The TLS blog

From Blair to Spartacus and Back(less)

This time last night I was sitting on backless black-leather chair listening to myself talking to a man in Atlanta.

What I was listening to was what I had been saying a second before - a microphone fault which the consoling woman at the CNN studios in London said had often floored much better broadcasters than I am.

The subject of my necessarily halting interview (at least the backless chair makes one sit up straight) was Tony Blair's evidence to the Iraq War inquiry yesterday, a subject in which seven years ago I was a peculiar authority, a role I have happily abandoned since.

During that war I spent thirty days with Blair and wrote a nightly diary about it wich became a book. In 2003 I could have done quiz-shows on Blair-in-Iraq, the kind where you get a black leather chair with a proper back and an earpiece that doesn't tell you what you've just been saying at the moment when you are trying to say the next thing.

That was then. This week I've just published another book of nightly diaries - this time about following the route of theSpartacus War 2000 years ago. CNN is probably not so much interested in that but others have been, I'm pleased to say: a particular note of appreciation for the Spectator.

Yesterday afternoon I was back to writing for The Times about Iraq - a version which anyone who couldn't understand me on CNN can read here.

And last night, a three minute segment of hearing myself in my ear (confident.. .confident. . .no doubts. . .no doubts. . .no risk. . no risk?. . ), feeding back on myself between London and the southern United States, struggling to speak against an echo,  was all an appropriate reminder of strangeness gone by.

Jean Simmons, love-interest of Spartacus

A friend from Rome rings to congratulate me on the final arrival of On the Spartacus Road. He doesn't mean my new book - which I may have to encourage him more sharply to buy - but on the reviews of it by Tom Holland in the Spectator (sadly, not online) which is his weekly print-fix from London and in The Scotsman (which does arrive on his computer). He also thinks I should take advantage of Jean Simmons' death to blog about Spartacus the movie and tell more about how a slave girl from Britain, played by Simmons from Britain, became one of the stranger elements even of a film as strange as Kubrick's.

 I said I might struggle with that, never being much of a film historian and with a knowledge of the movie which while going back to sixties schooldays did not progress very far. The film also plays only a small part in the book. I did watch it once on my Spartacus Road in a narrow alley in Modena on a bootleg-seller's TV where every colour, including that of Simmons' famous eyes, was a swirl of chemical yellows. And I played the same DVD again in a brick-tower overlooking the Messina Straits where, thanks to a bigger screen, the love-interest (in many ways the main interest) of the movie was somewhat easier to understand. Simmons herself, I discover today from the obits, felt that she had a certain experience of slavery, being bought and sold around the Hollywood Studios 'like a piece of meat'. Like many former slaves in the city from where my friend sent his note today, she did very well for herself, drank too much at various times but lived to a generous eight decade age. R.I.P.

Reviews for Mithradates and Spartacus - and why to avoid St John's Wort

Mithradates was a king with a secret formula for long life. For that reason alone he was once a very famous mass-murderer and proto-terrorist yet now, just as the fashion for natural remedies against the poisons of the world, could hardly be higher, he is almost forgotten.

The King of Pontus was a political and military  enemy of Rome, as I described over the New Year in a long review of Adrienne Mayor's new biography for the excellent US website truthdig. But his secret survival formula - to judge from the reaction of readers here - offers much the greater fascination.

The details of how to make this Mithradateum remain a mystery even now, although there is unlikely to be a more thorough weighing of the possibilities than Mayor gives.

 The most practical message that this reviewer took away with him was “beware St. John’s wort,” a natural replacement for Prozac which, it seems, does stimulate resistance to toxins but does other bad things besides, especially to the liver. Chemically-fascinated readers will also find fine pages in The Poison King  on the fate of slaves in arsenic mines, the use and sources of naphtha and the advantage to be gained from eating the testicles of bark-chewing beavers who had made an early discovery of aspirin.

Mithradates was a contemporary of Spartacus, my own present subject about whom other reviewers have been writing this week. Mayor suggests that if the two men had managed to combine forces, there would have been a much greater Roman need for Prozac substitutes than there ever was - and rather depressing for all of us who write about the classics too.

Working with Granta - with wine and clay

 

 Last night Granta Magazine gave a party and we talked with readers about its new issue titled, Work - about skills-training for genocide, about being the only vet in a small African country and about why the Editor of the TLS wrote about life on a housing estate of radar engineers while telling the story of the Spartacus Slave War.

A good time was had by all - discussing the dogs of Sierra Leone with Aminatta Forna and the machete rhythms of Rwanda with Martin Kimani and wondering what my father (above) would have thought about being included with me here if he had still been alive.

