Volume 50, Number 14 · September 25, 2003
A Tale of Two Iliads
By Christopher Benfey
BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS REVIEW
De l'Iliade
by Rachel Bespaloff
Meaux: Revue Conférence, 704 pp., 28e
On the Iliad
by Rachel Bespaloff, translated from the Frenchby Mary McCarthy, with an introduction by Hermann Broch
Pantheon/Bollingen, 126 pp. (1947; out of print)
Lettres à Jean Wahl, 1937–1947
by Rachel Bespaloff, edited by Monique Jutrin
Paris: Claire Paulhan, 192 pp., 24e
The Iliad or The Poem of Force
by Simone Weil, translated from the French by Mary McCarthy
Pendle Hill Pamphlets,39 pp. (1957; out of print)
The critic Kenneth Burke once suggested that literary works could serve as 'equipment for living,' by revealing familiar narrative patterns that would make sense of new and chaotic situations. If so, it should not surprise us that European readers in times of war should look to their first poem for guidance. As early as the fall of 1935, Jean Giraudoux's popular play La guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu encouraged his French audience to think of their country as vulnerable Troy while an armed and menacing Hitler was the 'Tiger at the Gates' (the play's English title). Truth was the first casualty of war, Giraudoux warned. 'Everyone, when there's war in the air,' his Andromache says, 'learns to live in a new element: falsehood.'
Review, 4761 words
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