Group Read: August: Myths Told and Retold

I think of myths as stories that persist over time and become touchstones. We tell and retell myths, and they often have a strong oral history.

This reading will be focused on examining different tellings or retellings, and exploring what makes these stories persist: What is it in these stories that touches us across years and often cultures? What is changed in the retellings to make the myths more "modern"?

There are an enormous number of possible works. Copying from some posts on other threads, here are some contemporary retellings of older myths:

"Canongate, the publisher of Atwood's Penelopiad has a whole myth series going on right now. I think, the publisher commissions different authors of note to write a revionsist myth. Jeannette Winterson's Weight covers the myth of Atlas; Alessandro Barrico's An Illiad just came out a about two months ago; others in the series include The Helmet of Horror mentioned by avaland, Lion's Honey by David Grossman, Dream Angus by Alexander McCall Smith, and The People of the Sea by David Thomson. There may be others, but these are the ones about which I know.

Outside the Canongate series, there's Lavinia by Ursula Le Guin. Her retelling of The Aeneid is fabulous, but then I'm a big fan of Le Guin. Christina Woolf's Cassandra is good as is Ursula Molinaro's retelling of the same story. Ellen Scott Kushner has written a lovely version of Thomas the Rhymer. I don't particularly care for her other books, but this one is well worth the time to read.
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To urania1 excellent suggestions, I would add Homer's daughter by Robert Graves, which tells the myth of Odysseus from Nausicaa's point of view and, for whom can read Italian (I don't think it has been translated into English), the excellent Penelope (wrong touchstone) by Silvana La Spina."

A few I would add to the above list: Thomas Mann's The Transposed Heads; Derek Walcott's Omeros; The Tale of the Four Dervishes; Mahfouz's Arabian Nights and Days; John Gardner's Grendel; Par Lagerkvist'sBarrabas; Ibsen's Peer Gynt; all the various tellings of Faustus, whether by Marlowe, Goethe, Mann or others; please add more.

You also could explore older tellings or retellings of major myths; I will add a separate post later detailing some possible choices there.

Atwood's Penelopiad is on my shelf........I think I will choose that one! I love these group reads for many reasons, one of which is it helps with selections from the tumbling piles of TBR!

There's no end to a list of mythologies, but here are a few major mythologies that have been told and retold in many forms:

Indian Mythology: probably the biggest sources are The Mahabharata and the Panchatantra; these have become sources throughout Southeast Asia as well, told and retold in many languages

Persian Mythology: the Shahnameh collects many of the stories, including the Rostam stories and the stories based on Alexander the Great.

Hebrew and Christian Mythologies: of course, there are many great Biblical stories, some of which are closely related to other sources (such as the Flood in Gilgamesh and Sumerian mythology).

Arabic Mythology: the legends summarized in the 1001 Nights may be the biggest and most easily accessed source, retold over and over again in many forms.

Celtic, Germanic, Romantic Mythology: there is the Tain, the Sagas, Beowulf, the Niebelungenlied, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Tristan and Iseult, Robin Hood, Legend of King Arthur, The Cid, Roland and many of the other stories of Medieval and Early Modern Europe. There are also interesting later mythologies that were consciously created as such, like William Blake's mythologies, or the Narnia series.

Maybe someone with more knowledge than I can talk about major mythologies for Japan, China, Russia, Africa, Native Americans, and others.

OK, forgot the Roman's and Greeks. Some of the major works are themselves a bit of retellings: Ovid's Metamorphoses and Hesiod's Theogony, as well as the Illiad, Odyssey and Aeneid, are all summaries of mythologies or stories incorporating mythologies.

But, in all cases, there are many other sources as well.

Ranko Marinkovic's Kiklop (Cyclops, 1965) isn't a straightforward retelling of a single myth, but it's been described as a "mythological crossword", with the Odysseian Cyclops figuring importantly in the main hero's subconscious.

It's an excellent book, a classic, I'm sorry to see it doesn't appear to have been translated into English.

Greek and Roman mythology are variously utilised in tons of Croatian and neighbouring literature, it's an embarrassment of riches. Maybe I'll post more later... Of course, local folk and national myths dominate even more...

Vesna Krmpotić is probably unique in her immersion in and consistent application of Egyptian and Indian mythology and philosophy in her books : The diamond pharaoh, Bhagavatar, The mountain above the clouds etc. (Seventy-five published books, apparently none available in English.)

Vladimir Nazor, older than both preceeding writers, started out with a book on/of Slavic legends and myths and wrote many mythological stories and fairy tales (a personal favourite, as far as his oeuvre is concerned), Veli Jože, about the Istrian fight against Venice, with Istra personified as the giant Jože, who rose up from inanimate rocks and trees; Stoimena, about a magical woman with a hundred names who defeats her would-be foreign conqueror; Medvjed Brundo, Gospa od snijega (Snow lady, one of the most beautiful stories I ever read) etc.

