Like Edith Wharton (previous post), Machado de Assis has what looks very like a mythological blunder in his very first short story (first collected, in his case), “Miss Dollar”. The very handsome and affordable new translation of the Collected Stories translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson (Liveright, 2018) includes these remarks about a beautiful widow very reluctant to remarry (13-14):
“She wants to remain faithful unto the grave, an Artemis for our own age.”
Unconvinced by this reference to Artemis, Andrade smiled at his friend’s remark, . . .
* * * * *
This quote had the effect of silencing Andrade, who believed about as much in constancy as he did in Artemises, . . .
Of course, the classical model for inconsolable widows was not the virgin goddess Artemis but Artemisia, specifically Artemisia II of Caria, who built one of the Seven Wonders of the World, the Mausoleum, as a tomb for her husband (and brother) Mausolus. Except for helpful stress-accents, the two names are the same in Portuguese: Ártemis and Artemísia. (Being ignorant of Portuguese, I would not have been able to check this easily until the last few years, since dictionaries usually omit proper names. Now I can just look up Artemis and Artemisia – the queen, not the generic name of mugwort, wormwood, and sagebrush, which comes up first – on Wikipedia, and click on Languages / Português in the left margin to see how the articles are titled in Portuguese.)
Though I may be wrong, the apparent blunder does not seem to be the translators’. Machado de Assis’ Obra Completa is out of copyright (he died 110 years ago last Saturday) and on-line at a Brazilian government URL (machado.mec.gov.br/). The text of “Miss Dollar” there (click on ‘Conto’, then ‘Contos Fluminenses’) reads ‘Artemisa’ or ‘Artemisas’ in all three places. Could this be an earlier spelling of Artemis or Artemisia? That would be awfully confusing: it looks more like a conflation of the two, falling between two stools, as it were. Did Machado de Assis himself, or his copy editors, proofreaders, or typographers drop an I and an accent to turn Artemísia into Artemisa? That is a question only an expert on Brazilian Portuguese and the works of Machado de Assis can answer. However, he must have meant the woman whose English name is Artemisia, not Artemis, so the translation is definitely wrong.
Perhaps I should add that I’ve been very impressed by the quality of the stories I’ve read (four so far) and the translation reads very well, though I’m obviously in no position to judge its accuracy except on this one tiny point. I would have liked footnotes for some of the geographical and literary allusions, but there was hardly room for them: the book is already xxv + 931 pages. Perhaps someone could put together a companion website, with contemporary maps, explanations of what the named streets and neighborhoods imply socially and economically, identification of now-forgotten (at least outside Brazil) authors, and so on. (If such a site already exists in Portuguese, a translation would be very much appreciated by readers of the new Collected Stories.) I would be glad to help with the frequent classical references and allusions.
Five More Seneca Commentaries
I have been intending to update my list of commentaries on Seneca’s Epistulae Morales, especially since Jeremias Grau told me in a comment on my last update about three I did not know: two German PhD theses (one of them his own) that will be published as books in the next year or two, and a recent commentary on letter 104 that I had missed (Lemmens 2015). I have now (six months later – oops) added these three, plus two more, one that just came out (Li Causi 2019) and one that I had unfairly neglected (Trapp 2003). Pietro Li Causi’s is a collective commentary on 124, written with his students, only available as a free on-line PDF, which I know from John Henderson’s review in BMCR. Michael Trapp’s is the Cambridge ‘green and gold’ collection of Greek and Roman Letters, which includes detailed notes on two short letters (38 and 61) and the opening of a longer one (75.1-5), all three relatively neglected by full-time Seneca commentators.
If anyone knows of others I have missed, please let me know: I have a feeling I may have seen one more. The number of letters that get no love from any commentator or translator of selected letters is now down to eight, or will be when the three dissertations at the end of my bibliography come out in book form: 45, 69, 74, 81, 89, 98, 109, and 111. If someone is looking for a thesis topic, one or more of these would make a good one.
As I mentioned in my last update almost a year ago, some day I hope to find the time to transform my list of Seneca commentaries into a data base for easier and more flexible searching, allowing users to sort the bibliography by date (as it is now) or alphabetically, or to filter the results to include only one or a few or a range of letters, and to filter commentaries by language, or by level (scholarly vs elementary), by whether they include text, translation, both, or neither, and so on. If I’ve forgotten any important criterion for sorting or filtering, please let me know.