Who is daniel mendelsohn

He also received the Harold D. Daniel Mendelsohn official website. Send a message to up to three recipients. First email is required, the following two are optional. Memoirist, Critic, and Translator. Ecstasy and Terror. The Bad Boy of Athens. Cavafy: Collected Poems translator. Gender and the City in Euripides' Political Plays. Daniel Mendelsohn on Mary Renault. Reading from The Lost. Return Leave this field blank. In-Person Appearance Virtual Appearance.

Date of Event. Location of Event. Topics of interest. There was no genre that was necessarily better than any other, it was that certain qualities were important.

I take everything seriously. By the same token, if you want to be taken seriously then you have to step up to the plate. But if you claim seriousness for your work of popular culture—as Julie Taymor et al. Have you seen the new Planet of the Apes movie? This is the third in the newly rebooted series. He listened to everything, and I try to emulate that. Do you go to the movies a lot? Yeah, I always go to the movies.

Look at a bigger screen! Well, a slightly bigger screen. Years ago, I was gossiping with my agent about a date I had gone on with this guy who was a professor. He has a piano but no television, because he told me that at a certain point he had to decide whether he was going to have one or the other and he chose the piano.

Because this is our culture , you have to know it. And a lot of it is great. I did a piece for The New Yorker about five years ago, a roundup of classically themed recent novels, and one of them was a book I quite liked, The Lost Books of the Odyssey , by Zachary Mason. There were a series of chapters consisting of very clever riffs on Odyssean themes, very amusing. The Odyssey , for instance, gestures in this very weird postmodern way to parallel Odysseys, to other versions of itself and other epics: in it, there are banquets when bards start singing songs that are clearly riffs on the Iliad and Odyssey themselves.

They already thought of so much. What do you make of the more experimental translations of Greek and Latin classics emerging recently? Anne Carson is a fabulous example of the kind of thing that I think is so great, these creative adaptations of the classics—taking classical texts and massaging them in unexpected ways, like her Autobiography of Red.

And, as I never tire of saying, the Greeks themselves futzed around with their own mythic tradition in experimental ways. A lot of Greek tragedy is already experimental riffing on Homeric themes. Myth is plastic, not a set thing. This is the difference between the classical and the biblical traditions. There is no master text in the classics that cannot be touched.

Certainly, for example, the Iliad had great authority for the ancient Greeks—but people were always adapting episodes from it and rewriting them and so forth. What was your approach to translating Cavafy? What was most challenging about rendering his poems in English? Every translation is, to some extent, a reaction to previous translations. When I began my Cavafy translation, in the mids, there were relatively few English translations of the complete poems available this has changed by now.

The preeminent one was the Keeley-Sherrard version, published in the s. This marvelous translation had done so much to make Cavafy known in the Anglophone world—and, in particular, to make him known as a modern poet: the diction is crisp and plain, and one feels, reading this version, the presence of a poet very much of the twentieth century. So I went out of my way in my own rendering to bring those qualities to the surface again. As for approach, I suspect that, like many other translators, I vastly underestimated the challenges when I began.

If anything, I came to respect and admire what earlier translators had accomplished the more I worked on my own version.

As time passed and I abandoned some of the more strident or showy choices that had at first seemed attractive, I realized that some of the existing renderings had gotten things just right, and the impulse to do things differently just for the sake of novelty had to be resisted. A feature of my translation that very much played into my life as a critic and, so to speak, a public explainer of classical texts, is the extensive literary commentary that accompanies it, and preparing the commentary took an enormous amount of time and labor.

But his areas of historical interest lie largely outside of mine, in fact he has almost no interest in the High Classical period, Periclean Athens, Greek tragedy, and so forth, which have always been my scholarly focus , and so I had to spend years, literally, reeducating myself in order to prepare the notes on the poems set in the Hellenistic and Roman and Late Antique and Byzantine periods—to say nothing of the contemporary poems, which required a different kind of preparation.

But it was worth it in the end, and I like to think that the commentary offers readers a useful way into the poems. I was startled, when some of the UK reviews of the translation came out, that a few critics felt that Cavafy is too recent to require a commentary. Daily Newspaper reviewer? Well, you choose your writers and your writers choose you.

In my own work, both my criticism and narrative nonfiction, I am interested in time and memory and particularly in the tension that can arise between history by which I mean, oral or written narratives of events in the past and memory, and in which traces and memories of prior civilizations and earlier lives haunt the present.

These are large themes in Cavafy. How are you and your father like-minded, and how are you not? To some extent, I think a great inheritance from my father is a kind of taste for rigor, intellectually. I think I have ended up being very much like him. But look, I discovered some surprising things about my father while we were traveling together—and I should say, parenthetically, that we traveled together very often in the last six or seven years of his life; the Odyssey cruise was just one adventure.

