On translation.

Before stumbling into a life of drug addiction and bank robbery, the protagonist of Nico Walker’s Cherry served in the Army. He’s miserable overseas, but, to be fair, he was miserable in the United States, too. He eventually blames all his problems – the drugs, the crime – on a lady friend’s promiscuous behavior while he was in the service. He takes great pains to describe all the readily-available sexual encounters he forwent to stay true to her, even claiming that he would not think of anyone else while masturbating.

But he does a great job of describing the misery of military service: the trauma is understated, focusing instead on doldrums and drudgery.

Oo! Ta-ah! Here come the Warrior Medics!

The refrain was to go on indefinitely, till we were signaled to stop. That’s how it went. And from that day on, whenever the company was called to attention (something that happened no less than a million times on a given day), the company cheer was to be recited in its entirety. No exceptions. To make matters worse, after a while it got to be expected that the guidon bearer would do the robot throughout the refrain.

So don’t ever join the fucking Army.

Soon, he is in Iraq. His patrol relies upon interpreters to communicate with anyone they meet.

The patrol leader asked the mustache haji questions about what he was doing out so late and where he was coming from and where he was going. An interpreter translated.

The car was clean.

The radio said to let the hajis go on their way.

The patrol leader said to the interpreter, “Tell that that from now on they must respect the curfew. It’s for their own safety. They could’ve been hurt out here tonight and we don’t want that to happen.”

And the interpreter said something. As far as what he said, we’d have to trust him. So that was that.

American soldiers don’t trust the interpreters, feeling sure their sympathies are secretly with the other side. As it happens, the Iraqis don’t trust interpreters, either. By translating, the interpreters keep everyone safe because they allow the two sides to communicate – sometimes words can resolve disputes, instead of bullets.

But the interpreters themselves were endangered. In Sympathy for the Traitor, literary translator Mark Polizzotti writes:

As recently as 2011, the Armed Forces Journal reported that interpreters in Iraq were “10 times more likely to die in combat than deployed American or international forces,” because neither the troops they were interpreting for nor the enemy they were speaking to had complete confidence in the fidelity of what they were relating.

Both sides assumed that the translators had some hidden agenda or secret loyalty to the other. There is always the danger, when we speak for someone else, that our own interests will distort whatever message we’d been expected to deliver.

This happens even with my kids. Our two-year-old says something to me, then I tell my spouse, “She’s worried because you said that … “

“No,” she interjects.

“What?”

“ mumble mumble garble digger mumble “

Well, great, kid. I misrepresented your intent, but only because I have no idea what you’re trying to say!

When translating literature, there’s an additional difficulty. Most languages have ways to communicate common human experiences – what can I eat?, how much will it cost me?, how do I get there? But literature draws upon the whole set of meanings and associations that link words to concepts. In general, there won’t be a direct equivalent between languages.

In an essay for the New York Review of Books, Perry Link writes that:

In teaching Chinese-language courses to American students, which I have done about thirty times, perhaps the most anguishing question I get is “Professor Link, what is the Chinese word for _______?”

I am always tempted to say the question makes no sense. Anyone who knows two languages moderately well knows that it is rare for words to match up perfectly, and for languages as far apart as Chinese and English, in which even grammatical categories are conceived differently, strict equivalence is not possible.

Book is not shu, because shu, like all Chinese nouns, is conceived as an abstraction, more like “bookness,” and to say “a book” you have to say, “one volume of bookness.” Moreover shu, but not book, can mean “writing,” “letter,” or “calligraphy.” On the other hand you can “book a room” in English; you can’t shu one in Chinese.

And, beyond the fact that languages differ from each other, every reader is unique. In “Does Talking About Books Make Us More Cosmopolitan?,” Tim Parks writes that:

To exist as a book, the pages with their letters and spaces need a reader. We may think of books as unchanging material objects, but they only, as it were, happen when read; they have no absolute identity. And the nature of that reading – an experience extended over many hours, then mulled over for many more, for the book does not cease to happen the moment we turn the last page – will depend, to a large degree, on who the reader is.