In a previous post, I said that Essex Clay, my contribution from On the Spartacus Road, was not available on line. But now, thanks to an increasingly active Granta website, it is. There is a review of the book too from The Scotsman.

Gross Margin - and other TLS Translation Awards

This time last night we were celebrating the TLS translation awards, the annual event at which the TLS editor hands out cheques to often unsung heroes who render foreign literature into English - and also tries his best to pronounce properly most of the foreign names.

My pronunciation went not too badly by past standards - with the worst slip a perverse rendering of the English 'Equator' as though it were a small country in South America. There was some small Swedish difficulty too but nothing too memorable, I hope.

So thanks to everyone for their indulgence and Paula Johnson for her patient advice. I decided some time ago that a linguist's life of essentially Latin and Ancient Greek alone had left me with a mind for other languages that can see texts but hardly hear them. The experience last year of writing  On The Spartacus Road (see previous posts and Scotsman review), a book based heavily what I was able and not able to remember while following the Italian route of the Third Slave War, reinforced that feeling into almost a truth. Or perhaps, when I read all those names from Arabic and Basque, I'm simply not being careful enough.

But heck, who cares about the guy with the white speech cards and the cheques in envelopes? We were there to celebrate the winners - which we jollily did with the wonderful Society of Authors,  British Centre of Literary Translation, funders and friends.

Among the most memorable parts of the prize-giving was the chance to hear the young Oxford translator from 'the French' ( as we must say on these occasions) who had won the Scott Moncrieff Prize. Polly McLean, a woman with a CV (I now discover) as remarkable as her stage presence, read from her version of a novella by Laurent Quintreau (pronounced correctly by the prize-giver, lest you were wondering)  called Gross Margin.

This extract - which, like the whole work, in both its languages, lacked any full stops - concerned the efforts of a dysfunctional band of business colleagues to decide which was the most suitable destination for their corporate-bonding weekend.

". . that fat sow, Bremont, she suggests Tunisia, typical, you can tell just by looking at her how much time she's spent in Djerba trying to get laid. I'd have to be completely pissed, or perhaps in a coma, Castiglione would have us all go to Thailand. . to crack our protective shells and give birth to a new group dynamic, Thailand, I might have guessed, I can just imagine her striding through the tropical rain forest in her safari shorts like some scary man-eating back-packer. . Tissier is suggesting Senegal, now there's a surprise, what a loser, poor, poor guy, whores on tap in the hotel complex, developing country, brothel for the west, I love African women, but coming after a a loser like Tissier, no thanks, really. . ."

And so on, through Uzbekistan, Switzerland, Brittany and Australia: something of a change of the sometimes somewhat solemn tone for our awards. McLean is a philanthropist, I discover online  tonight, who works in Africa and has given a well publicised eco-makeover to the Oxfordshire home formerly owned by Graham Greene's wife, Vivien. She has academic expertise in the benefits of meditation ,(surely that must be mediation) in primary schools.

I feel sure we have not heard the last of her.

Granta, two fathers and the Spartacus Road

The new edition of Granta is entitled 'Work' and contains two pieces in which men pay tribute to the work of their fathers.

One is by Colum McCann - and describes exquisitely the Irish newspaperman who introduced him to the arts of print and cultivating roses while dissuading him from doing anything as foolish as becoming a journalist himself. The black and white image is of Sean McCann in Mulligan's Bar in Dublin and the title 'Looking for the Rozziner' refers to the first drink of the day, named for the resin that moistens a violin bow before it is fit to play.

The second is by me - and describes the radar engineer who brought his family in the nineteen fifties to live in an Essex estate where every one else too was a designer or manufacturer of Cold War seeing machines. My father too might have preferred a moody portrait in a famous bar, like that of McCann senior, but he is commemorated in a tweed-jacketed company-fair photograph with the boy whom he too could not persuade from print.

Essex Clay, as the Granta piece is titled, was originally written On the Spartacus Road, the 2008 journey through Italy that is the subject of the book of that name being published this month. See previous post. For various reasons, good ones I hope, most of Essex Clay did not quite fit into the final book version. So to read it,  purchase of the Work issue of Granta, editor John Freeman's second in the post,  is the only way.

Those suspicious of men writing about their fathers can also pick and choose from Salman Rushdie on Sloth, Julian Barnes on magnetic healing, Daniel Alarcon's extarordinary essay on book piracy in Peru and Aminatta Forna's homage to the only dog-doctor in Freetown.