analyzing the changes.

After this brief plunge in the waters he returns to the beginning, setting English amongst its relatives in the Indo-European language family and its Germanic branch. He uses this to introduce theories of how languages develop across geographic distances. Then it's on to an introduction to phonetics. I have to admit that I found this part somewhat hard going though I hope that at least a part of the classification of sounds into voiced/unvoiced, frictive/non-frictive, front, middle and back, high, central and low, diphthongs or not, nasal or not, palatal or not, the presence or absence of 'stops' and so on. He end this section with a chart that I must admit I didn't find as clear as I would have liked. This basic introduction, however, is central to linguists in general and to his presentation of the history of the English in particular.

From there it's into the meat of the subject; how did old English sound and how was it spelt. As to the latter he admits that most of the documentary evidence is from one dialect of Old English ie West Saxon. There is enough evidence, however, to infer the existence of other dialects, their difference from the 'standard' and at least some of the details of their pronunciation and writing. As an interesting little gemmule for those of us who have read and appreciated versions of Beowulf he mentions that OE poetry hardly ever uses rhyme. There is extensive discussion of how OE was spelt, how it was influenced by other languages and its regional variations. The author also presents many interesting items on how OE manuscripts actually physically looked. Just that is novel and fascinating in its own right.

Word forms, dialects and 'literature' (as opposed to didactic works) each receive their own treatment, and the changes English underwent before the Norman invasion are tracked, or at least speculated on. The basics of phonetics that the author previously presented are invaluable for this project, and this rather specialized treatment of one language was something of a revelation to me about the general methods of linguistics which had always seemed rather opaque before.

The discussion of Middle English and its evolution is shorter than that of OE even though the sources are far more numerous than in the earlier period. The influences of French which hardly began with the invasion and Latin are discussed as well as the 'survivals' from OE, and the reappearance of colloquial speech in written texts. The sounds of the language during this period are analysed as well as the appearance of another influence, loan words from Scandinavia.

The Middle English language was the language of Chaucer, but Chaucer was only a small part of what has survived, a corpus far greater than that from OE. Piers Plowman is frequently mentioned, and it reminded me that this work is one that I have never read even though I have seen it mentioned very often. Once more the author goes through the dialects, the development, sounds and physical appearance of the language during its changes into Early Modern English. The section on medieval manuscripts and publishing are fascinating on their on. What was important then differs vastly from what is considered noteworthy today. Attribution for instance.

All told I enjoyed this book immensely even if I am modest about how much of the technical details I actually fully comprehended. One nice little item I did take away - when people use "ye" in imitation of past English it is actually a common mistake. The letter that people misinterpret as a "y" in older manuscripts was actually pronounced "th". Thus (Yus ?) 'Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe' was actually 'The Olde Curiosity Shoppe'. The "e"s at the end of the words have their own story as well.

'Yarns of the Near East'

YARNS OF THE NEAR EAST BY BASIL MATHEWS

This was a weird one. I have quite a few folklore/classics/mythology books in my personal library, and I grabbed this one at random hoping for a legitimate collection. Wrong choice. The book, published in 1927, as  fourth reprint from 1920 was something of a manual produced by the author for the World Methodist Missionary Society. It was meant as a Sunday School source for the indoctrination of young boys into a path leading to missionary work. Not a single actual folk story from the area at all. It opens with a dramatization of one of the journeys of St. Paul which counts as 'Near East' because at least some of the action takes place in Anatolia. A good part of it, however, takes place in the Greek city of Philippi in Macedonia, and it is classic triumphalist hagiography of heroism and miracles and the gathering of souls to Christ.

The next story is a hatchet job on the life of Muhammad, and a number of 'exemplary stories' of missionaries in what is now called the Middle east rather than the Near East bulk up the rest. The author is at great pains to point out the value of "believing in Jesus Christ" even though said advantages are hardly spelled out beyond the "Jesus as a nice and charitable guy" level. As if Muslims didn't practice charity at all. There is a cast of Arab characters of the 'wild thief' pattern, and if the author wanted to make a book to introduce youngsters to the actual life of people in the area it does a pretty bad job of it.

The interesting thing is rather that the book is a window into the rather baseless self confidence of the English missionary societies of the day. The society itself was rather disreputable by today's standards as its refusal to acknowledge the massacre at Amritsar (1000 dead) India in 1919 amply demonstrates. Looking back from almost a century one can only wonder at the self confidence of the missionaries. At the time, post WW1, the British Empire was already in hock up to its ears and well advanced in its decline. Some will never notice they are on the way down even if it is obvious from the outside, or with the passage of time.

The present day over-weaning pride of American missionaries reproduces this picture in the time of the decline of the American Empire. The participants soldier on with an optimism buoyed up by ignorance. I actually finished the book. It as short and rather padded. Even if it wasn't what I was looking for it was an interesting look into an enterprise remote from hat most of us are familiar with today.