Three-Toed Sloth

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, April 2025

Attention conservation notice: I have no taste, and no qualifications to opine on poetry, on translation, or on anti-imperialist economic theories. Also, most of my reading this month was done at odd hours and/or while chasing after a toddler, so I'm less reliable and more cranky than usual.

Barbara Hughes Fowler (trans.), Love Lyrics of Ancient Egypt

Where "ancient" means "circa 1305--1080 BC". These are sweet, vivid, sometimes startlingly horny, and totally recognizable emotionally. The use of "sister" and "brother" as endearments for lovers is jarring, but, on reflection, I wouldn't want to have to explain our "baby". §

(Hughes Fowler was a professor at UW Madison, which is why her interesting-looking book was in the university book store when I was a graduate student, and led it sitting on my shelves for three decades before finally getting around to reading it this month.)

Jalal al-Din Muhammad Balkhi / Rumi, translated by Haleh Liza Gafori, Gold

I do not, sadly, speak Persian, but I grew up hearing my grandfather quote from the classic poets, along with his extemporized English translations. (He sometimes said that he knew his grasp of English wasn't perfect because he couldn't use it to compose original verse.) Thinking about it, when I read classic Persian poetry in translation, I am always looking for something that sounds like my grandfather's translations. This book is very much not that. To quote Gafori in her introduction (p. x), "the tropes, abstractions, and hyperbole that are so abundant in Persian poetry contrast with the spareness and concreteness characteristic of poetry in English, especially in the modern tradition." Gafori has very consciously sought to make Rumi sound like a very particular kind of 21st century American poet. I'll quote the start to one of the poems (pp. 8--9) where I think this is most successful as poetry:

Just the other day
fire whispered to smoke,
"No stick of aloewood shuns me.

From its gnarls and knots,
my flames unfurl a honeyed musk
of amber, fruit, and flower.

It profits in perishing.
It welcomes me, even thanks me.

At the doorway to emptiness,
all knots come loose."

I left the book dis-satisfied, but this may be because of my own expectations as a reader. Had I encountered poems like these in an original work by a contemporary Iranian-American poet, I'd probably have enjoyed them more, and thought "it's interesting how she's modernized Sufi themes, and she clearly knows her Rumi". I would also have been far less likely to have picked up such a book in the first place. §

Homer, translated by Caroline Alexander, The Iliad: A New Translation

... where "new" = 2015. It's very readable, and captures a sense of what is, fundamentally, a very alien, and often ugly, story in a very alien, and often ugly, world, related in magnificent language. The whole plot turns on a major but subordinate military commander grounding his forces because he feels insulted that he couldn't keep a particular sex slave in his share of loot, and everyone accepting this as perfectly understandable, though seeing perfectly well how it leads to even more totally pointless (vividly-described) bloodshed and death. This is before we get to the gods, who are powerful assholes. (*)

Some people --- not, I believe, Alexander --- are convinced that Homer is secretly repelled by what he depicts; I think that's wishful thinking. This is great art, produced by men who accepted the values of a society run by gangsters. In short: calling battlefields the places "where men win glory" was not meant ironically. §

*: Something I'd never noticed before is that there are at least two places where the poem distinguishes the words the gods use for something from the mortal words for the same thing. What?!?!??!

While reading this, I had a very long and involved dream where I was forced to participate in a vicious argument among literal muppets. One side insisted that Achilles and Éowyn were trans, and the other were just as vehement that they were rather gender-fluid. Both parties were united, however, in affirming that the question made sense and were of great importance, and that the answers were not merely "not beyond all conjecture", but obvious to anyone of good faith. This has remained stuck in my head, unlike most of my dreams, and I write it down here publicly in the hopes of getting it out. ("Persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished.")

Anon., translated by Maria Dahvana Headley, Beowulf: A New Translation

I cannot do better than to quote the beginning:

Bro! Tell me we still know how to speak of kings! In the old days,
everyone knew what men were: brave, bold, glory-bound. Only
stories now, but I'll sound the Spear-Danes' song, hoarded for hungry times.

Their first father was a foundling: Scyld Scefing.
He spent his youth fists up, browbeating every barstool-brother,
bonfiring his enemies. That man began in the waves, a baby in a basket,
but he bootstrapped his way into a kingdom, trading loneliness
for luxury. Whether they thought kneeling necessary or no,
everyone from head to tail of the whale-road bent down:
There's a king, there's his crown!
That was a good king.

This is, plainly, a very contemporary translation, quite consciously influenced by the language of the men Headley served with in the US military. I thought it was great, but it will date rapidly; enjoy it while it's fresh. §

(Previously, in weirdly too-modern renditions of Beowulf.)

Anthony Brewer, Marxist Theories of Imperialism: A Critical Survey

This is a thorough survey of the main intellectually important contributions to the topic from Marx through the 1980s. (The large number of works from the official Marxists of the USSR, China, etc., are accordingly ignored, aside from one swipe at the idea that the Comintern could decide scientific questions by proclamation.) Beginning with Marx, who did not really have a worked-out theory of imperialism, Brewer covers Luxemburg, Hobson (not a Marxist but essential to all later Marxist work), Hilferding, Bukharin, Lenin, and then various post-war theorists of monopoly capital, dependency, unequal exchange, etc. Throughout, Brewer does a good job of balancing giving historical context with treating these thinkers whose ideas are live and not just museum-pieces. (I am not sure whether Brewer would have called himself a Marxist, but he was certainly sympathetic and deeply familiar with the literature, e.g. intelligently bringing Morishima to bear on the unequal-exchange debates.) This latter form of respect includes being very blunt in critique, especially of "underconsumptionist" theses (an important part of this literature since Luxemburg), and of sheer errors of fact.

To be even more blunt that Brewer, those who came after Marx have spent a lot of time explaining why things that we can see have visibly happened were impossible, and things that have not happened were inevitable. Because this was published in 1990, and so written in the late 1980s, some relevant developments like the collapse of the Soviet bloc, and the way industralization took off along with globalization across much of the Third World, are omitted. Needless to say these do nothing to rescue the theories Brewer discusses. §

(I read the 2nd, and so far as I can tell final, edition of 1990, not the first of 1980.)

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur; The Commonwealth of Letters; The Progressive Forces; The Dismal Science; Commit a Social Science; Writing for Antiquity