Amazon.com
The condition of exile is an exaggeration of the process of change and loss that many people experience as they grow and mature, leaving behind the innocence of childhood. Eva Hoffman spent her early years in Cracow, among family friends who, like her parents, had escaped the Holocaust and were skeptical of the newly imposed Communist state. Hoffman's parents managed to immigrate to Canada in the 1950s, where Eva was old enough to feel like a stranger--bland food, a quieter life, and schoolmates who hardly knew where Poland was. Still, there were neighbors who knew something of Old World ways, and a piano teacher who was classically Middle European in his neurotic enthusiasm for music. Her true exile came in college in Texas, where she found herself among people who were frightened by and hostile to her foreignness. Later, at Harvard, Hoffman found herself initially alienated by her burgeoning intellectualism; her parents found it difficult to comprehend. Her sense of perpetual otherness was extended by encounters with childhood friends who had escaped Cracow to grow up in Israel, rather than Canada or the United States, and were preoccupied with soldiers, not scholars. Lost in Translation is a moving memoir that takes the specific experience of the exile and humanizes it to such a degree that it becomes relevant to the lives of a wider group of readers.
Customer Reviews:
comfortable in London, half way between New York and Cracow.........2007-03-25
I will not refer to the book itself as so many have reviewed it already. I just wish to make a brief comment, in addition to stating that it is a good book
The author, Eva Hoffmann, would never have written this particular book if, when leaving Poland, her mother had had the last word on where to immigrate to, North America or Israel. She had preferred Israel and the anxt, the feeling of being torn between two cultures would not have haunted her enough to write a book. I too have been transplanted. In my case at least three time but possibly five. As right through my cultural identity was always clear to me as Jewish, I could move from culture to culture without feeling that I had to be "translated" into them. Only few will understand what I am trying to say: had she been better grounded in her Jewish culture and identity, she would never have felt such conflict.
On the other hand, for those of us who have experienced her "angst" though in a lower dose, the book is a useful projection of something that could not be understood except as such a total and essential question; magnified for the sake of study.
If not London, but Jerusalem would have made Eva Hoffmann feel comfortable, she would be a less anxious (neurotic?) person but perhaps a lesser thinker. This is a book to keep even after reading it. It is almost a reference book.
Lost in Translation.......2007-01-04
A wonderful book on moving from one culture to another and one language to another--Polish to English. Anyone who has had this experience will immediately identify with the author. Eva Hoffman writes beautifully about every nuance of her family's move as a young teenager from Communist Poland to Canada. Cultures that are superficially similar turn out to be very different and the effect on family life is staggering.
Lost, But Found As Well.......2007-01-01
Hoffman's description of Poland in the Communist years following World War II is riveting, and so is her narrative of life in the U.S. following her arrival here at age 13. But what impresses me most about this book is its assured writing style, and the author's ability to skip back and forth from one decade and year to another without boring or losing the reader. Hoffman is an unusually gifted writer. I am using her text as a teaching tool for a would-be memoir/autobiographer. Thank heaven her parents survived the Holocaust and brought her to us.
Enlightening description of immigration and languages.......2006-12-16
I started reading this wonderful book 6 months before I left Brazil towards Israel. After finishing the first Part (Paradise) I just could not keep on reading, and I abandoned the book for a while. After I landed in Israel I re-took the book and was delighted again with the realness of it. A thought occurred to me that the reading was so descriptive of the immigration sentiment that I just could not understand it before immigrating myself.
The book helped me to understand and to organize the infinite sensations that come with the leaving/arriving to another country. How the language affects the way we think and act, how sadness and happiness are mingled into one strange feeling, how we cope and forget without noticing, and how we urge to succeed and prove that we can be part of the new country.
In addition, the book also brought to me new feelings and curiosities about my grandparents, whom also escaped from Poland and Russia in the late 40's. Hoffman describes so well how the old traditions and languages influenced the new live of those who left their country because of prejudice and persecution!
One passage that I am specially fond of: "No, I'm no patriot, nor was I ever allowed to be. And yet, the country of my childhood lives within me with a primacy that is a form of love. (...) All it has given me is the world, but that is enough. It has fed me language, perceptions, sounds, the human kind. It has given me the colors and the furrows of reality, my first loves. The absoluteness of those loves can never be recaptured: no geometry of the landscape, no haze in the air, will live in us as intensely as the landscapes that we saw as the first, and to which we gave ourselves wholly, without reservations." It reminds me of Wordsworth when he writes about Tintern Abbey.
