Rediscovering Seneca: Dana Gioia Translates "The Madness of Hercules"

I took two years of Latin in high school. Even (way back) then, Latin was a dying subject. Nine of us took Latin I. Five of us took Latin II. That was out of an all-boys public high school of 2,000 students. Our Latin teacher was passionate about the language; I can still vividly remember him almost bouncing as he paced in front of the blackboard, always holding a piece of chalk.  

I learned more about English grammar in my Latin classes than in any English class I took. I also unexpectedly learned about the history and literature of Rome. That was because we translated sections of the writings of famous Romans like Julius Caesar, Virgil, Cicero, and a Roman born in Spain named Seneca.

 

Seneca, or Lucius Annaeus Seneca (the Younger), was a Stoic philosopher, poet, playwright, satirist, and, surprisingly, advisor to the Roman emperor Nero. To Seneca’s credit, he was more influential with Nero in the first five years of emperor’s reign; eventually, accused of involvement in a conspiracy to assassinate Nero, Seneca did what many well-known and suddenly-out-of-favor Romans did and committed suicide. I once thought this was a rather extreme practice, but suicide meant the individual’s estate would remain with the heirs and not be confiscated by the state. And the times were such, and the emperors were such, that most of the best people ended up doing that.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Words

Since Friday at about 10 a.m. Central time, it’s been a tsunami of words about what happened in Newton, Connecticut.For the first few hours, many of the words were incorrect – we experienced the hypersensitivity of the news cycle as the media tried to be first with most, watching what’s was happening on social media, competing against each other, as the horror finally unfolded behind them.

Too many words. Useless, wrong words. It took some time for the right words to begin crowding out the wrong words.

Then came the groping for understanding. What happened is unfathomable. And our human minds began reaching for something – anything – that would explain this. We need to explain this. If we can’t explain this, we are afraid it can happen again. This is the stuff of our worst nightmares, and we are afraid we will never be able to explain it, that we will never know the reason for why the gunman did what he did.

Not enough words. Too few words.

I thought of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, something he wrote in The Gulag Archipelago: “The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”

Words we don’t like to hear.

We are writing blog posts, emails, poems. We are drawing pictures and posting photographs. We are offering meditations. We’re ranting against guns and video games, and we are defending guns and video games. One blogger I read suggested we stop everything and simply observe a prolonged silence.

Painful words, encouraging words. We don’t know how to comfort a father and mother whose six-year-old daughter was gunned down for no apparent reason other than a lunatic decided to do it. We don’t know how to comfort a town which lost 20 year children and seven adults.

I made myself read the names and birth years of all of the victims. I lost it when I hit the third on the list, but I made myself read through every name on the list. These were real people with hopes and dreams and problems and life and whole lives ahead. They laughed and cried and thought that this Friday would be a school day like any other school day.

No words. The fact is, words fail here. The only way to comfort is to be there and weep with the families. That may be the most important thing we can do. Very few of us know what this is like, what it is to go through something like this, something that changes you completely and forever.

We look at our own children and our grandchildren, and we tremble. We have no words here, either, but we have arms, and our arms may be what we most need. Our arms around them. Their arms around us. Our arms around each other.

Perhaps we don’t need words at all.

Photography by Anna Langova via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.