I grew up in the United States, speaking only English during the years when my brain would have absorbed new languages most easily, so I read a lot of literature in translation. This is suboptimal, I know. I would enjoy a richer experience of humanity if I could read more of our world’s literature in the original. But my life would be dreadfully impoverished if not for the charitable exertions of many translators, because then I wouldn’t have a chance to read many stories at all.

I am personally unqualified to translate any piece of literature, or to judge how well a particular translation conveys the sense of the original, as a native speaker who lived contemporaneously to the author might have understood it. But I am an experienced reader, and I am the reader’s premier expert on the way literature makes me feel. Occasionally I find myself musing, despite not knowing how to speak the source language, whether I might rephrase certain passages. Especially when primed with excellent notes, such as in Hayden Pelliccia’s review of two translations of the Iliad.

The Iliad opens with a word generally translated as “wrath,” yet this is the direct object of the first sentence. In Greek, this makes sense, but in English we identify subjects and objects based upon their location in a sentence. Pelliccia writes that

The very first line of the Iliad forces any English-language translator to decide immediately and to declare conspicuously whether he would rather be caught betraying his poet or his own language.

I couldn’t help but draft my own variant:

Wrath, hubric wrath of Achilles

As sung by the goddess

Wrought pain & devastation for the Achaians

Droves hurled to Hades, souls hewn from heroes

Their bodies leavings for dogs, a feast for vultures and crows –

So was His plan fulfilled

Set stirring in that moment

Agamemnon and Achilles

Parted in fury.

Obviously my second line fails to convey what Homer wanted – “sung” has a waft of fate to it, as though this story was preordained by the goddess, whereas Homer exhorts his muse to relate the tragedy after it occurred. My failure is unsurprising, considering both my lack of Greek and Pelliccia’s assertion that every professional translation available to date has failed as well. But the experience of translation was a success – another reader might well be dissatisfied with my lines, but creating them changed me for the better.

Although Ezra Pound could not read or speak Mandarin, his translation of classical poetry for Cathay had a huge influence on both his own writing and the subsequent work of other English-language poets. Although Christopher Logue could not read or speak Greek, his adaptation of the Iliad is a fantastic work of poetry.

Homer lavished attention on the myriad ways that humans might die upon a battlefield. And in War Music, Logue interlaces Homeric myth with modern nightmare:

Drop into it.

Noise so clamorous it sucks.

You rush your pressed-flower hackles out

To the perimeter.

And here it comes:

That unpremeditated joy as you

– The Uzi shuddering warm against your hip

Happy in danger in a dangerous place

Yourself another self you found at Troy –

Squeeze nickel through that rush of Greekoid skum!

Oh wonderful, most wonderful, and then again more wonderful

A bond no word or lack of words can break,

Love above love!

And here they come again the noble Greeks,

Ido, a spear in one a banner in his other hand

Your life at every instant up for –

Gone.

And, candidly, who gives a toss?

Dead: pointlessly, unmemorably dead. By depicting the utter dehumanization of war – “who gives a toss?,” and female captives referred to with just the pronoun she, as in the opening scene when Achilles is enraged because Agamemnon announces that “I shall take his prize she” – he demonstrates just how precious life should be.

Logue knew no Greek, but his Iliad changed my life for the better.

On bread.

In the King James version of Genesis, Adam and Eve began their lives as vegans. They ate nuts and fruit.

Then they ate Yahweh’s special fruit, so he expelled them from Eden. Yahweh said, “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground.” Adam and Eve would no longer live in a land of such abundance that they could survive on the raw produce of trees – instead, they’d have to cook bread.

And Yahweh rubs it in – even if you work hard, and procure food, and survive a while, still you will die. You humans are mortal.

(To the other deities, Yahweh offers an aside: “Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.” Yahweh does not mention to the humans that their mortality was curable, His own doing, and His plan all along.)

In the beginning, bread was a curse.