A wonderful life-changing book.
a classic.......2006-06-19
I loved this book when it came out and I love it still many rereadings later. This portrait of the Wandering Jew as a young girl begins with Hoffman's childhood in Cracow, Poland just after the second world war; moves to Vancouver, British Columbia when she is thirteen; continues on to Texas and Massachusetts for her university years; and ends in New York, where she becomes a writer and an editor at the New York Times Book Review. It encompasses many themes: the defining power of language; the cost of changing cultures, the construction of personal identity, and the consequences, for many Jews, of the Nazi and Communist regimes. Hoffman was born in the summer of 1945. Like many Jews in post-war, Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe, the Hoffmans observed Passover and had home-baked challah, on shabbat but Eva was culturally Polish, reading Sienkiewicz's nationalistic novels, playing Chopin etudes, attending church with her friends, receiving gifts on St. Nicholas's Day. After emigration, she adapts to North American culture, first Canadian, then Texan, then New York. This is a memoir squarely in the Jewish immigrant tradition but one in which the immigrant is a graduate student at Harvard, and relates her situation not only to Mary Antin but to contexts laid out by Sartre and Nabokov, Jung and Freud. Lost in Translation contains stories and essays, phrases to ruminate on, ideas to consider. It is a demanding read that challenges its reader to consider her own autobiography, her own childhood, her own assumptions. Having compiled an international bibliography of Jewish women's non-fiction books with poet Irena Klepfisz (available on my website) , I can say this is one of my favorites.
Amazon.com
Nicole Mones doesn't waste any time getting to the heart of the matter in her first novel, Lost in Translation. Within the first 10 pages we discover that protagonist Alice Mannegan, an interpreter based in Beijing, has a yen for sex with Chinese men. By the time we reach page 20, we've learned that Alice is in full flight from her father, a racist U.S. congressman, and about to start working for Adam Spencer, an American archeologist on the hunt for the missing bones of one of the century's biggest scientific finds: Peking man. Having set the stage, Mones steps back and lets her characters do the work as she proceeds to spin a tale that is part mystery, part love story, and part cultural exchange. Alice and Spencer travel to a remote region of China, accompanied by Dr. Lin Shiyang, with whom Alice falls in love. Mones spends a fair amount of time on the team's search for the bones, whose mysterious disappearance during the Second World War has never been explained, but her main focus is less on finding Peking man than on exposing the skeletons in her main characters' closets. As Alice, Spencer, and Dr. Lin move forward in their quest, they are forced to reckon with their pasts. Each, it seems, has an ulterior reason for being where they are and doing what they do, and it is in the subtle play of personalities, motivations, and misunderstandings that Lost in Translation finds its rhythm.
The key to the novel's success is Mones's in-depth knowledge of China's culture, history, and politics. The question of cultural identity is at the core of her tale, and she skillfully weaves various aspects of Chinese life--from ancestor worship to the Cultural Revolution--into the personal relationships of her characters. By novel's end, readers have discovered a great deal about archeology, China, and most especially about the unmapped territories of memory, desire, and identity. Lost in Translation is a fine first novel, the first salvo of a promising literary career.
Book Description
A novel of searing intelligence and startling originality, Lost in Translation heralds the debut of a unique new voice on the literary landscape. Nicole Mones creates an unforgettable story of love and desire, of family ties and human conflict, and of one woman's struggle to lose herself in a foreign land--only to discover her home, her heart, herself.
At dawn in Beijing, Alice Mannegan pedals a bicycle through the deserted streets. An American by birth, a translator by profession, she spends her nights in Beijing's smoke-filled bars, and the Chinese men she so desires never misunderstand her intentions. All around her rushes the air of China, the scent of history and change, of a world where she has come to escape her father's love and her own pain. It is a world in which, each night as she slips from her hotel, she hopes to lose herself forever.
For Alice, it began with a phone call from an American archaeologist seeking a translator. And it ended in an intoxicating journey of the heart--one that would plunge her into a nation's past, and into some of the most rarely glimpsed regions of China. Hired by an archaeologist searching for the bones of Peking Man, Alice joins an expedition that penetrates a vast, uncharted land and brings Professor Lin Shiyang into her life. As they draw closer to unearthing the secret of Peking Man, as the group's every move is followed, their every whisper recorded, Alice and Lin find shelter in each other, slowly putting to rest the ghosts of their pasts. What happens between them becomes one of the most breathtakingly erotic love stories in recent fiction. Indeed, Lost in Translation is a novel about love--between a nation and its past, between a man and a memory, between a father and a daughter. Its powerful impact confirms the extraordinary gifts of a master storyteller, Nicole Mones.
Customer Reviews:
One of the most engaging bi-cultural novels I have ever read.......2007-09-27
This has to be one of the most engaging bi-cultural novels I have ever read!. Alice Mannegan, a young woman who for various reasons has come to be a free-lance interpreter in Beijing, is asked to interpret for an American paleontologist who is seeking to recover the remains of Peking Man, which, during the turbulence ensuing from the Japanese invasions of the 30's and 40's, disappeared under mysterious circumstances. (So far all historically true!)
