This book belongs to a new Bloomsbury series called Imagines, which describes its aim as ‘seek[ing] to broaden the scholarly community's understanding of the reception of classical antiquity in the visual and performing arts’. More specifically, it presents itself as moving away from the ‘traditional, academic approach’ and intending to produce a ‘continuous dialogue between scholars on the one side, and “producers” of classical reception’ – that is, artists (publisher's website). Thus S. is not a classicist but a visual artist working in South Africa. She explains in the preface that her interest in Homer originated in her realisation that oral poetics, as discussed by scholars like G. Nagy and E. Bakker, had much in common methodologically with her own process of constructing sculptures from found objects, which she calls assemblage. The title, obviously a play on the famous catalogue of ships in the Iliad, is also the name of a series of sculptures she produced as portraits of important Homeric figures or concepts, called A Catalogue of Shapes (ACOS). The volume is both a discussion of how assemblage is like Homeric poetics and a description of ACOS.
Her premises are clearly laid out in the preface, where she describes the book as being an exploration of oral poetic theory as she engaged with it rather than a summary of Homeric poetics. As such, this study is as much a work of art criticism as an engagement with Homer and offers not so much an interpretation of the poems as an invitation to think differently about the Homeric tradition – indeed, about the idea of translation as a whole. The book is wide-ranging and thoroughly researched, and displays a strong grasp of the history of Homeric scholarship, particularly in the introduction; while there will be little surprising to a Homerist, S. distils more than a century of work into an overview accessible to readers of any discipline.
The goals of the book are, first, to make the argument that sculpture can be a vehicle for translating literature and, second, that her ACOS series captures something fundamental about the Homeric poems that cannot be effectively expressed in a literate translation. She explains this in the introduction, where she discusses modes of meaning-making and representational systems to introduce the idea of an ‘aesthetic translation’, which captures elements of the poem other than the literal narrative. Throughout the book, in fact, her expansive understanding of translation was something I found useful and intriguing, and believe will be of interest to anyone undertaking a substantial translation project.
The first chapter looks at different ways that the visual can signify in a given culture or context, using several indigenous South African oral traditions as analogies to suggest that the Homeric audience likely had a very different relationship to the visual than most European and American readers of the poems do today. Her discussion of illusionistic naturalism – visual representations that attempt to reproduce exactly what the eye sees in a specific moment in time – was interesting and novel to me. By describing different representational systems she makes the point that a ‘system of representation that meets the expectations of one group could thoroughly confound another’ (p. 25). This is to argue that language-based translations of Homer fail to capture some aspects of the poems, but, because oral and visual systems of meaning-making are premised on the same metaphors and symbolic systems, a visual translation might succeed.
The second chapter uses a specific object, Nestor's cup, as a case study in how assumptions about representational systems affect interpretation. She explains how the text on the cup has been privileged historically, and provides a speculative alternative interpretation of the cup based on ‘reading’ the other visual elements to demonstrate what can happen when we engage differently with them: the entire standard interpretation can be turned on its head and new meanings can be found. She suggests that we are embedded in a literate world where meaning is made visually as well as textually, but that Homer's audience would have been in a fully visual world and thus experienced their world differently. To experience Homer as they did, then, we need to understand their representational system.
With Chapter 3 she returns to her basic premise that the sculptural technique of assemblage is well suited for a visual representation of Homeric poetics because both methodologies are based on appropriations of received objects: literal material objects for her, and formulae, epithets and other elements of composition-in-performance for the Homeric poets. Chapter 4 continues this comparison, likening different interpretations of the poems to visual representations of the stories from more recent centuries, showing how meaning is made in both cases through techniques such as juxtaposition, reuse and opposition. Given her extensive references to paintings and sculptures that were unfamiliar to me, illustrations would have been helpful, but I was able to find images of all the objects she discussed online. Moreover, the absence of images here allows her to provide multiple illustrations – albeit in black and white (colour images can be viewed on her website) – in Chapter 5, which is dedicated to a detailed description of the twelve individual sculptures that comprise ACOS.
After the narrow focus in Chapter 5 on ACOS, S. returns in Chapter 6 to the Homeric poems themselves. She argues that Homeric poetics, as a merging of form and content impossible to achieve in written language, transcends the static text of a literate age. In her interpretation performances of Homeric poetry would have been not a hierarchical experience where the passive audience listened as the poet composed, but rather a dialectically reciprocal experience where both poet and audience contributed to the specific shape of the poem on that specific occasion. This she compares to the difference between illusionistic naturalism, where an image reflects what the painter's eye saw at a specific moment, to the way that other representational systems such as cubism implicate the viewer in the active making of meaning. Calling ACOS an ‘untested extra-lingual method of translation’ conceptually similar to a simile, S. summarises her whole project as conveying not ‘an understanding of how the complexities of Homeric composition inform its content’ or ‘an unambiguous “solved” interpretation’ of the poems but ‘a visual symbolic system in which the Homeric poetic system is expressed as a catalogue of composite object portraits’, making the interpreter ‘responsible for mentally reconstructing the relational, narrative, and thematic significance of each catalogue entry as relative both to each other and to the series as a whole’ (p. 157). The book ends with a short conclusion summarising the overall project.
Throughout the book I struggled to understand the distinction she was drawing (or not) between the poems themselves, the system of oral poetics by which they were composed and the scholarship theorising those poetics; at times, she seemed to see all three as methodologically similar, and thus presented ACOS as translating all of them at once. Similarly, while she emphasised the importance of making the poems more widely accessible to non-specialists, it was unclear to me how or why scholarship was key to this goal. That said, her discussions of visual representational systems were fresh and informative, and I found her broad understanding of translation to be valuable and productive, especially since so much of our work as classicists rests on translations of one kind or another. While the book does not offer a new take on Homer, it provides clear analogies for anyone wrestling with Homeric poetics and offers some useful challenges and correctives to widespread assumptions that many readers, especially in Europe and the US, may bring to the poems. S. has melded two disparate topics well, and interdisciplinary work like this certainly enriches the field.
