Gal Beckerman

So it's a kind of linguistic guide in a sense.

We did a show a few months ago with the American writer Gal Beckerman about how to be a dissident.

Again, a very interesting book.

You're probably familiar with Gal and the work.

There is always this sort of Aesopian speech.

Yeah, so

it's probably not surprising, certainly in Gal Beckerman's book, How to Be a Distant, perhaps, His most attractive model is Vaclav Havel, the Czech dissident playwright, of course, a man of words, as well as other Czechs like Kundera writers.

And of course, again, don't need me to tell you this, Dan, this is manifested not just in works, but not just in words, but in all kinds of artistic expressions.

[singing] Hello, everyone.

Back in April of this year, we did a show with the cultural political historian Gal Beckerman, works for The New York Times, about becoming a dissident.

He had a new book out back then, it's done rather well, How to Be a Dissident.

He included 10 features in dissidents, including pessimism, humor, recklessness, and immortality.

Uh, for sure.

I mean, race science was a, a huge deal at the time, and obviously something she never bought into, and I think that kind of plays into why she really started studying the psychology and then the, the psychoanalys- a- uh, analysis of, of, of white supremacy, um, to examine how it affect, how it affected white people, how the shame and guilt and humiliation of their, you know, decades if not centuries of oppression and, and rape and murder of Black people really hurt white people in a profound way that we still don't even talk about in, in a very frank way today.

So what kind of dissident was she? As I, as I noted in the introduction, uh, Gal Beckerman has an excellent book, How to Be a Dissident, that talks about the qualities, if that's the right word, of, of dissidents, including humor, pessimism, immo- uh, immortality.

I mean, not every dissident of course conforms to his ten rules.

Dragging a 3,000-year-old poem into the present requires a choice.

Gal Beckerman watches a modern translator sweat over the exact rhythm of ancient Greek syllables, trying to make Homer sound just as urgent today as he did around a campfire.

Then there is a much more rebellious approach.

Iskander Raymond looks at a seventeenth-century French archbishop who simply stole Homer's characters and dropped them into a subversive political thriller meant to secretly critique his king.

When college students complain that the Odyssey is boring, translator Emily Wilson doesn't blame the ancient Greek story.

She blames English versions that drag on for twice as many lines.

In an interview published last week, Gal Beckerman catches Wilson explaining why she forces her own translations to match Homer's exact pacing.

Notice how she treats meter and length not as academic rules but as a direct cure for a bored reader.