Author Mones interweaves the psyches of imaginary present-time persons with the historical facts about the disappearance of the remains of Peking Man, which involved the French Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and his spiritually (at least) lover Lucile Swan.
The result is a wonderful narrative within which Chinese and Euro-American communications collide, negotiate, and occasionally transcend certain cultural and speech differences. Because of the originality of the characters and the plot, the story is always unfolding and never fully predictable, which makes the book hard to put down.
As a cultural anthropologist whose first-hand experience with China extends over 20 years, I am extremely critical of much writing about China. However, I LOVED this book! I thought Mones understanding of cultural differences and how they manifest in communications and behaviors is extraordinary, and I now look forward to reading her other books A Cup of Light (2002) and The Last Chinese Chef (2007).
A biased expat loved this book........2006-01-04
I loved this book, but I am biased. I am the same age, physical description, and emanate from the same geographical region as Alice. I also read this book while I was living in China and found it to be an accurate view of an American woman living in China. Alice is a woman who tries very hard to escape from her heritage and her past by immersing herself in the Chinese culture. This is also an approaching middle age story. Alice 36, has spent all her adult life in Beijing, and is pondering what she has to show for it all. Alice also agonizes over lost love, her biological clock running out, reconciliation with her estranged father, and future career plans.
The author manages to create novel around an actual historical event. The plot is built around a hunt for the bones of the Peking Man. They were stashed away for safekeeping during the Japanese invasion of China on the eve of WWII. They mysteriously vanished and remain unaccounted for to this day. I was so intrigued that I read some non-fiction books about the discovery of and disappearance of the Peking man, one of the oldest complete skulls ever found, and its disappearance. Fortunately, the archeologists made a plaster cast of the skull and it survived.
By the way, I noticed some criticism from some Asians who didn't like the premise of the story. I ask that they keep in mind the target audience and the cross-cultural aspects of the story. If Alice were Chinese it wouldn't be much of a story. While I was living in China I happened across a book written by a Chinese man who had attended Vanderbilt University. It was a bilingual book about how he "discovered" my city. I read it with great interest because I was curious to know how an outsider viewed my city and my culture. While it was basically a positive book I respect the fact that the author wrote about a few negative experiences he had in my city.
Excellent debut for Nicole Mones.......2004-07-20
I have a confession to make. I grabbed this off the bookshelf because I thought a movie of the same title was based on this. When I saw it (the story) was based in China, I only thought Coppola might have modified the story a bit so she can film in Japan. Well, it turns out I was wrong! The book has nothing to do with the movie.
This book, apparently, is Nicole Mones' first attempt at novelwriting. And I have to say she did a good job. The whole story and parallelism of Alice, Dr. Spencer and the Peking Man was well done and very original. Pacing was a bit slow though and I found myself struggling a bit to finish the book. And the ending could have been better. Mones' lines are very good though. Natural and not out-of-place and unnecessary.
It's a good first attempt but there is still room for improvement. But it's still a good read, especially if you like reading about other countries and cultures.
Connecting within and without.......2003-02-25
The key to this novel lies in its epigraph, a quotation from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French anthropologist and priest whose explorations of fossil hominids in China in the early 20th century forms the backdrop for this ambitious novel. "...it would seem that we have only got to look at ourselves in order to understand the dynamic relationships existing between the within and the without of things at a given point in the universe. In fact so to do is one of the most difficult of all things." Mones's novel is not only an anthropological, quasi-Indiana Jones search for relics (in this case, the remains of Peking Man), but it is also a novel about its main character's search to make the complicated connections de Chardin speaks about in the quotation. Alice is an American interpreter living in China in an unspecified time period close to the present. Alienated from her Congressman father because of his overt racism, Alice seeks to leave America behind and become Chinese. As she joins the search for the skeleton of Peking Man, Alice confronts her own demons. The book works at more than one level, but never fully succeeds as a thriller or as a character study. Nonetheless, the title captures quite well the difficulties of trying to move between cultures, never being sure what has been lost in translation. In fact, as wenavigate between thewithin and the without, don't we all lose something in translation, an insight the book portrays rather well. This is a novel worth reading and worth discussing with a book group.
Weird but educational........2002-07-28
Let me begin by saying that I did not enjoy the heroine of this novel. She's very vain and seeks only Chinese men for her love conquests. In fact, it kind of creeped me out how much she only focused on Chinese men. The only redeeming thing about this novel was that it taught some information about the Chinese cultural practices of mourning a family member, drinking tea, eating, and speaking Chinese in a respectful manner to other Chinese people. However, I think I'm just going to stick with reading Pearl S. Buck novels, because unlike Pearl Buck, the heroine/author of this novel was way too much of a poseur. The whole time you're reading this book you get the feeling that the heroine/author is trying to convince you that she was Chinese in a previous life. Well, she didn't convince me of this and she was way too cheesy in her approach.
