I’m not sure what the relevance of ‘conservative’ magazines is, but since I’m drunk I’m hardly interested. However, I am a rabid foe of Pevear and Volokhonsky. ‘Hype’ is absolutely the right word. I’ve almost never seen such unreadable, watery garbage — pushed into a dominant position in libraries now thanks to the hypocritical economics of book publishing (and its enablers).

So, then — Pinsky’s translation of the Inferno is plain awful. In order to “rhyme”, and often with words that hardly qualified and weren’t worth the trouble to find, he ended up squeezing the already terse Dante; enjambing the almost never enjambed Dante; botching the triple Trinitarian verse atop the gates of Hell, wringing it down to seven lines. But because of his name, everybody went a-gaga over it.

And then there were Seamus Heaney’s and Burton Raffel’s translations of Beowulf. Now, Raffel is a very good translator of Rabelais, and some other works in that vein, but he just never got the knack of the mordant irony in Beowulf, and Heaney made Beowulf sound like Heaney. I can’t use either one for teaching. But nobody was going to criticize them.

This problem doesn’t really qualify as a conservative / literal one; it’s just that we are a half-literate people.

I attempted to reply to your comment by explaining my interpretation of certain ethnic tensions within American society and within the New York media. While I did not use any ethnic slurs and expressed my opinion in sober language, it appears that my comment was judged politically incorrect by the blog administrator and it has been removed. In fairness, what I wrote would probably pass for "anti-semitic," in today's media. So I won't have a chance to respond to your comment.

But I might add that this experience validates my hypothesis that American society is rife with subliminal ethnic tensions, and I think it unfortunate that intellectuals have failed to create a protected sphere where the influence of these tensions may be openly discussed rather than pushed under the surface through the moral of political correctness.

Anon 6:33

If you approach a work of art and use its perceived message as the primary standard of its quality, you punch your aesthetic sensibilities right in the nose. You shape your reaction to the work with an agenda–and a narrow agenda too. Worse, you deny your soul the richness of the work. Liberals can be guilty of this too but, to make another hateful generalization, it is a much bigger problem right now in the conservative world.

I often call this the "Ayn Rand syndrome" because her essays on art seem to have spread this condition. For all her intelligence, and for all her ability as a writer, she had a shockingly faulty understanding of how art functions. I hardly claim to understand it myself–not by any means–but I do know enough not to assert, as Rand did, that because of his "sense of life", Mickely Spillane was a better writer than Hemingway or Nabokov.

I am a liberal by the way (as if that mattered), and I enjoy Rand's novels immensely. She is a good craftsman all in all, and she makes me think. She is also a good example of how the act of judging a work can be skewed by its conservative message or lack of such. Consider the reaction to the film adaptation of Atlas Shrugged. The overwhelming sentiment is that if you like the movie you are probably conservative; if you don't like it, you are very probably a liberal collectivist.

This insults conservatives and liberals alike by putting us in small art boxes. You don't have to believe in the Greek gods to admire and respond to the Iliad; you don't have to be a Christian to be deeply moved by Milton; and you don't have to be a conservative to enjoy and admire Rand's Atlas Shrugged. (As a footnote, let me add that the film is quite tedious: a plodding, episodic mess–and that problem has nothing to do with its message.)

I'm pretty sure I've spent years wishing someone would say this, so, thank you for saying it.

(I ended up reading the P & V Notes from the Underground in a Western Civ class, but I am a classicist who is ignorant of Slavic languages and didn't really bother to notice if it was a good translation or not.)