But then, in the last six or seven years of his life, I started taking him everywhere with me—when I had professional obligations, literary festivals, book tours, whatever.

We had many adventures. We traveled a lot, and so we talked a lot, and one thing I learned—and this is a major part of my new book—is that my father was a lot more feeling, as a person, than I had ever given him credit for when I was young. And at the end of the book you find out why, and it was actually a very touching, very sentimental reason. Did the seminar, the trip, and the process of writing the book itself shift your conception of how like-minded you two were?

It certainly shifted my impression of my father, all the things I learned about him. My brother Eric, a filmmaker, always talks about that line. This is a great obsession of Henry Green, whom I like a lot; I was so happy to have an opportunity to write about him recently, in an introduction to one of those NYRB reissues of some of his work.

In my Holocaust book I was trying to know something about these people, my murdered relatives in Poland, who just disappeared off the face of the earth. And I wanted to know just what could be known about them—not in some general, statistical way but what specifics could be known, seventy years later? What do I really know about my father?

For instance, I was very impatient all semester because I felt my father had made no effort to get to know the students. He would sit in the same corner every day and rarely refer to them by name in class discussion.

Only at the end of the course did I realize that, in fact, he had relationships with many of these students and was talking with them and coaching them and mentoring them, sort of behind my back.

I had no idea. This leads me to the next fascination of mine. As narrators, because we have our own mentalities and preoccupations and tastes and values, we are often prevented from seeing things that others see. This is also a Proustian issue, but it starts in the Odyssey. For example, we all know how Odysseus defeats the huge hulking cyclops, by virtue of some very sophisticated trickery.

At the end of the episode, the cyclops admits to being surprised that he was defeated by a puny little guy. I had certain notions of my father that were exploded during the course of this seminar and the cruise, and also in his illness and death.

That was certainly no different in the case of my father than it was in the case of my students. I learned a lot about him through his reactions to the text, what they revealed about him not as a reader but as a person. Our tastes as readers are deeply shaped by experiences and tastes which seem to have nothing to do with literature but do in fact make themselves secretly felt in funny ways.

The book is not only about fathers and sons, but about teachers and students, about what it means to be a teacher—about parenting as a kind of allegory of teaching, or maybe vice versa. On the one hand, you have to keep them on the straight and narrow, so to speak, have to impart the facts, the stuff, the knowledge. And that also goes for interpretations. It was a really interesting idea.

For instance, Odysseus recalls meeting a hideous, cannibalistic trio of royals, a princess and her parents, an episode that is like a nightmare version of his visit with the charming princess Nausikaa and her parents.

I had my own ideas about this part of the text, but they had just come to a conclusion which was totally opposite to the conclusion that I had been led to when I was a student. Not in some slavish way, but to resemble you somehow, right? Interestingly, this business of resemblances as proof of filiation is a great anxiety of the Odyssey.

Is Telemachus really the son of Odysseus, the young man wonders glumly. Does it mean you look like them? Do you think like them? How do you prove it? These are great Odyssean issues and believe me, they work themselves out in the classroom, too. One young woman who was really smart, very even-tempered, very well-spoken, and who wrote a brilliant classics thesis went on to become a speech therapist; I was convinced that she was going to go to grad school in classics.

Whereas Jack, the class wise guy, became a classics major. Teachers, like parents, can bring their young only so far, and then they do their own thing. Given these parallelisms between teaching and parenting, it was so great, so overdetermined in a way, to be teaching a class in which my parent was also my student. Have you written any fiction since your dad responded to that story you placed on his desk when you were fourteen with an offhand comment about the impossibility of perfect love?

Did you have ambitions to write fiction and that comment maybe steered you in a different direction? Subconsciously, maybe it fried my wires or something. I wrote a lot of fiction when I was a teenager, which was all very crude wish-fulfillment, as I think beginning fiction is, and lots and lots of very bad poetry.

All of my short stories were about dark-haired, brooding Long Island boys who met cute, blond, British lords on ocean cruises and then everyone died of a terrible disease. Or the boat sank, or whatever. I doubt all this would pose much of a challenge for a psychoanalyst.

If one were doing a psychoanalytical reading of my work, as you are doing by asking this question, one might say that maybe my insistence on being a nonfiction writer and a classicist and a critic—that my insistence on rejecting fiction—was a way of trying to please my father.

That said, the sad fact is I could never write fiction because I could never make up a story. I could never make up a plot, if I tried for a thousand years. Has your family read the book? Are your boys old enough to read it? Peter is going to be a senior in college this fall. Thomas is going to be a senior in high school and is brilliant with his hands and a genius at every sport he picks up. Who knows? My sister read it. Every child has a different set of parents.

You always have different relationships to your parents than your siblings do. I know from past experience that people remember things differently in families. That to me is so interesting. We have different memories of what he was like when he was ill, because I was seeing him almost every day, and she was seeing him a few times a month.