Soon, however, the Western world treated bread as a mark of civilization.

In The Odyssey, Odysseus and his crew sail to Laestrygonia. Not knowing that the island is overrun by voracious giants who might slay and eat them, he asks who eats bread there. In Emily Wilson’s new translation, he says:

I picked two men, and one slave as the third,

and sent them to find out what people lived

and ate bread in this land.

Bread is alchemy. Flour and water and a speck of yeast aren’t enough to support a human life, but if you let yeast eat the flour, then bake it, suddenly you have a food that could nourish you for weeks.

In jail, meals are served with flimsy slices of airy white bread. I’ve eaten one meal at our local jail – the guards let us stay for dinner with the men after class one week, just after one man’s partner was murdered.

(The trio charged with murder – a woman and two men – were incarcerated in that same jail. The woman was placed into a holding cell adjacent to the dorm where the murdered woman’s partner lived. He stayed up all night, shouting to her through the wall. He was telling her to forgive herself.)

We received green beans, spaghetti, a slice of white bread, a cookie. To drink, our choice of milk or sweet tea. I’ve been told that our jail has better food than almost any other.

If you fold your spaghetti into the bread, they told me, you get to have a taco.

When we incarcerate people in this country, we force them to find ingenious ways to deal with deprivation. Demetrius Cunningham built a practice piano out of cardboard. In Heather Ann Thompson’s Blood in the Water, she describes the jerry-rigged water heaters common at Attica Prison.

At the end of our poetry class recently, a man showed me his ear gauge, a round disc of purple and green.

“I’m surprised they let you keep it,” I said.

“They didn’t. It’s bread.”

“What?”

“Bread. I made it here.” He popped it out to show me – it wasn’t quite as shiny as the stuff you’d see on Etsy, but otherwise looked just as nice. “While I been in, I must’ve went from a quarter inch to, what’s this, over an inch?”

“Bread,” I said, shaking my head. I felt hesitant to touch it.

“I been making all sorts of things. You need bread, and some pencil shavings, colored pencil, you know? I been making flowers, little sea turtles. I made a whole lot of flowers. Gifts for people, when I get out. It’s like therapy. While I’m making them, gives me something to think about, you know? It helps. Keeps the mind busy.”

The next week he brought a few of his sculptures to class. The flowers were incredible, each an inch or two tall, with green stem and leaves, petals in blue and purple. His sea turtle was only a quarter inch across and intricately detailed. Like netsuke, except …

“Bread?” I asked him again.

“Yup,” he said, leaning back in his chair.

I’d previously read about Robert Martinson making a chess set from bread, but I’d assumed the pieces would look gross. In “Solidarity under Close Confinement,” Martinson wrote about his experience being incarcerated for 40 days with the Freedom Riders in the 1960s. He reported that “chess sets and objets d’art could be molded from paste made from chewed bread and dried in the ventilator … I gloated over a tiny nest of buttons, string, chicken bones, and chess pieces – an affection I now find difficult to remember.”

Martinson was appalled by what incarceration does to people: “Of course, the persons we had become in our cells were difficult, boring things.” After his release, he studied prisons, hoping that the way we punish people could be made less awful. He was hired by the state of New York to address recidivism: did any type of programming reduce criminal behavior by ex-felons?

As described in Terry Kupers’s essay “How to Create Madness in Prison” (published in Hell Is a Very Small Place):

A turning point occurred with the publication of Robert Martinson’s 1974 essay, “What Works? Questions and Answers about Prison Reform.” Martinson ran some numbers and announced that rehabilitation programs have no positive effect on recidivism rates. This was the research that conservative pundits and politicians had been waiting for, and they made Martinson famous as they legislated a drastic turn from rehabilitation to harsher punishments.

…

With calls to “stop coddling” prisoners, prison education programs were slashed, weights were removed from the yards, the quality of prison food declined, prisoners were deprived of materials for arts and crafts, and so forth.