Average customer rating:
|
Translational Pain Research: Comparing Preclinical Studies And Clinical Pain Management. Lost in Translation?
Manufacturer: Nova Biomedical Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
 Pain Medicine | Pharmacology | Medicine | Subjects | Books
General | Diseases | Medicine | Subjects | Books
General | Medicine | Subjects | Books
General | Research | Medicine | Subjects | Books
Pain Medicine | Pharmacology | Medical | Professional & Technical | Subjects | Books
All Titles | Qualifying Textbooks - Fall 2007 | Stores | Books
ASIN: 1600212050 |
Customer Reviews:
Excellent in Translation.......2007-02-03
I have read the English translation, and love it. Agnon's mystical surrealism is worthy of Garcia-Marquez. While being versed in Jewish traditions can be helpful, it is not necessary for appreciating this brilliant writer.
The hebrew Shakespear.......2001-06-25
Ye, I know it sounds over-bombastic. Still, I quite stand behind this. Agnon has the quality (like the bard) of writing one sentence or a few words within, that tell a whole story in a bang. Every now and again you stop over a phrase that seems obscure, you think a bit, and often enough, it's revelation. It causes you to regret all the previous, skipped, pharagraph that you only half fathomed.
I must worn you though, that I can't recommend the english translation (not having read it translated).
Book Description
This highly regarded, thematic reader for freshman composition offers students an introduction to issues in the arts and sciences. It includes a good balance of classic and contemporary selections from mixed genres and provides a wide range of viewpoints and voices. The readings are supported by introductions to each theme and individual headnotes.
Customer Reviews:
Bozoi Reader.......2005-07-22
Very nice anthology. Lots wonderful essays, and some are directly responding to each other. It's for my English class, pretty interesting to read from.
Plethora of knowledge.......2000-09-23
Great collection of writers is assembled. A great collection of writings to build your knowledge. Expressions in composition with ultimate terms in rhetoric to a brave new world. It is history and philosophy from fiction to the literal signs of the times. I would truly recommend this book for scholars of law and political science, but not just. If you are a student of history, business or any major humanities, you will love this book just for the knowledge wisdom and understanding you will receive through the experience of perusal. Enjoy, you will be on a road that only a few have chosen. Notably names in the book - ee. Cummings (my personal favorite), A. Huxley, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Luther King jr. and many others.
Plethora of knowledge.......2000-09-23
Great collection of writers is assembled. A great collection of writings to build your knowledge. Expressions in composition with ultimate terms in rhetoric to a brave new world. It is history and philosophy from fiction to the literal signs of the times. I would truly recommend this book for scholars of law and political science, but not just. If you are a student of history, business or any major humanities, you will love this book just for the knowledge wisdom and understanding you will receive through the experience of perusal. Enjoy, you will be on a road that only a few have chosen. Notably names in the book - ee. Cummings (my personal favorite), A. Huxley, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Luther King jr. and many others.
Book Description
In September 1962, when Martin Dockery landed in Saigon, he was a young, determined, idealistic U.S. Army first lieutenant convinced of America’s imminent victory in Vietnam. While most of the twelve thousand U.S. military advisors in-country at the time filled support positions in Saigon and other major cities, Dockery was one of a handful of advisors assigned to Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) combat units.
For eight months Dockery lived and fought in the heart of the Mekong Delta with an ARVN infantry battalion on missions and operations that often lasted several days. And for most of that time, whether tramping through the steaming, leech-infested jungle, hiking across canals, or engaging in sudden firefights, Dockery was the only American soldier with the unit.
Dockery’s solitary assignment with ARVN during the infancy of U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia afforded him an understanding of Vietnam far more profound than most other Americans. Lost in Translation is his riveting account of the largely overlooked role of American combat advisors in the war. As he vividly evokes the sounds, smells, and vistas of the country and its people, Dockery depicts an army poorly trained, incompetent, and unwilling to fight for a government every bit as corrupt as that of the French colonial empire it replaced. Yet even worse than his daily fare of isolation, frustration, and danger was Dockery’s growing conviction that the advisory program was doomed. Though these dedicated, highly motivated advisors would do their best and persevere under the most trying circumstances, they would not succeed.
The author’s eyewitness testimony provides inescapable evidence that as early as 1962 the writing was already on the wall concerning the outcome of the Vietnam War. Although it would take U.S. leaders more than a decade to divine what the young officer learned in a single year, Dockery’s personal and penetrating analysis of the war—which he presented in a lecture at a Special Forces facility in Germany one week after his tour in Vietnam ended—proved chillingly accurate. Those who send soldiers to war should consider the realities and truths within these pages.
