Word: arrowsmith
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...William Arrowsmith is a 42-year-old professor of classics at the University of Texas who smiles often, likes to shed his tie in class, melts coeds with his boyish good looks. He is the kind of professor, says a colleague, "who doesn't construe his life as one thing and his job as another-he wears his humanity on his sleeve." The gentle Arrowsmith also burns with the notion that education has been turning sour ever since the 5th century, and he is making himself one of the most caustic critics of academe in the 20th...
Director Thomas Babe has chosen to do the William Arrowsmith translation in modern dress, with Pentheus of Thebes looking something like a teenage Marshal Ky, and the god Dionysus a blond-haired cigarette-smoking James Dean. The first resemblance is most pointed; Babe interprets the autocratic, highly organized government of Thebes as a garrison--perhaps fascist--state, threatened by the earthly, irrational Dionysiac cult. The interpretation works in that Babe's production is exciting theatre, and in the end faithful to the original as well. Just the same there are points worth questioning...
...about the techniques of good teaching. "It's a myth that once a man gets a Ph.D. he's a good teacher," says Earlham College President Landrum Boiling. The stress on the Ph.D. is, in fact, under sharp attack for producing narrow specialists. University of Texas Classics Chairman William Arrowsmith says that "liberal arts colleges should have the guts to say to Harvard and Yale that they don't want any more overtrained, overspecialized Ph.D.s, many of whom are really incompetent to talk to undergraduates." University of California President Clark Kerr deplores the fact that "nothing is being done...
Critics will never admit it, and the reader's good sense denies it, but sometimes bad writing is best. Good writing would never have produced Eliza crossing the ice. Scarlet and Rhett. Ivanhoe. Amber, James Bond, Arrowsmith, Queeg's ball bearings, or any of the Bobbsey twins. The best and most enjoyable bad writing ever done by an American is Hemingway's in To Have and Have Not, but when some anthologist pastes together the definitive collection of Great Moments from Bad Novels, he should give a secondary dedication, at least, to Frederic Wakeman...
...fact that even Homer described all this in a flatter manner hardly disturbs Arrowsmith's co-editors, who include D. S. Carne-Ross, 40, onetime BBC editor, and John Sullivan, 32, a transplanted Oxford don who recently won a $1,000 prize as the best teacher at Texas. They view translation as reseeing and refeeling of structure and meaning. Carne-Ross argues: "The translator's job is to get inside the text, to work his way through the words and relive the informing experience which lies behind them." Poet Logue has done just that for The Iliad, says...