He also wrote a myth-flavoured romantic epic, Utva zlatokrila (a Croatian mythological bird, gold-winged somethingy), and a ton of Biblical epics... Oh, when it comes to the Bible, there's no stopping. :)

Also worth mentioning is C.S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces which is a retelling of the Greek Myth of Psyche and a very good book as well.

I have the Penguin Epics boxed set, which provides plenty of material for this. See here.

I think I'm going to tackle a section of the Mahabharata and a couple of retellings of the stories -- at least one by Kalidasa and one more contemporary. Since Kalidasa is writing plays, this will be three or so shorter readings.

I just remembered my favourite collection of Croatian fairy tales, a bit short on fairies, actually, but filled with other kinds of magical creatures, Ivana Brlic-Mazuranic's Priče iz davnine, Stories from ancient times ("Croatian tales from long ago", in English translation). Again, not a mere retelling, but you encounter many figures of the mythological Slavic pantheon. I would avoid the recent animation of these stories, though. It was a collaborative international project, and most of the foreign teams, IMO, did a very bad job. Then again, I grew up with the imagery of the classic illustrations... Just imagine Tenniel's Alice redrawn by Matt Groening!

I B-M was from a distinguished family, the granddaughter of poet and ban Ivan Mazuranic (his most famous retold myth is "Judita", about Judith and Holofernes), and more than a century later still the most beloved chidlren's author in Croatia. It's a great pity to think she killed herself...

I just received a new book in the mail: Medusa: The Fourth Kingdom by Marina Minghelli. She's Italian. Her book juxtaposes two stories: Medusa as an innocent young girl before she became a mythological character and that of a modern Italian women attracted to a man incapable of emotional intimacy. Each story informs the other. I started reading the book tonight. Thus far I'm really impressed. The translation is beautiful, the language and imagery evocative and lyrical - not easy when one translates from Italian, which naturally dances off the tongue, to English, which sounds positively gutteral in comparison. I do love the English language (it's my first), but it just doesn't dance as easily as some languages (although it dances much better than others).

urania1, who is the translator? The best ones, in my opinion, are William Weaver and Stephen Sartarelli.
I confess I had never heard of Marina Minghelli. I will have to look into it.
Since you like Italian writers, I strongly recommend Silvana La Spina, whom I mentioned already. Her prose is beautiful (in Italian), and the plots interesting. Hopefully, she ahs been translated into English.

I was just thinking a bit this morning, and a lot of the stories we're going to read have made their way into other arts, whether music, painting, or sculpture. If anyone wants to post or link to illustrations or point out artistic or musical interpretations of the works they're focused on, I would find those interesting.

Here's an example - an exhibit at a museum that focuses entirely on the artistic depiction of one myth over time, the love story of Manjun and Layla: http://www.artmuseums.harvard.edu/exhibitions/sackler/madness.html

I think I might read some African Folktales/myths. I did read the epic of Son jata last summer, could always do a reread of that.

Morgan LLwelyn writes a lot about Irish myths in her books. And Mercedes Lackey has a whole series called The 500 Kingdoms in which she retells many of the fairy tales/myths that we all grew up with as children.

I might re-read Anubis: a desert novel by Ibrahim al-Koni. It is based on the Tuareg myth of Anubi (based on the Egyptian God Anubis). I read it a few months ago but didn't do my homework on Anubi, so didn't get as much out of it as I had hoped for.

I may also try to re-read Live from Golgotha by Gore Vidal or The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by Jose Saramago. They are both very different re-imaginings of biblical stories that I enjoyed very much, but haven't read in a while.

Dan Simmons has a number of myths retold:

Hyperion 2257 copies, 27 reviews
The fall of Hyperion 1765 copies, 18 reviews
Ilium 1292 copies, 24 reviews
Endymion 1275 copies, 8 reviews
The rise of Endymion 1117 copies, 8 reviews
Olympos 897 copies, 18 reviews

Hyperion is vaguley bsed on the Titans myth, with a tip of the hat to John Keats. Endymion furthers the story, mostly science fiction.

Ilium and Olympos are based on the Homeric myths with some space and time travel.

One of the works I have enjoyed teaching the most is Euripides’ Medea. Her story fascinates me for several reasons: my students’ reactions to the play and the character herself. I’ve noticed that people always respond more angrily when mothers kill their children than when fathers do the same. My students generally feel no sympathy for her. They don’t want to understand her plight or her rage. So, I've decided to read Christa Wolf's Medea: A Modern Retelling.

P.S. Can somebody tell me how to upload an image into my message?

Another book which might fit well is Kissing the Witch.

#17> urania1, very interesting point. My son, who is 14, is presently reading Medea. Amazingly, he is seeing her rage and the reason why she kills her children. I must say that, when we had a conversation about it, I was impressed as I myself have always had problems in coming to terms with it.

>12 A_musing: ...a lot of the stories we're going to read have made their way into other arts, whether music, painting, or sculpture.