From the Hardcover edition.
Customer Reviews:
A slow read, nothing really new in this book.......2007-07-29
After reading everything out there on the Vietnam war, this book brings nothing new to light. I found it hard to stay interested in. The author spend a lot of time on the problems of the war, and not enough time on his personal experiences. Rather boring.
Read twice.......2006-05-30
Terse and void of embellishments Dockery chronicles his frustration with moral compass to ultimately discover self actualization as tenacious warrior turn civilian. I highly recommend this book for Policy Planners and those interested in histography, volunteerism, and Asian American Studies. Especially potent for those compelled in the circuitous rational, that ground conflict establishes a venerated democratic value system. The reader is left to speculate as to why entrenched corrupt civil war settings consistently prompt this "Christo-American" reaction.
Dockery's voice is original, masterful, and commanding. Weaving a penetrating insight on the human condition with its flaws and zeniths making this reader suggest that Random House Publishers keep a pulse on additional Dockery writings, clearly he has more to contribute. Read it twice, time well spent.
An enterprise doomed from the start.......2005-03-16
This is a very worthwhile account of one young officer's experience in the early years of America's Vietnam War when President Kennedy sent a couple of thousand advisors to Vietnam to show the South Vietnamese Army how to fight their war. Reading Dockery's account it is incredible that anyone really believed that seasoned Vietnamese commanders, many who had a totally different agenda, would take advice from a few fresh-faced Americans. Query? Are we in the process of making the same mistake this very minute in Iraq?
The reviewer is the author of "Killed In Action..." a book about the other end of the Vietnam War, told through the life of SP4 Stephen H. Warner, an anti-war activist, who was drafted and killed in action while serving as an Army journalist in February 1971.
All the reasons we went wrong in Vietnam........2004-11-17
Dockery list in a clear and concise manner all of the reasons for our ultimate failure in Vietnam. From the arrogance of our views of people and culture to our total misunderstanding of the influence of the dead on a culture. This is a must read for anyone who needs evidence that the military is not in the business of winning the hearts and minds of a people.
Thanks to Martin Dockery for sharing this long overdue piece of American military history.
Vietnam.......2004-09-06
This is a well-written book. The author has pretty much sanitized it of all emotion except that of frustration, which makes it a good historical work. I recommend this over Tour of Duty.
Customer Reviews:
Wang Wei, China's nature poet.......2006-04-17
A beautiful book full of nature poems by the chinese poet Wang Wei, this book contains over 170 wonderful poems, including the complete Wang River sequence. One of the best translations of Wang Wei's poems. If you want a more detailed history of this poets life, get the book 'Wang Wei' by Marsha L Wagner. I highly recommend both books.
An Awesome Book of Poetry.......2001-05-04
The publisher hit all the key points, so I'll just say a quick few words. Wang Wei is one of my favorite poets, he paints like DaVinci and moves you like Mozart. Reading his work takes you to a whole new world.
A great escape, and a great way to spend an afternoon. Get this book! You will be pleased, guranteed!
Book Description
Vol 3 in the Dispatches series, tr various
Book Description
Greek epics of the archaic period include poems that narrate a particular heroic episode or series of episodes and poems that recount the long-term history of families or peoples. They are an important source of mythological record. Here is a new text and translation of the examples of this poetry that have come down to us.
The heroic epic is represented by poems about Heracles and Theseus, and by two great epic cycles: the Theban Cycle, which tells of the failed assault on Thebes by the Seven and the subsequent successful assault by their sons; and the Trojan Cycle, which includes Cypria, Little Iliad, and The Sack of Ilion. Among the genealogical epics are poems in which Eumelus creates a prehistory for Corinth and Asius creates one for Samos. In presenting the extant fragments of these early epic poems, Martin West provides very helpful notes. His Introduction places the epics in historical context.
Customer Reviews:
Learn to read Greek too!.......2007-05-17
If you've gotten this far you must know the story of "the Trojan War" is more than just the Iliad and the Odyssey, quite a bit more actually. This book will fill in everything else about the Trojan Cycle. It's presented with the right page in English and the left page in Greek as written. I thought this was nice to be able to see the original text. Throw in the Theban Cycle and some poems about Heracles and Theseus and this small green book has a lot of punch.
Fragments from the Trojan Cycle and other epic poems.......2004-09-26
We can only imagine how many countless millions of students have read the "Iliad" or some version of Homer's epic poem and were surprised to find that the story of the Trojan Horse is not part of the tale. While the two heroic epics ascribed to Homer are the only extant examples of the genre there are other such works, telling not only about other parts of the Trojan War but also about Heracles, Theseus, and the city of Thebes. In "Greek Epic Fragments: From the Seventh to Fifth Centuries B.C." edited and translated by Martin L. West we have the original Greek and translated versions of these extant fragments, placed in historical context.