Even though Martinson really should have realized that this would be the consequence of his publication (and subsequent speaking tour), he was devastated. After all, he was a firm believer in social justice. He had risked his life to join the Freedom Riders. He began to study incarceration because he hoped to improve prisoners lives. As a result of his research, he’d written that prisons “cannot be reformed and must be gradually torn down.”

That’s not what happened. Instead, we started sending more people to prison, and made the prisons worse.

Which is why Martinson soon recanted his findings. It was true that the education and counseling offered in prisons weren’t very effective at staving off future crime. It was also true that the education and counseling offered in prisons were terrible.

If the available “education” is just a guard and some textbooks, is it surprising that few people are rehabilitated by it? What about counseling – with untrained counselors told to do “whatever they thought best” during five or so short meetings with their patients each year?

Nobody cared about Martinson’s 1979 publication, “A Note of Caution Regarding Sentencing Reform,” in which he apologized for flaws in his earlier work. By then, the punitive reformers had already gotten what they wanted: a lefty intellectual arguing that nothing works and so prisons should be cheap and miserable.

Martinson was horrified by the damage he’d wrought. That same year, he committed suicide – in front of his teenage son, he leapt from the window of their ninth story apartment.

On violence against women.

This is the first in a series. Read the second one here.

Quick caveat: this essay will be unpleasant. Given the title, you can probably guess the nature of the impending unpleasantness. So, if you think that’s a topic you shouldn’t be reading about right now, then you should skip this.

But it’s something I figured that I should eventually write an essay about. Because a major theme of my work is violence against women. And this is a topic that I can’t easily claim I’m writing about just because it’s important in the Ramayana – my plan from the beginning was to write about violence against women, and a major incentive for me to work with the Ramayana was that it provides a good scaffolding to do so.

And I should also apologize right from the beginning that some of this will sound sacrilegious. Because, yes, the relationship between Rama and Sita is often put forward as the ideal. And it can seem crumby to have aspects of your religion analyzed in a critical light.

But for this project, I am trying to engage with The Ramayana as mythology first, rather than as a religious text. In the same way I’m engaging with The Bible as a collection of stories, and I’ll try to include some of that in this essay too: obviously the text underlying Christianity has many troubling instances of violence against women as well. As a minor justification for this view, I’d like to quote A.K. Ramanujan from his essay “Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation,” in which he compares and contrasts many of the Ramayana variants that exist throughout South-east Asia.

“Thus, not only do we have one story told by Valmiki in Sanskrit, we have a variety of Rama tales told by others, with radical differences among them. Let me outline a few of the differences we have not yet encountered. For instance, in Sanskrit and in other Indian languages, there are two endings to the story. One ends with the return of Rama and Sita to Ayodhya, their capital, to be crowned king and queen of the ideal kingdom. In another ending, often considered a later addition in Valmiki and in Kampan, Rama hears Sita slandered as a woman who lived in Ravana’s grove, and in the name of his reputation as a king (we would call it credibility, I suppose) he banishes her to the forest, where she gives birth to twins.”

So, even when considering only the Valmiki Ramayana (the other variant mentioned in the quote above is typically referred to as the Kamba Ramayana, which was written in Tamil much later than the Valmiki Ramayana. I hope to write an essay about south Indian variants soon — other than its engagement with violence against women, the other biggest draw toward working with the Ramayana, for me, is the generally-discredited theory that it reflects historical conquest and was promulgated as a means of subjugating the conquered peoples of south India), there are multiple “texts.” And in some of them, Sita is not treated well. Honestly, my personal belief is that she isn’t treated well in any of them, but there are issues with viewing ancient stories through the lens of modern feminism.