The Hindu epic in which Prince Rama recovers his kidnapped wife, Sita, infuses Thai culture to an astonishing extent, e.g. 'The Ramakian (Ramayana): Mural Paintings along the Galleries of the Temple of the Emerald Buddha', printed for the third time in 1995 in Thai, French, and English by the Thai Lottery Bureau.

Two other interesting takes on the Medea story are the play Medee by Jean Anouihl and Jason and Medeia by John Gardner.

>19 aluvalibri: aluvalibri, your son must be pretty cool. I'm always struck by the long speech Medea gives about the injustices women experience in a male-dominated culture. This speech was used as a rallying cry for women involved with the British women's suffrage movement.

>15 GlebtheDancer: depressaholic, your mention of biblical tales jogged my memory. Timothy Findley, an Australian writer, has done a magnificent retelling of the Noah story entitled Not Wanted on the Voyage. The humor is dark, very dark. Mark Twain's The Diaries of Adam and Eve are wonderfully funny. The two diaries narrate Adam's and Eve's perspective on the events that occur and are still apt descriptions of gender relations (sigh). If your tastes run to delightful nonsense, I also recommend Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal. It's not what I'd call an A-list book, but it is great for a giggle. The same is true for Good Omens, Gaiman and Pratchet's retelling of Revelations.

I really need to go through my library. Revisions/retellings of myths and fairy tales fascinate me. If someone want to hit several works at one time, read Chimera by John Barth. He hits the Thousand and One Nights, the story of Perseus, and the tale of Bellerophon, who tamed the winged horse Pegasus. For those interested in young adult fiction, Beauty and Rose Daughter both by Robin McKinley. She has also revisited Donkey Skin in Deer Skin - a bleak retelling. Her book Spindle's End redoes Sleeping Beauty. Thank god. That story needed to be redone. A Door in the Hedge is a story collection that retells several fairy stories. She's won the Newbery Award. One of books was a Newbery Honor Book and a lot of other awards as well.

#22, urania1, and speaking of retellings of fairy tales, what about The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter?
The part I like the most in the story that gives the book its title, and which is obviously a retelling of Bluebeard, is the fact that the girl is saved by her mother, and not by her brothers as in the original.
All the stories in the book are excellent, I think.

>23 aluvalibri: aluvalibri, there you go again, picking out my favorite books. I adore Angela's Carter's work, The Bloody Chamber in particular, Have you seen the movie The Company of Wolves for which she wrote the screen play. Apart from the special effects, which look a bit dated now, the film still works. I love the message: "Ah, yes maidens, you may stray from the path and find a version of yourself you never envisioned existing." My favorite Angela Carter short story is "The Tiger's Bride." I love the ending. It's so lush, sensuous, erotic, and utterly freeing. The only work of Carter's that I don't really care for is Love.

I believe that Timothy Findley is Canadian. His books was also done as a play a number of years ago in Toronto.

#23, 24: I just read The Bloody Chamber a few days ago and *loved* it! I ordered three of Carter's novels right after finishing it. My favorite story in the collection was "Wolf-Alice."

>25 torontoc: torontoc, thanks for the correction. You're quite right. Findley is or was Canadian. I don't know where I got the idea that he was Australian. Talk about being in the wrong hemisphere. For some reason, I think I had him confused with Peter Carey. I rather liked his novel Oscar and Lucinda, but I had both Carey and Findley associated with some writer (Australian, I think) who wrote a dystopian novel that bored me so much I never progressed beyond the first fifty pages. And this from a woman who seldom meets a dystopian novel she doesn't like. Undoubtedly, it's my cheerful optimism that draws me to such pieces. At any rate, the unknown and unwanted dystopian novel possibly by an Australian passed on to the friends of the library sale. Now, I'm insatiably curious about the author and the book. I just spent 30 minutes trying to track down this unknown writer. If anyone knows of a dystopian novel, possibly by an Austrialian and definitely by a man, please send the titles on. I won't sleep until I've tracked it down. To make a short story even longer ( I never adhered to the "brevity is the soul of wit" axiom), having confused the possibly Australian unknown with both Carey and Findley, I dismissed them both as one-hit wonders. Now I see I must revisit the scene of my error and read more deeply.

Timothy Findley died in June 2002, and had been living in France. I went to a book signing in 1999 for Pilgrim in New York.

ooh -- this is a topic close to my heart -- I've been a devotee of myth for as long as I can remember. Oddly enough, I've just finished reading Not Wanted on the Voyage, and I have to agree with urania1 (22) that it is dark, but it is also very funny and touching.

