Simone Weil was a brilliant French intellectual, political activist, and mystic who died at 34 in 1943. She was a freakishly precocious student who mastered ancient Greek by age 12 and went on to learn Sanskrit. She wrote the essay "The Iliad, or the Poem of Force" in 1939. It is hard, given her intense involvement in left-wing political causes, her Jewish background, and her service in the Spanish Civil War, to think that she was not reacting at least in part to the increasingly sinister political situation in Europe. This is a deeply emotional, non-scholarly response to the Iliad. Here is the opening of her essay (the whole essay is posted on UB Learns): "The true hero, the true subject, the centre of the Iliad, is
force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before
which man's flesh shrinks away. In this work at all times, the human
spirit is shown as modified by its relation to force, as swept away,
blinded, by the very force it imagined it could handle, as deformed by
the weight of the force it submits to." Whether you agree with her analysis or not, she captures vividly the relentlessness of the Iliad's unflinching contemplation of mortality.
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Salve Thetis. This is my translation.
Freely we abandon the fields for the praetor Afidius Luscus, the lauging rewards for the insane scribe, and the toga praetexta and the broad purple stripe and the chafting dish of hoar frost. Then we, weary, remain in Mamurrarae, we remain in the house with the eel offering, we remain in the kitchen with the fraud. Afterwards the very graceful night rises; for Plotius and Varius of Sinuessa and Vergil come here, their minds, the nature of which neither brighter the earth brought forth nor any other who may be more bound than me.
Salve Thetis. This is my translation.
Freely we abandon the fields for the praetor Afidius Luscus, the lauging rewards for the insane scribe, and the toga praetexta and the broad purple stripe and the chafting dish of hoar frost. Then we, weary, remain in Mamurrarae, we remain in the house with the eel offering, we remain in the kitchen with the fraud. Afterwards the very graceful night rises; for Plotius and Varius of Sinuessa and Vergil come here, their minds, the nature of which neither brighter the earth brought forth nor any other who may be more bound than me.
Salve Thetis. This is my translation.
Freely we abandon the fields for the praetor Afidius Luscus, the lauging rewards for the insane scribe, and the toga praetexta and the broad purple stripe and the chafting dish of hoar frost. Then we, weary, remain in Mamurrarae, we remain in the house with the eel offering, we remain in the kitchen with the fraud. Afterwards the very graceful night rises; for Plotius and Varius of Sinuessa and Vergil come here, their minds, the nature of which neither brighter the earth brought forth nor any other who may be more bound than me.
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