Plenty of Nothing

Constance B. Hieatt

The frontispiece of Prosody and Poetics in the Early Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of C.B. Hieatt. You know you've made it in academe if they give you a festschrift. Hieatt, who died in 2011, was the translator of the Bantam edition of Beowulf, Karlamagnús Saga, and was a world expert on medieval cookbooks. She taught at the University of Western Ontario.

[You can find an obituary here.]

[There's a bibliography of her publications in M. J. Toswell (ed.), Prosody and Poetics in the Early Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of C. B. Hieatt (University of Toronto Press, 1995), pp. 219-23. ISBN 0-8020-0653-1.]

When I Die and Go to Heaven ...

I want to sit between these two people: Arnaldo Momigliano and Betty Radice. Douglas

Beatrice de Cardi

I recently read Beatrice de Cardi's name in a footnote in an archaeology book published in 1950, and thought I'd look her up and see who she was. Well, she isn't was, she's is. She just celebrated her 100th birthday (read about it here), seven years after this BBC segment labelled her the oldest archaeologist in the world. She learned her archaeology from Mortimer Wheeler at Maiden Castle in the Thirties, but made her mark in Pakistan and the Persian Gulf. D

[She died July 5th, 2016, age 102.]

Liliane Welch Comix

Donald Keene Still Pulling His Weight

91-year-old Japanologist Donald Keene is enjoying his retirement. Source.

Mommsen

When it comes to 19th-century classical studies Theodore Mommsen is the boss, and the main reason you need to learn German to study Rome.

Keene, Chronicles of My Life

Two months after passing along the news that the Japan scholar Donald Keene is emigrating there at age 88 I came across a hardcover copy of his 2008 autobiography Chronicles of My Life: an American in the heart of Japan for $10 at Schooner Books, so I had to read it. It's a surprisingly plain and quick-paced account of his remarkable career as the preeminent herald of Japanese culture in the second half of the twentieth century, told without footnotes, and with a bit less poetic imagery than I would have expected. I think if I were his editor I would have encouraged him to quote more classical verse, or opera, or one of the many Japanese diaries he read as a naval interpreter during the war, and relate it to his own life, and perhaps imply a love affair with the moon as Yasunari Kawabata does in Japan, the Beautiful and Myself. As it is there is a layer of artistic interpretation in the dozen or so fanciful illustrations by Akira Yamaguchi that cluster toward the beginning of the book. The one above puts a storybook spin on Keene's account of a childhood trip to Europe in 1931. The kanji on the brass plaque of the French train window seem to say that although the autobiography is written in English, the story is ultimately Japanese. D

Donald Keene

Of the heroes that I had when I was twenty, it seems it's the translators who remain now that I'm fifty or so. I've been carrying around Donald Keene's Anthology of Japanese Literature to the Nineteenth Century all that time, and volume one of his A History of Japanese Literature is on the bedside table.

Keene has taught Japanese literature at Columbia for 55 years and now, at 88, he plans to emigrate and take out Japanese citizenship. There's little chance that the Japanese will turn him away, as they have already designated him a Person of Cultural Merit, making him one of only three Westerners to be granted that honour.

 (This is the 1500th Plenty of Nothing post.) D

Magnus Magnusson

Magnus Magnusson has died.   Though the Icelandic Scot will be remembered in the UK for his career on TV, I'll always think of him as a translator of the Penguin Classics' Icelandic sagas.  I have four volumes co-translated by him and Hermann Palsson: Njal's Saga (1960), The Vinland Sagas (1965), King Harald's Saga (1966), and Laxdaela Saga (1969).  The bare bones exposition, irascible characters and laconic dialogue of these books remain a model for me when I write.  Here's a bit from chapter 48 of Laxdaela Saga:

      Over at Laugar, in Saelingsdale, Gudrun rose early as soon as the sun was up.  She went to the room where her brothers were sleeping, and shook Ospak.  Ospak and his brothers woke up at once; and when he saw it was his sister he asked her what she wanted, to be up so early in the morning.  Gudrun said she wanted to know what they were planning to do that day.  Ospak said they would be having a quiet day -- 'for there isn't much work to be done just now.'

    Gudrun said, 'You would have had just the right temper if you had been peasants' daughters -- you do nothing about anything, good or bad.  Despite all the disgrace and dishonour that Kjartan has done you, you lose no sleep over it even when he rides past your door with only a single companion.  Men like you have the memory of hogs.  It's obviously futile to hope that you will ever dare to attack Kjartan at home if you haven't the nerve to face him now when he is travelling with only one or two companions.  You just sit there pretending to be men, and there are always too many of you about.'

    Ospak said she was making too much of this, but admitted that it was difficult to argue against her.  He jumped out of bed at once and dressed, as did all the brothers one after another; then they made ready to lay an ambush for Kjartan.

This prose style may be Magnusson's legacy.

Douglas