Here a few other retellings that I don't think have been mentioned yet:

Classical:

Homero Aridjis's Persephone (still tbr)
Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red -- Geryon and Hercules (I've just started to read this one)
H.D.'s Helen in Egypt- a look at the alternate tale of Helen which claims she spent the Trojan War in Egypt, and H.D.'s meditation on the relation of Eros/Eris/Ares.
Marion Zimmer Bradley's Firebrand about Cassandra
Christine Brooks-Rose's Amalgememnon -- with another bow to Cassandra (on my tbr list)
Nikos Kazantzakis's The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel
Mark Melis's An Arrow's Flight -- an updated telling of the story of Pyrrhus/Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles (also tbr)
Carol Orlock's The Goddess Letters: The Myth of Demeter and Persephone Retold -- exactly what it says it is
Mary Renault's The King Must Die (Theseus) and Bull from the Sea
Marguerite Yourcenar 's Fires -- 9 monologues/stories based on Greek myth

And a few more from other venues:

BIBLICAL:

King Jesus by Robert Graves
The Last Temptation of Christ by Nikos Kazantzakis
The Man Who Died by D.H. Lawrence
Moses, Man of the Mountain by Zora Neale Hurston

CELTIC:

The Children of Llyr series by Evangeline Walton
and tons of Arthurian retellings!

MISC:

The Popul Vuh Mayan myth translated by Dennis Tedlock
Eaters of the dead: The manuscript of Ibn Fadlan, relating his experiences with the Northmen in A.D. 922 by Michael Crichton -- this is vaguely related to the Beowulf epic as I recall
The Red Swan: Myths and Tales of the American Indians and The Hungry Woman: Myths and Legends of the Aztecs both translated by John Bierhorst

# 1

It looks like we've lost some Touchstones, like Weight: Atlas and Heracles by Jeanette Winterson. The Canongate 'The Myths' series (9 books so far) is at: http://www.librarything.com/series/The+Myths

"Weight" was very good.

This is the list of "The Myths":

Order
A Short History of Myth by Karen Armstrong 1
The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus by Margaret Atwood 2
Weight: Atlas and Heracles by Jeanette Winterson 3
Lion's honey : the myth of Samson by David Grossman 4
The helmet of horror : the myth of Theseus and the minotaur by Victor Pelevin 5
Dream Angus : the Celtic god of dreams by Alexander McCall Smith 6
Girl Meets Boy: The Myth of Iphis (Canongate Myths) by Ali Smith 7
Binu and the Great Wall: The Myth of Meng (Canongate Myths) by Su Tong 8
Where Three Roads Meet: The Myth of Oedipus (Canongate Myths) by Salley Vickers 9

This theme read sounds fascinating! August will be a busy month for me since school will start, but I hope that I'm able to participate. Binu and the Great Wall by Su Tong, a retelling of an old Chinese myth, has been sitting on my TBR pile for a few months now. Hopefully I will get to read that and a few more of the intriguing titles mentioned here. I'm particularly interested in Till We Have Faces. I had never heard of it before this thread, but it sounds fascinating.

Incidentally, I hated The Penelopiad. I am usually a big Margaret Atwood fan and I understand that most people like that book, but I found it strangely dull. I felt like the satire didn't communicate anything I didn't already know about the status of women in ancient myth or our own gossip-hungry society.

Gulp. Deep breath...........I think I'll forge ahead with The Penelopiad, but thanks for the heads up, cestovatela!

I loved The Penelopiad ... in fact it got me back into reading Margaret Atwood after several years away!

I've just read a book which I hadn't realised was a retelling of a myth until I got to the end of it and did a bit of googling (it's a Chinese book, retelling a Chinese myth). It's called The Moon Opera by Bi Feiyu and I think would fit perfectly for this challenge.

I've just been trawling through lists of old IMPAC shortlisted books (thanks, Avaland, for suggesting another source of desired books...) and Oceans of Time looks as if it might fit this bill - the blurb says:

"It is midsummer in Norway. A long-divorced couple, Johan and Judith, meet one another again in the wake of a family tragedy. Finally they are forced to confront what went wrong in their relationship and the effect it has had on those around them. In the extraordinary psychological drama that follows, Johan and Judith plumb the very depths of sorrow and despair, before emerging with a new understanding.

Set in the 'white night' of a Norwegian summer, this profound novel, which draws on the myth of Persephone and on Mozart's The Magic Flute, not only deals with loss and grief, but also - transformingly - with hope, recovery and love."

Started reading Bertolt Brecht's Caucasian Chalk Circle last night, not realizing it would be perfect for this read. A modern retelling of an old Chinese tale, but recast in the Caucuses during the Soviet period.

A-musing, Caucasian Chalk Circle if my favourite among Bertolt Brecht's works.

Mine too -- I've been a devotee of Brecht since my undergraduate days when I did my senior thesis on Brecht. Interesting how he's so influenced by Biblical myths (in this case Solomon's decision on the disputed child) despite his avowed communism. And his first play is entitled "Die Bibel" (The Bible) ? and his first success was Baal -- a play celebrating (?) the fertility god with which the Hebrews were in continual rivalry.

