Iliads Without Homer: the Renaissance Aftermath of the Trojan Legend in Italian Poetry (Ca 1400–1600)
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
ACTA UNIVERSITATIS UPSALIENSIS Studia Graeca Upsaliensia 22 THE TROJAN WARS and the Making of the Modern World edited by Adam J. Goldwyn ISSN: 0562-2743 ISBN: 978-91-554-9322-6 © 2015 Adam J. Goldwyn for selection and editorial matter; individual chapters, their contributors Distributed by Uppsala University Library, Box 510, 751 20 Uppsala, Sweden, [email protected] Acknowledgements his volume has its origins at a conference held at Uppsala University 13–16 TJune 2013, under the title “The Trojan Wars and the Making of the Modern World: Classical Reception Since Antiquity.” The conference was organized under the auspices of the Department of Linguistics and Philology and generously funded through a grant from the Marcus Wallenberg Foundation. The aim of the conference was to explore the global tradition of artistic representations of the Trojan War by ex- amining versions from a variety of periods, places, languages, and media, with particu- lar interest in more obscure, unexamined, and non-canonical accounts. We sought to understand how each of these works drew from the preceding tradition, and yet was also the unique product of its artistic, political, cultural, and aesthetic context and the vision of its creator (or creators). Not all papers that were presented at the conference are included in the present volume, though all of the contributors were in attendance. The first acknowledgement, therefore, goes to those who participated in the conference: the speakers, moderators, and the members of the academic community and general public who contributed to the fruitful discussions at the panels and during the course of the weekend. During the editing of the volume, a number of colleagues offered to act as anon- ymous peer reviewers, and each of the chapters and the volume as a whole are much better for it. Emilee Ruhland at North Dakota State University also deserves thanks for undertaking the time consuming process of formatting, proof reading, and copy editing each of the contributions. I would also like to thank the foundations cover- ing the printing costs: the Marcus Wallenberg Foundation and Kungliga Humanis- tiska Vetenskaps-Samfundet i Uppsala. Above all, special thanks goes to my former colleagues at Uppsala University: Ingela Nilsson, Professor of Greek and Byzantine Greek and the series editor for Studia Graeca Upsalensia, and the assistant editor Eric Cullhed, who was finishing his Ph.D. at the time. In addition to creating the wonderful environment at Uppsala and for providing much guidance and friendship during my time there and since, both were indispensable at every stage of this project, from draft- ing the original call for papers to overseeing the publication of the volume. Adam J. Goldwyn Fargo, North Dakota August 2015 v Content Acknowledgements . v Adam J. Goldwyn Introduction: “That men to come shall know of it”: Theorizing aesthetic innovation, heroic ideology, and political legitimacy in Trojan War reception . 1 Valentina Prosperi 1 Iliads without Homer: The Renaissance aftermath of the Trojan legend in Italian poetry (ca 1400–1600) . 15 Derek Pearsall 2 Chaucer’s Criseyde and Shakespeare’s Cressida: Transformations in the reception history of the Troy story . 35 Maura Giles-Watson 3 Tristis Orestes? The ecstasy of reception, revenge, and redemption in the Early Modern English Orestes plays . 51 Janek Kucharski 4 The Trojan origins of Polish tragedy . 67 Anastassiya Andrianova 5 Aeneas among the Cossacks: Eneïda in modern Ukraine . 91 Rui Carlos Fonseca 6 The Pindaric poetry of Cruz e Silva and the neoclassical revival among Lusitanian national heroes. 111 Barbara Witucki 7 Victor Hugo’s Trojan War . 129 Johanna Akujärvi 8 An epic battle: Aesthetic and poetic struggles over the Swedish Iliads . 161 vii viii The Trojan Wars Vasiliki Dimoula 9 Gender and nationalism in the Mediterranean avant-garde: The Trojan Wars of the Modernist Painter-Poets Giorgio de Chirico and Nikos Engonopoulos 185 Jennifer E. Michaels 10 The Trojan War as a warning for her time: Christa Wolf ’s depiction of feminism and the Cold War in her Cassandra project . .203 Johan Callens 11 The volatile value of suffering: Jan Ritsema’s Philoktetes Variations . 223 Adam J. Goldwyn 12 Achaeans, Athenians and Americans in the Post-9/11 era: Comparing empires in The New York Times . .245 Index. 