Like, okay, here’s a passage from Sheldon Pollock’s translation of the Ayodhya Kanda (book 2 of the Ramayana), and I don’t think anyone from any culture would still agree that this inequality is something to celebrate:

“[Anasuya], too, felt delight when she saw how illustrious Sita was following the way of righteousness, and she cheered her, exclaiming, “How fortunate you have such high regard for righteousness! How fortunate you should abandon your kinfolk, your pride and wealth, proud Sita, to follow Rama when he was banished to the forest. A woman who holds her husband dear–whether he is in the city or the forest, whether he is good or evil–gains worlds that bring great blessings. To a woman of noble nature her husband is the supreme deity, however bad his character, however licentious or indigent he might be.”

Okay. Well. That was a pretty long preamble. But I think I might finally be ready to start writing this essay.

The basic gist of the Ramayana is that Sita was stolen away and Rama ventured forth to take her back, employing the aid of an army of monkeys. But unlike The Iliad, in which Menelaus was roughly innocent when Helen was stolen away (unless you count being a crumby husband as a valid transgression; in the text, that is not. But it’s probably fair to quote Churchill’s “History is written by the victors,” and point out that Menelaus was on the winning side. So Homer could stuff lines like “Brother-in-law of mine — of the bitch that I am, / a cause of evil, a curse and abomination — / it would have been better that when my mother first bore me / some evil storm wind had suddenly whirled me off / to the mountains or into the swell of the load-roaring sea / where the waves would have swept me away before all this happened.” into Helen’s mouth (this was taken from Stephen Mitchell’s translation — I wasn’t super keen on his rendition of The Odyssey, but his Iliad is fantastic. I think a lot of why I liked his Iliad much better than his Odyssey is that he writes action so well; the Iliad obviously gives him a lot more of that to work with), which does not seem like something she would have said. Equivalently, Rama is the victor in the Ramayana, which I think allows us to view Ravana’s dialogue, and even Sita’s attitude toward Ravana in the myth, with a skeptical eye), Rama and his brother clearly provoked the abduction of Sita.

Rama, his wife, and his favorite brother were living in a forest. Ravana’s sister, a sexually-empowered woman, happened by and thought the brothers were cute. Most variants of The Ramayana feature this woman, Surpanakha, propositioning the brothers in turn. Which obviously had to be punished: it’s unacceptable for women to be so wanton! (I should emphasize that I’ve referred to Supranakha as a woman, and generally refer to Ravana as a person also, even though they are often termed “ogres.” My word usage reflects that same oft-discredited theory that Ravana’s people are stand-ins for the Dravidians of south India, who were conquered by Caucasians from the north at about the same time as The Ramayana was written) Here’s a quote from Bhatti’s poem “The Death of Ravana,” translated by Oliver Fallon:

“He is without a wife; I am married. He will be a more fulfilling husband for you,” said Rama. “Go to him and do not leave him.” She lusted after Lakshmana and came at him again like a cow to a large bull, her mind unbalanced by the flight of Love’s arrows. As she sat splaying herself, Rama drew his sheathed sword ready to slash and rendered her face noseless.

To me, that passage brings to mind Susan Brownmiller’s thesis from her work “Against Our Will.” The idea that violence against women, particularly rape, is used as a tool to keep them from exceeding certain sphere’s of life that’s it’s deemed acceptable for them to participate in. Brownmiller has a lot of astute analysis in her book, along with a number of citations from literature to provide examples for her case; for instance, here’s a quote from “Miss Lonelyhearts,” Nathaniel West’s bleak novel about a newspaper advice columnist in New York, that Brownmiller brought my attention to:

One of them was complaining about the number of female writers.

“And they’ve all got three names,” he said. “Mary Roberts Wilcox, Ella Wheeler Catheter, Ford Mary Rinehart…”

Then someone started a train of stories by suggesting that what they all needed was a good rape.

“I knew a gal who was regular until she fell in with a group and went literary. She began writing for the little magazines about how much Beauty hurt her and ditched the boy friend who set up pins in a bowling alley. The guys on the block got sore and took her into the lots one night. About eight of them. They ganged her proper…”

“That’s like the one they tell about another female writer. When this hard-boiled stuff first came in, she dropped the trick English accent and went in for scram and lam. She got to hanging around with a lot of mugs in a speak, gathering material for a novel. Well, the mugs didn’t know they were picturesque and thought she was regular until the barkeep put them wise. They got her into the back room to teach her a new word and put the boots to her. They didn’t let her out for three days. On the last day they sold tickets to n—–s…”

Miss Lonelyhearts stopped listening. His friends would go on telling these stories until they were too drunk to talk. They were aware of their childishness, but did not know how else to revenge themselves.