I also love Yeats' revisioned myths in his plays (Eleven Plays of William Butler Yeats)especially "Deirdre" (Synge's is also wonderful), "The Only Jealousy of Emer," "The Death of Cuchulainn," and ""Cathleen ni Houlihan." I'm not sure if my affinity for Irish myths is because the Vikings settled Dublin or because I married a proclaimed Irishman -- though he's multi-generational American. Actually, I think it's because I'm an unrepentant pagan.

#39
I think that is what is interesting about the sort of myths this thread was designed to cover. They are not 'christian' or 'pagan' or 'Irish' per se (though their most familiar examples might be), but persistent ideas (perhaps memes?) that re-emerge and are retold within different time frames and cultures, but that still address universal human themes. It might be interesting to try to elucidate some of these deeper themes as we read in this thread.

Welcome to August 1!

My reading on this subject has been in flux. I still plan to read some Kalidasa retellings of stories from the Mahabharata, but I'm also almost done with Brecht's Caucasian Chalk Circle. Kalidasa is often thought of as the greatest of Sanskrit dramatists, writing during Europe's early middle ages. Much of his material comes from the Sanskrit classics, such as the Mahabharata, written many a good millenium and then some earlier. Brecht, of course, is writing as a 20th century Marxist; he retells an ancient Chinese myth. Both readings are plays, so they are dramatizations intended for performance.

I will post some detailed thoughts on Brecht's when I'm done, likely over the weekend, but maybe I'll just start with the general observation that Brecht is very self-consciously using myths to make a contemporary social statement, and doing wildly radical surgery on the retelling, where my impression from just scanning my collection of Kalidasa plays is that he is more interested in the retelling per se, and his surgery is intentionally less radical. It is more a celebration of the original.

I've read several revisionist myths in the last month or so: Boy Meets Girl: The Myth of Iphis by Ali Smith, Christa Wolf's Medea, Lavinia by Ursula LeGuin, Homer's Daughter by Robert Graves, and Medusa: The Fourth Kingdom by Marina Minghelli. I'll post reviews when I regain my ability to be articulate. I think I'm suffering from a wicked fairy godmother curse. However, I will say this. If you're chomping at the bit, your fingers poised above the "add to basket icon," eagerly anticipating the moment when Boy Meets Girl will be yours, STOP. It's not worth the money for this decidedly inferior piece. If you feel that your life won't be complete until you've read a reworking of the myth of Iphis, read John Lyly's 16th-century drama Galathea. It's much more interesting, particularly when one considers that it was written for the Children of Saint Paul's - a 16th century drama company composed of young boys. Were this play to be put on today with pre-pubescent boys as the actors, the drama teacher would not long have a job.

I've settled on my copy from Mt TBR of Tolkien's translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight followed by Iris Murdoch's The Green Knight.

I won't be starting them till later in the month as I have a couple of other group read committments before then.

I'll be reading and appreciating everyone's comments until then.

I finished Medea by Christa Wolf last night. Urania1 -- I'm really interested in what you thought about it. I was somewhat disappointed, but that may be partly because I have such high expectations for Wolf.

In MEDEA, Christa Wolf revisions the tale of Medea in a series of narrations with six voices: Medea; Jason; Glauce, the Corinthian princess; Agameda, Medea's jealous former student; Akamas, King Creon's first astronomer; and Leukon, King Creon's second astronomer. The revisioning is most successful on the level that it reflects and calls to mind current political situtations and practices: the use of propaganda, the "big lie," the scapegoating of immigrant populations, and the inevitable struggles to retain power despite all costs.

However, on the level of character development, the novel is disappointing. Wolf, who has written marvelously complex characters in PATTERNS OF CHILDHOOD, THE QUEST FOR CHRISTA T, and ACCIDENT: A DAY'S NEWS, here falls back on stereotypes. Jason is a blustery, somewhat bewildered, adventurer trying to carve out a place in society for himself. Akamas is the ultimate political schemer and operative, reminiscent, perhaps, of Dick Cheney. Although Glauce suffers, not only from epilepsy, but a childhood trauma , she is a simpleton; and Agameda is simply spiteful. Leukon's is the most interesting voice; he has fallen in love with Arethusa, a Cretan gem-cutter and Medea's friend. While he admires the women's independent spirits, he despairs over their inability to understand the fatal challenge they present to the Corinthians' sense of stability. He can do nothing but watch the disaster unfold.

And what of Medea herself? Medea is one of the most fascinating figures in classical mythology and literature -- a Colchian princess, granddaughter of the sun god Helios and Circe's niece, a sorceress who deserts her homeland and family to help Jason retrieve the golden fleece and avenge himself against his uncle, only to be abandoned and betrayed by him in Corinth. Did she murder her brother to help Jason escape from Colchis? Did she murder her young rival? Did she slay her children to avenge herself or save them from a worse fate? Wolf will have none of this -- her Medea is innocent of everything except a residual guilt for leading her countrymen away from Colchis into an environment that increasingly becomes threatening. She is an oddly modern woman claiming an independent spirit, but lacks emotional or intellectual depth. She plays at being a political dissident, a psychologist, a detective -- but ultimately Wolf's Medea is unsatisfying -- the mysterious enigma has been flattened.