In his introduction West characterizes these poems as "redactions of traditional material" from the archaic period that include poems that narrate a particular heroic episode or series of episodes along with poems that recount the histories of families or people. These fragments constitute an important part of the mythological record, especially with regards to those that tell the story of the rest of the Trojan War. Those were what I was interested in tracking down, but you may well have other interests, so here is a list of what you will specifically find inside in this collection:
The Theban Cycle is represented by "Oedipodea"; "Thebaid" tells of the Seven Against Thebes; "Epigoni" is about the sons of the Seven Against Thebes; and "Alcemonis." The Trojan Cycle features: Stanius' "Cyrpia," where Zeus plans with Themis to bring about the Trojan War, including the Judgment of Paris (Alexandrus); "Aethiopis" by Arctinus of Miletus, follows up on the "Iliad" with the death of Achilles and the fight over his armor; "The Little Iliad" by Lesches of Mitylene, has the death of Ajax, Odysseus stealing the Palladium out of Troy, and the Acheans leaving behind the Trojan Horse; and "The Sack of Iliom," also by Arctinus of Miletus, tells of how the Trojans brought the horse into their city and were destroyed. It also includes "The Returns" by Agias of Troezen; Eugammon of Cyrene's "Telegony," which picks up on the end of "The Odyssey"; and "Thesprotis."
A section devoted to Poems on Heracles and Theseus has "The Capture of Oichalia" by Creophylus, "Heraclea" by Pisander, "Heraclea" by Panyassis, and "Theseis." Under Genealogical And Antiquarian Epics there are works by Eumelus ("Titanomachia," "Corinthiaca," "Europia"), Cinaethon, Asius, Hegesinous, and Chersias, along with fragments from "Danais," "Minyas," "Carmen Naupactium," and "Phoronis." The collection ends with Unplaced Framents, most of which are ascribed to "Homer." That means West dos not include any Hesiodic fragments or any from poems that are historical and technical (i.e., not strictly mythological).
I understand that West has made some choices in terms of what to include or not include that scholars will find debatable. Michael J. Anderson of Yale University enumerates these choices in his review of the volume for the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, but obviously neither my interest nor my knowledge allows me to join in on that conversation. I simply appreciate being able to have access to the original fragments to muse over when we study the Trojan War in my Classical Greek & Roman Mythology course each semester and I rethink again how I think all of these bits and pieces best fit together.
Ian Myles Slater on: Bits and Pieces.......2004-05-10
I opened a review of M.L. West's edition and translation of "Homeric Hymns. Homeric Apocrypha. Lives of Homer" (Loeb Classical Library No. 496) with a bibliographic note that applies to this volume as well:
Back in 1914, the Loeb Classical Library issued, as volume 57 of the series, "Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns and Homerica," edited and translated by Hugh G. Evelyn-White. A revised and expanded edition of 1920 included a substantial appendix of newly published fragments from Greek papyri; this appendix received a further supplement in 1936, edited and translated by D.L. Page. The volume was reprinted at intervals thereafter (my copy is from 1967), but without updating.
So much for the repeated information.
As was the case with the volume of "Homeric Hymns" (etc.), this is a whole new edition of part of the contents of the older, single-volume Loeb edition, along with some additional material. "Greek Epic Fragments" (LCL No. 497) is made up of the summaries and snippets which are all that survive of a body of narrative poetry outside the familiar "Iliad" and "Odyssey," dating, at least in theory, from Archaic and early Classical times. The works represented concern not only the Trojan War, but also the earlier wars of Thebes, the Voyage of the Argo, and the adventures of such heroes as Herakles (Hercules) and Theseus, and some lesser-known material. Some of the stories survive in other forms, including the famous, or relatively well-known, "Argonautica" of Apollonius, Virgil's "Aeneid," Statius' "Thebaid," and many of the extant Greek tragedies, and in more obscure works, such as the "Posthomerica" of Quintus of Smyrna. Ancient scholars sometimes noted borrowings or divergences, information preserved as marginalia ("scholia"), and embedded in other works.
For the most part, however, we are fortunate when we have spare prose summaries of what was in each of the epics, versions from late antiquity preserved under the name of Proclus. These seem to be based at least in part on the works of Alexandrian scholars, who had access to manuscripts of the works in question. The learned travel writer Pausanias supplies some valuable quotations, with critical comments, and there are a variety of other incidental sources, plus invaluable parallel versions in the "Library" of mythology attributed to Apollodorus. Among recent studies of the problems this presents, Timothy Gantz's "Early Greek Myth: A Guide to the Literary and Artistic Sources" is comprehensive and relatively accessible.