Obviously this is an extreme example. But Brownmiller’s general point is that whenever men feel like the perquisites of their gender are threatened, sexual assault has generally increased. And the strategy often succeeds: a response to the well-publicized cases of sexual assault in India was to curtail the freedoms of women, ostensibly for their own protection. And even more often, women curtail their own freedoms out of fear. In that article, women discuss feeling compelled to dress more conservatively than they’d like. They stay in at night. They curtail other behaviors: Koss & Dinero studied predictors of sexual aggression in college males and found , unsurprisingly, that most sexual assaults were preceded by consensual kissing. As I think most people expect, the biggest dangers for sexual assault against women aren’t from strangers, but from people they know. Which is awful: for instance, the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network has tips on reducing your risk of being assaulted, but a major piece of advice is “avoid isolated areas.” That can be tricky on dates. It can be tricky if you’re not safe at home: here’s a passage from the end of dream hampton‘s beautiful, harrowing essay in the volume “Black Cool“.

“Marvel and two other tall boys were yelling through our heavy wooden locked door, through the thunder and rain, for my brother to open up. I told my brother he better not even think of it. My brother looked at me, on the stairs, and then again through the window, where Marvel was threatening his life should he not open the door, and he did something that still makes my heart sink: He opened the door and let the outside in. The three boys, who were all older than sixteen (I’d learn this later, from Friend of the Court documents) pushed my brother aside the moment he cracked the door and chased me upstairs, where I was hoping to lock myself in my room and use the fire escape ladder my dad had bought me to run to my neighbor Ms. Erma’s, across the street. I remember having that plan in my head. But they ran faster than I did. And were stronger. And they threw me on the bed in the playroom, where Bo sat frozen, and pulled off my panties. There was an attempt, many attempts, to pin me down, to keep my legs from kicking, but I would not stop kicking. I kicked and I punched and I screamed and I spat and I squirmed. …. …. I’ve told this story three times. To my two best friends and to a lover I trust. In my sister circle where I sit, or the many friendships where my girlfriends have asked me to witness the telling of their own rape stories, I’ve stayed silent. I always feared my not being raped because I refused to stop fighting would seem an indictment of their stories. But I don’t feel that way. I don’t believe they weren’t strong enough or should have fought if they didn’t or that their rapes were in any way their fault. But I never tell my own story, because of a kind of survivor’s guilt. That, and the deep contempt I hold for Bo and my brother.”

Then, of course, there is the fallout; will a victim of sexual assault have even the minor consolation of seeing her assailant brought to justice? Which obviously has important implications for the safety of others: those who commit sexual assault tend to be very likely to do it again. But reporting sexual assault has been very difficult throughout history, has often resulted in further harm done to the original victim, and rarely results in justice. Here’s a single example to start off with: submitting a rape kit is an arduous process, but some victims go through with it hoping to keep others safe. DNA testing is relatively inexpensive and could identify patterns of repeat assault and in some cases directly identify criminals. Unfortunately, ending sexual assault has not been a high priority for police departments in the United States, judging by their behavior. After women went through the ordeal of submitting a kit, many many kits have gone untested in this country. That is, police put the bagged samples onto a shelf in the back of their evidence room and simply forgot about it.