Can't get the touchstone to behave -- the loading for alternative Medeas just freezes, sorry.

I have finished the Caucasian Chalk Circle. The fundamental myth of the Chalk Circle is a variation on the wisdom of Solomon: a judge chooses the mother of a child based on which of two women pulls the child from a chalk circle (the mother being the one who fails to do so, being unwilling to cause the child pain). But the myth is buried under a morass of other stories, stories of judges, wars, rulers, property disputes, what have you, and used as a sort of comic resolution to a raft of conflicts. Brecht's writing is filled with fun and irony; he's having a great time, and he's poking fun at absolutely everything, including the myth itself.

This is not the retelling of a profound myth in all its grandeur, but a short celebration of the joy of storytelling itself. I did find the prose (and often poetry) occassionally awkward and stiff, inappropriately so for its subject matter, but it is hard to tell whether that is the translation.

Reading Jane's above, it strikes me that a danger in retelling a myth is oversimplifying or trivializing it. By taking a comic approach, Brecht makes the trivialization fun; by mixing multiple rather simple myths, he creates enough interaction among the stories to keep it interesting.

As a some-time fan of Wolf, I find the review of Medea disheartening. I haven't picked her up in 20 years, but remember what I read back then as wonderful. I guess this won't be my revisiting of her work.

Oh, A_musing, I hate to dishearten you. Maybe I've just read too many feminist retellings of myths that verge on the polemical. Once upon a time, I found them thrilling.

Brecht was pretty polemical by turns - and it did get in the way sometimes. But he used enough humor and enough ambiguity to avoid the big risk of the overly polemical - boredom.

You're right, Brecht is polemical AND funny. His use of misdirection is also fairly brilliant.

Probably the most intriguing retelling of Greek myth I've yet read is H.D.'s Helen in Egypt. The poetry is dense but gorgeous, and she really is examining the connection and conflict between eroticism and violence. Just a brief taste:

Is there another stronger than Love’s mother?
is there one other, Discordia, Strife?
Eris is sister of Ares,

His unconquerable child is Eros;
did Ares bequeath his arrows
alike to Eros, to Eris?

O flame-tipped, O searing, O tearing
burning, destructible fury
of the challenge to the fairest;

O flame-tipped, O searing,
destroying arrow of Eros;
O bliss of the end,

Lethe, Death and forgetfulness,
O bliss of the final
unquestioned nuptial kiss.

The Penelopiad i own..and love

i read an interesting novel recently...Mortal Love by Elizabeth Hand..that deals with the legend of Tristan & Iseult...various myths of creation/creativity/eternal love...it can be a bit over-wrought (the novel) but does a good job tracing the attitude toward Artistic Inspiration down through the years/decades/centuries

janeajones,

Thanks for posting the the brief section of H.D.'s poem. It's lovely. Your posting made me realize that I need to go back and reexamine her poetry. But then many of the different versions of Helen's story are interesting. I love the section in Homer's Odyssey where Penelope in referencing Helen says,

" . . . . I armed myself
long ago against the frauds of men,
imposters who might come - and all those many
whose underhanded ways bring evil on!
Helen of Argos, daughter of Zeus and Leda,
would she have joined the stranger, lain with him,
if she had known her destiny? known the Akhaians
in arms would bring her back to her own country" (23.16-24).

The fact that Penelope, a woman, defends Helen is striking in light of the unfavorable depictions of Helen offered up by the men in the poem. It is one of the many ruptures that make the work so interesting.

Vis a vis poetry, another interesting myth retold is Christopher Marlowe's Hero and Leander. The poetry is lush although the poem itself is quite disturbing. I used to tell my students that it provides a perfect example of the rationale used to justify date rape, although the term itself is anachronistic when applied to the 16th century. The most chilling part of the poem are the lines "Love is not full of pity (as men say) / But deaf and cruel where he means to prey." I highly recommend this work. Marlowe deftly adopts the Ovidian style, with its sensual imagery to create a striking gorgeous poem. And on the topic of Hero and Leander, I notice that Touchstones is registering this as yet another retelling with which I'm not familiar: Milorad Pavic's The Inner Side of the Wind, or The Novel of Hero and Leander. It sounds interesting. Has anyone read it?

janeajones, vis a vis your comment #44, I agree that Wolf's characters are less well-rounded than they might be; nevertheless I did enjoy the book. I do think it would have been a more interesting piece had Wolf explored Medea, not as an innocent woman, but as a woman capable of murdering her brother and her children. Culturally, we have a much harder time with women who kill their children than with men who kill their children. I think feminism that puts women on a pedestal is dangerous. That same pedestal has also been used to justify restricting women to the private sphere lest their moral superiority be sullied by contact with the outside world.

