Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) August 21, 2024: In the fall of 1964, I transferred as a junior planning to major in English to Saint Louis University, the Jesuit university in the City of St. Louis, Missouri. Consequently, I was told to see the head of the Department of English, the American Jesuit priest Father Maurice B. McNamee, S.J. (1909-2007), for academic advising. Father McNamee advised me to take Father Walter J. Ong's course Practical Criticism: Poetry. Over the years, I took five courses from Father Ong (1912-2003).
Over the years, I also took one course from Father McNamee. In any event, many years later, I read McNamee's concise book Honor and the Epic Hero: A Study of the Shifting Concept of Magnanimity in Philosophy and Epic Poetry (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960).
In his characteristically concise way, McNamee (pp. 170 and 178n.14) discusses how the spirituality of St. Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556), the founder of the Jesuit order (known formally as the Society of Jesus) and the author of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, and of The Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, and of thousands of letters giving spiritual advice. To this day, I admire the concision of McNamee's compendious 1960 survey book Honor and the Epic Hero.
Unfortunately, the American Jesuit theologian Barton T. Geger in his new 2024 critical edition of The Constitutions of the Society of Jesus (Institute of Jesuit Sources) is not familiar with McNamee's 1960 book. However, in the "Index of Topics" in Geger's 2024 critical edition (pp. 577-621), we find the following entries that are related to themes McNamee discusses in his 1960 book: Ambition/ambitioning (p. 578), Honor(s) divine and worldly (p. 597), and Magnanimity (p. 602).
For a study related to McNamee's 1960 study, see Robert Faulkner's 2008 book The Case for Greatness: Honorable Ambition and Its Critics (Yale University Press). Unfortunately, Faulkner is not familiar with McNamee's 1960 book.
Recently I thought about McNamee's 1960 book when I read about the British-American classicist Emily Wilson's 2023 translation of the Homeric epic The Iliad (Norton) - one of the epic poems discussed by McNamee at length (for specific pages references, see the entries on Achilles and on The Iliad in the "Index" [p. 183 and 187, respectively]).
In 2018, Emily Wilson (born in 1971; Ph.D. in classical studies, Yale University, 2001) of the University of Pennsylvania published her translation of The Odyssey - another epic poem discussed by McNamee at length (for specific pages references, see the entries on Odysseus and on Odyssey in the "Index" [p. 188]). Emily Wilson was the first woman to translate The Odyssey into English. Consequently, her translation was widely publicized at the time.
But she is not the first woman to translate The Iliad into English, and her 2023 translation has not been as widely publicized as her 2018 translation was. Even so, I would call your attention to Judith Thurman's wide-ranging interview with Emily Wilson titled "Mother Tongue: Emily Wilson makes Homer modern" (dated September 11, 2023) in The New Yorker:
In it, among other things, Emily Wilson says, "'Any woman who has lived with male rage at close range has a better chance of understanding the vulnerability that fuels it than your average bro. She learns firsthand how the ways in which men are damaged determine their need to wreak damage on others.
"This insight, and the lucidity Wilson brings to it, may be the greatest revelation of her Iliad. The poem's machismo has often bored or estranged me, and, in more grandiloquent translations, its heroes' mindless bloodlust obscured the pathos of boys and men who are shamed literally to death by weaknesses that they've been bred to suppress. Her plainsong conveys the tragedy of their bravado, and, listening to her voice, I felt it for the first time."
Judith Thurman's reflection here calls to mind the bravado of former President Donald Trump.
For an insightful profile of Trump, see the American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Justin A. Frank's book Trump on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President (Avery/ Penguin Random House, 2018).
For critique of Emily Wilson's 2023 translation of The Iliad, see Graeme Wood's article "What Emily Wilson's Iliad Misses: Her new translation is inviting to modern readers, but it doesn't capture the barbaric world of the original" (dated October 2, 2023) in The Atlantic:
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