The whole harvest, however, even counting some works included by West, although usually considered too late to belong to this group, fits on about a hundred mass-market paperback sized pages of Greek text. (For those not familiar with the Loeb series of small hardcovers, the Greek and/or Latin text is printed on the left-hand page, facing an English translation on the right side.)
Nothing, therefore, is going to make this particular volume thrilling reading. Unlike some of the Loeb editions of the tragedians and lyric poets, it is pretty clearly for the serious student, or the enthusiast (like me), not the ordinary literate reader. West, however, presents it clearly, and the edition marks a much-needed advance on Evelyn-White's venerable, but, in my experience, frustratingly antique, version.
On technical points, I must defer to qualified reviewers in the classical journals (see, conveniently, Michael J. Anderson in the on-line "Bryn Mawr Classical Review"); the initial response seems favorable, with the usual number of suggested alternative readings of the evidence. West has previously edited and / or translated Hesiod, the "Iliad," and a substantial body of lyric verse. I am certainly not about to challenge the distinguished editor's decisions!
Despite some residual grumblings about paying for three new books to replace one volume, I look forward to the forthcoming Loeb "Hesiod."
Book Description
This powerful novel tells the story of a love affair between an enigmatic Chinese prostitute and the Caucasian boy who worships her. It follows the main characters from childhood to old age, and is filled with a vivid cast of peripheral characters, from missionaries to gangsters. The book includes moments of tremendous cruelty and incredible human tenderness.
Customer Reviews:
A Wonderful Story of Hope and Survival.......2003-10-06
Fusang is kidnapped from her tea-growing village in the mountains of China and shipped to San Francisco. While many of the other young women die on the journey, she survives and is sold into a brothel, becoming one of many women lining the windows of Chinatown. She is sought after because of her beauty and friendly nature and a wealthy, young Californian falls in love with her. However Da Yong, a notorious criminal is obsessed with owning her.
There's enough of the story right there to keep you tuning the pages of this five star story that is filled with wonderful writing. I just loved this book.
Review submitted by Captain Katie Osborne
Eye-Opening Piece of History in Avant-Garde Style.......2001-06-13
This book sheds light on a really eye-opening bit of history in the free-for-all boomtown that San Francisco was in the late 19th Century. The style is interesting as well: a contemporary Chinese immigrant to the US speaks directly to a Chinese prostitute in the 19th Century, experiencing her life in those turbulent times and seeing what has changed and what has not. The prostitute, Fusang, is enigmatic because she defies categorization. She does not need to be rescued and, despite her lot, she is not an object of pity. She is who she is, accepts her fate, and has an almost Boddhisattva-like compassion for those who wrong her.
Interesting but not compelling.......2001-06-05
I understand why Harriet is the #1 reviewer - she put in words exactly how I felt about the book. I thought the setting and "history" of the period was interesting, but I just could not become attached to any of the characters.
hobbesian.......2001-04-19
Chris realized that he had never, ever understood Fusang. -The Lost Daughter of Happiness
Geling Yan, a widely respected young Chinese author, immigrated to the United States after the Tienanmen Square massacre. She is best known here for the movie Xiu Xiu : The Sent Down Girl, the script for which she cowrote with director and childhood friend Joan Chen, from Yan's own short story. In this new novel, set in the 1870s, she has borrowed a figure from history, Fusang, the most famous prostitute in San Francisco, and has imagined an unusual lover for her, a 12 year old white boy named Chris.
Approaching the issue of anti-Chinese racism through these two characters, she tells a tale of slavery, rape and murder, and, ostensibly, love. I say ostensibly because Chris and Fusang remain completely opaque throughout the novel; we can never comprehend their motivations or thought processes. One of the things that helps to make them so mysterious is that the novel is narrated by a female descendant of Fusang, who has gathered 160 texts about the Chinese experience in San Francisco, in an effort to understand her enigmatic ancestor's life.
I may well be wide of the mark here, but it seems like Yan's point may be that Fusang and Chris are equally incomprehensible to each other, as they are to us. In fact, though the novel has the structure of an epic love story, the message would seem to be that there is something fundamentally illusory in such interracial love affairs. At one point she says of Chris :
He has yet to realize that the infatuation one feels for what one cannot understand is just as violent as the animosity.
This linkage of racist hatred with cross-cultural romance, though awfully harsh, has more than a grain of truth to it. Equally stern is her later judgment of Chris, when he wants Fusang to marry him :
It is as if being with you, Fusang, is not a matter of anything so shallow as love or happiness, but rather a grand sacrifice. Or perhaps when love reaches this stage it crowds out ordinary feelings and becomes a doctrine, an ideal, that can only be realized through sacrifice. He is using you to enact his sacrifice for the ideal of love. He also wants to show everyone of his race and yours that his self-sacrifice will form a bridge across the racial divide.