Ah, my old friend Chrissy Marlowe, one of the great reteller of myths out there.

Marlowe's writing has always struck me as particular eternal and timeless, focused on huge and fundamental themes instead of the day to day little tensions. Who but he could resurrect one of the most persistent myths, that of Faustus, from the dying medieval days for the benefit of the modern world?

When you look at the speech from Penelope that you've pulled from the Odyssey, I think we see part of what makes some of these myths so persistent. Characters are iconic and representative, which in the hands of many authors can flatten them out. At the same time, they represent more than themselves (e.g., "Women"), and are not the complex but inscrutable characters of the modernist world most of us grew up in. One person's icon becomes another's simplistic stereotype, so for much of the twentieth century we avoided them both, and the icons were all sooo complex.

The characters in Brecht were FLAT. But the story and the humor brought home the mythic dimensions. And I go back to something like the Odyssey, and it's not so full of deep characterizations, but does let the story and plot carry it much more.

I've also begun Kalidasa's "The Recognition of Sakuntala" (in a nice Penguin collection The Loom of Time). Sakuntala is viewed in Indian mythology as the ultimate mother of the Lunar dynasty (and, in a manner, of India itself), and this is a love story about her and King Duhsanta, his marriage, rejection, and reunion with her. Kalidasa draws the story immediately from the first book of the Mahabrahata.

As I get into it, I will post a bit more about the differences between the story told by Kalidasa and the Mahabrahata story. But one of my first impressions is that what Kalidasa is doing to delving much deeper into the psyche of the characters; the story is less important and the characterizations more important.

It strikes me his audience would have known the story well, as with many myths, so what he needs to do, besides varying the story a bit for interest, is find a way to grab people, and he does so by delving into their conflicts. He has a wonderful second act where the King, his general and his fool share the stage, and the general and fool serve as foils so we can explore his state of mind in a way the epic really doesn't. This is a scene any Elizabethan playwright would be proud of, full of little quips and asides but held together by the inner turmoil of the central character.

Just picked up Dream Angus by Alexander McCall Smith, about a Celtic giver of dreams and love reset in contemporary Scotland.

Frankly, I was disappointed in The Penelopiad. I guess I must admit to myself that I do not particularly like revisionist works, and I should have known that about myself well enough to skip this theme read, but couldn't resist. Although witty in several places, Atwood's tale was not up to her usual standard, in my opinion.

I read Eaters of the Dead: The manuscript of Ibn Fadlan, relating his experiences with the Northmen in A.D. 922 by Michael Crichton, which is a retelling of the Beowulf legend. It was really an interesting book. I thought Crichton did a good job of creating the world of that time in which to set the legend. Of course it's been many years since I read the original. I didn't see the recent movie, although I do remember the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode that was based on Beowulf.

And I was highly amused when reading the more recently added afterword, or whatever Crichton called it (I've already turned the book in), that many of the sources he listed were also fictionalized.

hemlokgang, I felt the same way you did about Atwood's Penelopiad. While I normally enjoy her work, I thought this was tired and uninteresting. As as I said elsewhere on LT, Ive been there, done that, and the T-shirt's just worn threadbare now.

(I've actually been really disappointed with the Canongate myths series. I've yet to read one that I thought was truly first-rate, where the work in question equalled the commissioned author's regular, non-Canongate output.)

marietherese, I suppose it is a daunting task to try and equal or even come close to epic, culturally embedded tales such as these and do so in a way that readers feel does any justice to the original. Thanks for the tip on the myths series....I had been pondering trying another, but think I';ll pass. My TBR is full of too many other titles calling my name!

I've read a bit of Atwood's Penelopiad, but found I didn't like it much. I think it was mostly the fact that the Odyssee was my Greek exam, and we delved into all aspects very deeply. I think I'm just a bit fed up with the whole theme, even after two years. Maybe in a couple of years....

I'm now reading Dream Angus by Alexander McCall Smith. It's a very quiet book. So far I'm not impressed with this bringer of dreams and love, neither in the time of the gods, or in present day Scotland.

I am going to talk about a book that that follows the idea of myths told and retold, but is not really literature, such as as we have been discussing.

The book is The Nature of Loving: Patterns of Human Relationship. This is really a book of psychology. Starting with Sigmund Freud, and more so with Carl G. Jung, there has been an extesive use of myth, particularly those from the Greek-Roman tradition in describing personality and its conflicts.

"The Nature of Loving" takes some couples from the world of myth and analyzes them. Shiva and Shakti (Hindu) represent the ideal of the complete union. Pygmalion (modern, from George Bernard Shaw) describes the effort to reshape a partner into ones own image.

Ishtar and Tammuz is the story of a an older woman with a younger male lover. A more modern version of this story is Der Rosenkavalier, where Marschallin has taken on the boy, Octavian. But this relationship also slides into the relation of a mothe for her growing son, who needs to push out.

There is the conflicted marriage of Zeus and Hera, which is played out in many Greek myths.

