Forty years on

Spectator, The, Nov 1, 2003 by Miller, Karl

Hey there, O'Hagan, with your 'Imitation of Life'. But could he be right? The phantasmagoria Vernon God Little, with its note of Eminem-admiring adolescent outrage, also mentions 'imitating life', I see. Eminem and D.B.C. Pierre may both be doing that (despite their names).

The American presence has been fortified by the accession of Daniel Mendelsohn - youngish, I take it, a classicist with other strings to his bow. In the 14 August issue he wrote at pleasurable length about the meaning of Sappho's fragmentary verse, its appearing to hover between the personal and the communal, or choral, and about the ancient world of the lyrical island of Lesbos. He refers to the opinions and beautiful translations of the Canadian poet Anne Carson, in appraising the modern cult of the fragment, of textual 'injury', and thereby trenching on ground occupied by the row in the paper over James Fenton's examination there of the new annotated edition of Lowell's collected poetry. Mendelsohn discovers a 'strange waffling' in Carson's book of Sapphic translations and commentary, and her prose can certainly be cryptic. But he is fully alive to the high quality of her own poems, with their 'reconfiguration' of classical models. There must be few places in English-speaking literary journalism where you could hope to meet with a balanced view of such distinction.