Or there are the trials themselves, if a sexual assault case even makes it to trial. Which, right, because women have often been considered property and not people in U.S. law, has its own set of peculiarities. Like, if you’re a victim, you don’t get a lawyer. You are simply a witness on behalf of the state: the government charges the perpetrator on your behalf. And there are no rules regarding the sort of personal information that can be raised about witnesses in the courtroom. Witnesses have few protections, any and all personal details about them may be introduced in the courtroom, and in many sexual assault trials they can be sharply berated — while crying — on the witness stand. I discussed some of this for trials with child witnesses in an earlier essay about a similarly horrible topic; you should feel free to read that too if you’re not yet miserable enough. But, right, defendants, i.e. those who commit crimes and then go to trial, have many more protections. For instance, even if a defendant’s past shows behavior that might persuade the jury that this person might be inclined to commit sexual assault — such as past instances in which the person did commit sexual assault — that information is not allowed to be introduced into the courtroom. Despite all the data showing the prevalence of repeat offenders, a jury is not allowed to know whether the accused in fact is a repeat offender.

But the trials are less horrible for victims than they used to be: here is a passage from Martin Van Creveld’s “Wargames“:

The most famous case of this kind unfolded in France in 1385-6 and is known to us from Froissart as well as numerous other sources. The story started when Marguerite, the young and beautiful wife of a Norman nobleman, Jean de Carrouges, told her husband that during his absence from their chateau she had been raped. The perpetrator was one Jacques Le Gris, another nobleman well known to the couple. Though inferior in rank, he was wealthier and well-connected. Carrouges’ first step was to ask for justice at the hands of the local count. Having failed to get it, he went to Paris, consulted a lawyer, and begged the youthful King Charles VI to allow him to confront his enemy in battle. The matter was ferred to Parliament which launched a formal inquest, and after several months’ deliberations granted the request: clearly it was felt that, in the absence of witnesses, combat was the only way to find out the truth. Preparations were made to hold the event at Saint-Martin-des-Champs, a well-known Paris monastery. Its extensive grounds included a large field long used for the purpose and capable of holding as many as 10,000 spectators.

On December 29, 1386 a huge crowd gathered. In attendance were the king, his uncles, members of the high nobility, senior prelates and magistrates, and thousands of others. The most important spectator was Marguerite herself. Dressed in black and seated in a black carriage, she would face immediate execution (by burning) for bringing false accusations if her husband lost his fight.

Right. Let that sink in a moment.

And, here. As a tiny treat — because, look, I realize this essay is unpleasant, but I’m actually showing a good deal of restraint in terms of not citing numerous other unpleasantries — here are a few details about how the above contest would transpire, also from Van Creveld’s work:

“In all this, great care was taken to ensure equity and what today might be called transparency. Each protagonist had to swear a solemn oath that his case was just [which, right… minor note… you noticed, I assume, that it was the victim’s husband who was involved in the “trial” in the preceding passage, right? That’s because his property was damaged. It’d be senseless for the woman to testify on her own behalf because she was an object, owned by her father if unmarried and owned by her husband if married. Widows have often faired ill through history, and had a strong incentive to remarry]. In case he lost, that meant he would automatically be held guilty of perjury as well. Things were so arranged that neither combatant would have the sun in his eyes. The use of concealed weapons was prohibited. So was wearing magic prayers and charms on one’s body; if it is true that the combats were understood as the judgement of God, it is also true that supernatural interference was forbidden and, to the extent possible, prevented.”

Okay. The ancient judicial system strip-searching people for charms to make sure that no angels or demons would interfere with a fight… that’s something I can contentedly ponder. Much happier than thinking about Marguerite having to watch her husband fight her rapist to the death, knowing that if her husband lost people would declare her accusation to be slander and burn her alive.

Which, just in case you were wondering, her husband won. She lived.

But others didn’t.

Of course, in my own work I’ve permitted myself a little fantasy in making my world less bleak than our actual world has been and, in many ways, still is. Because it’s crushing, honestly: so far I’ve managed to type out only about a third of my planned essay on violence against women, and that feels like more than enough for today. So, yes, there’s this horrible stuff in my book, but it’s unrealistic in that it’s not awful enough. I hope that’s okay.

Frank Brown Cloud

Justice through words.

Tag: Homer

On translation.

On bread.