It's hard to imagine a more stinging indictment of the kind of racial understanding which, though it masquerades as selflessness and acceptance of others, is really based as much on objectification of those "others" as is racism.
In what I found the most powerful passage of the book, which after all is an examination of racism and violence directed against Chinese-Americans, Yan, in discussing the causes of a riot, reveals just how universal and non-specific is the human hatred which fuels such incidents, and even links it to the Cultural Revolution in China :
Hatred is amazing. It makes people self-righteous; it drives them with a sense of mission. I'm not talking about revenge; that's too simple. People are born with a higher form of hatred, so immense it doesn't even need a target. Like love so vast no object is necessary. This kind of hatred can lie dormant for years, like a swell of darkness, and people are never even conscious of it. But once the darkness is breached, all rationality drowns and the things people do out of hatred serve only the purpose of fulfilling an overwhelming emotional need. Burning, smashing, killing, rape--they're all just channels. It doesn't even matter what started it, because people quickly become intoxicated by the sheer spectacle of destruction. Like love at the earth-shattering stage, hatred by this point feeds on itself, simply for its own sake. The pleasure of watching some person or thing destroyed by one's own hand is virtually orgasmic.
When I was a child I saw those sexual impulses they called the cultural revolution and those orgasms they called rebellion. The gratification of hatred produces the same rapture in everyone.
This is a very dark--though I would argue realistic--vision of human nature.
This darkness, combined with various scenes of violence, the emotional distance of the central characters, the sparseness of the author's prose, make this a book that many people will not enjoy. Quite honestly, I wasn't sure if I liked it until I thought about it for quite awhile. But ultimately, despite the somewhat harrowing nature of the story, the brutal honesty of Yan's ideas won me over. And the more I've thought about it, the more I appreciate it.
GRADE : A-
Interesting look at nineteenth Chinese immigrants in USA.......2001-03-28
Though the California Gold Rush was over two decades ago, many Chinese immigrate to Gold Mountain as they call San Francisco in hopes of making a fortune. However, not all the Chinese living in San Francisco voluntarily crossed the Pacific. For example Fusang was kidnapped in her homeland and brought to California where she was sold to serve as a prostitute used by many white males.
Only twelve, Chris finds Fusang's aloof detachment quite attractive and begins to obsess over the Oriental woman. This begins a lifetime in which Chris watches Fusang as her life unfolds mostly in a negative way over the next forty or so years.
THE LOST DAUGHTER OF HAPPINESS uses a real person (Fusang) to provide a glimpse at the American mistreatment and prejudice towards the first wave of Chinese immigrants. The historical setting is quite deep and enhances an intriguing plot. However, Fusang, though a genuine person, never comes across as real to readers. They never understand her motives in spite of following along side Chris forty years of her life. The same is said of Chris who is a fictionalized account of a prostitute follower, but his motives seem contrived. Geling Yan shows much talent especially in describing the era, but the inability for the audience to feel anything towards Fusang leaves the plot a bit short and disappointing.
Harriet Klausner
Books:
- Magic Item Compendium (Dungeons & Dragons d20 3.5 Fantasy Roleplaying)
- Mary Kay: You Can Have It All: Lifetime Wisdom from America's Foremost Woman Entrepreneur
- Master of Dragons (Dragonvarld Trilogy, Book 3)
- Mein Kampf
- Memoirs (George F. Kennan Memoirs)
- Monkey Business: 7 Laws of the Jungle for Becoming the Best of the Bunch
- NIV/The Message Parallel Bible (New International Version)
- Orcas, Eagles & Kings: Georgia Strait & Puget Sound
- Outcast (Guardians' League, Book 2)
- Raintree: Inferno (Silhouette Nocturne)
Books Index
Books Home
Recommended Books
- Noel Coward: A Biography of No L Coward
- Fallen Angels and the Origins of Evil: Why Church Fathers Suppressed the Book of Enoch and Its Start
- The Shadow of the Galilean: The Quest of the Historical Jesus in Narrative Form
- Tony Hillerman: The Leaphorn & Chee Novels: Skinwalkers, A Thief of Time, Coyote Waits
- A Working Stiff's Manifesto: A Memoir of Thirty Jobs I Quit, Nine That Fired Me, and Three I Can't R
- Biology, Sixth Edition
- Blood and Vengeance: One Family's Story of the War in Bosnia
- The Triumph of Nature: The Paintings of Helmut Ditsch
- This Land: A Guide to Central National Forests
- Watch and Warn
Out of Egypt: A Memoir
Kaaterskill Falls
Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez
Mr. Sammler's Planet (Penguin Classics)
The Centaur in the Garden (THE AMERICAS)