From the latter period of the Arthurian saga, there is the story of Merlin and his enchantment by a younger woman-nymoh, Viviane. Goethe laso takes up an older man/young woman relationship in West-East Divan, where Goethe meets the married Marianne (referred to as Suleika in his poetry.

I am not sure that I am recommending this book, only 5-6 LTers own it. But it demonstrates the abiding strength of myth in showing us how we live as humans. The archetypes seem to come out more purely in myth as the unknown authors try to come up with characters who can repeatedly engage us and demonstrate their patterns of existence that may teach us something.

Judging from the thread of disappointment with many of the modern retellings of myths, I think perhaps the echoing of archetypes from myths in modern literature is more powerful than retelling or revisioning the myth in its original setting. In the reading I did this summer, I found Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson far more intriguing than Medea by Christa Wolf or Binu and the Great Wall by Su Tong although Binu had the advantage of novelty.

Beyond Freud and Jung, Joseph Campbell in his The Masks of God series and The Hero with a Thousand Faces and Northrop Frye in Anatomy of Criticism significantly add to our understanding of the power of myth and archetype.

I read Weight: the myth of Atlas and Heracles by Jeanette Winterson a year or so ago, and I thought that was an effective retelling of a myth.

Regarding Northrop Frye, I thought his Great Code: the Bible and Literature was very good in seeing the creative literary aspects of the Bible.

Back from vacation and ready to post a bit more about The Recognition of Sakuntala by Kalidasa.

So this is an ancient/medieval retelling of an even more ancient story, yet the psychological drama comes across as perfectly modern, even if the periodic intervention of gods and other supernatural beings marks it as un-modern.

The interesting plot difference is the increased use of "magic" in this plot versus the Mahabharata; in both versions, a King comes across a young maiden who is the daughter of a sage and a spirit, and they are secretly and informally married. She becomes pregnant, and he returns to his capital without her; when she follows him, he does not recognize her.

In Kalidasa's version, the failure to recognize her is the result of a curse, cast upon Sakuntala by a powerful sage (who is an incarnation of Shiva) when she fails to welcome him because she is lost in her lover's reverie. In the Mahabrahata, it is an intentional ploy by the King, for political reasons relating to his other wives and his people's acceptance of Sakuntala. Kalidasa has the spell broken by the recognition of a ring that the King had given to Sakuntala, but only after Sakuntala has been removed from him by her spirit relatives; the King then must show himself worthy of recovering her.

There is much play on the extent to which the King and Sakuntala are responsible for their own misfortunes and the extent to which these are simply fated.

Much of the retelling strikes me as inserting a more fundamentally tragic and psychological element to the story, well-suited to a dramatic production. There is a very sophisticated use of dramatic elements, including a stage with two independent centers of action at several points (where the king spies on Sakuntala or Sakuntala on the king, for example), and several occassions where there are role-reversals that are particularly telling. Indeed, the King's fool seems to constantly take the position of whoever comes before the King or of the King himself, with, of course, the other character quickly playing the fool.

This play was greatly admired by Goethe, among others, and I could speculate that it had some influence on his rendition of Faustus, for example. I think one of the most fundamental elements of the story is its deep exploration of how love and life interfere with each other, with much of the focus being initially tragic in nature, though an ultimate happy ("comic"?) resolution.

Well, I did read Dream Angus. It was in the "ok" area for me until I got to the last chapter. This book has Smith interspersing the mythic story of Angus wih modern tales of people affected by dreams.

This tenth chapter I found very affecting with a lucid dream that resolves the mess a couple have gotten into. It brought up memories of dreams I've had and dreamwork I've done.

I might mention that dreams in this book function as an agent of change and not as a pyschological analysis of your life already lived, particularly the detritus from the previous day.

Although I finished Sir Gawain and the Green Knight fairly early in August, I just finished Iris Murdoch's The Green Knight this past week. Better late than never, right?

I had read a review saying Murdoch's book was a satire of The Green Knight legend, but I found it to be much more subtle than that. Events in the story* could* have had a supernatural explanation--or everything *could* have been explained in other ways. So was this book magic realism or psychological study or both? There were many other mythological references throughout. An interesting read with many twists; it made me want to read more Iris Murdoch.

I've got to read the Green Knight; I've always enjoyed Iris Murdoch (try The Severed Head), but it has been a while since I read her. So is she somehow exploring our ability or our need to explain scientifically? I'm curious to hear more.

Hi a_musing--it may well be looking at our desire to make sense out of the twists and turns of life's events by fitting them into a religious or mythological pattern when they have randomness behind them.

Thanks for recommending The Severed Head. I will keep an eye out for it. In my warped view of my tbr pile, I am trying not to (physically) add anymore books to it....unless, of course a really nice used copy jumps into my hands and begs to come home with me (as a sackful did at the recent library sale). I'm loosely keeping track of the books I read on the 1001 list--I see SH is on there, but GK isn't.