259 Contributors . .267 Introduction “That men to come shall know of it” Theorizing aesthetic innovation, heroic ideology, and political legiti- macy in Trojan War reception Adam J. Goldwyn • n the climactic moment of The Iliad, Hector perceives the inevitability of his Ideath and, drawing his sword, makes one final charge at Achilles, that in his last moments he might, as he says to himself, do “some great deed, that men to come shall know of it.”1 Nearly 3,000 years after the earliest accounts of his fatal charge, Hector would no doubt be amazed to learn that not only do his imagined “men to come” still know of it, it has become one of the most widely depicted deeds in world literature. This volume examines some of the many forms Hector’s last stand and the other events of the Trojan War have taken since Homer’s epics were reintroduced to the West in the Renaissance and replaced (for the most part) the pseudo-chronicles of Dares the Phrygian and Dictys of Crete, both Late Antique forgeries which claimed their authors were eye-witnesses to the Trojan War and, as such, had been the source of most medi- eval accounts.2 Whether on the Elizabethan stage, in Modern Greek surrealist poetry or post-Soviet Ukrainian animated films, the Trojan War has endured as an extremely fruitful source of artistic production. Indeed, more accounts of the Trojan War are being produced today, and in more different genres, than at any time in history.3 Nor is the Trojan War simply a literary phenomenon: along with the literary, a parallel (and 1 Homer Iliad 22.305: μέγα ῥέξας τι καὶ ἐσσομένοισι πυθέσθαι. 2 In 1287, the Sicilian judge Guido delle Colonne expressed the common medieval antipathy to- wards Homer in his Historia Desctructionis Troiae: “Homer, of greatest authority among the Greeks in his day, turned the pure and simple truth of his story into deceiving paths, inventing many things which did not happen.” (Guido Pro.21, 32). Guido then contrasts this with “the true accounts of the reliable writers” Dictys the Greek and Dares the Phrygian, “who were at the time of the Trojan War continually present in their armies and were the most trustworthy reporters of those things which they saw” (Guido Pro.36, 41). Some three-hundred years later, the great English Renaissance writer Sir Philip Sidney came up with a different solution in his Defense of Poesy: “If the question be, for your own use and learning, whether it be better to have it set down as it should be, or as it was? then, cer- tainly is more doctrinable […] the feigned Aeneas in Virgil, than the right Aeneas in Dares Phrygius” (Sidney 119). 3 This is true of original adaptations based on Trojan War themes and of translations as well. For a history of Homeric translations, see Young 1998, esp. 149ff. for the second half of the 20th century. 1 2 Adam J. Goldwyn often interdiscursive) tradition appeared in the visual and plastic arts as well as music and, more recently, cinema. These works are all part of a long tradition of Trojan War artistic production that began in Classical Greece4 and, over the course of millennia, spread across the rest of the world. In his study of Homer in Imperial Greek literature, Lawrence Kim writes: “Throughout antiquity, the influence of Homer upon Greek literature and the authori- ty he exercised over Greek culture were tremendous, so much so that his sheer ubiquity has discouraged any large-scale attempt to chart his ancient reception.”5 This sentiment is echoed by Barbara Graziosi and Emily Greenwood in their introduction to Homer in the Twentieth Century, who write that “[l]eaving aside the rich cultural and linguistic diversity of Homeric receptions in any given century, even within a single language and cultural tradition it is impossible to write a total, truly representative history of Homer.”6 If this is the case for Greek antiquity and the twentieth century, it is no doubt even more true for the Trojan War in the post-medieval period, when the Trojan War as an artistic topos went global. This volume, then, seeks to present a selection of post-medieval representations of the Trojan War comprising both canonical and more obscure works to show the broad diversity of periods, places and genres in which such work was produced and the equally wide variation in literary and artistic interpreta- tion. Indeed, as the title of the volume suggests, it is for this reason that it is perhaps more accurate to speak of the “Trojan Wars” in plural rather than the “Trojan War” in singular, as every new artist working in this tradition cannot but simultaneously draw from and revise the essential elements of the narrative to suit his or, increasingly often in recent decades, her, own aesthetics and ideological positions. Simply identifying Homeric retellings and listing the ways in which Homer was appropriated by post-medieval writers, however, is but a first (if obviously necessary) step. The second more important step is to understand how and why these authors chose to re-tell Homer: what problems of authority and aesthetics, what political or 4 Some scholars suggest that the earliest written references to the Trojan War may be found in pre-Homeric Hittite sources. According to this view, the earliest written account is the Annals of the Hittite King Tudhaliya I/II.