Word: epical
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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When Fitzgerald's Odyssey won immediate acclaim as the finest English translation of Homer's epic, his reputation was already established by two volumes of original and translated poetry, and the definitive translation, in collaboration with Didley Fitts, of several Greek tragedies, including Sophocles' Oedipal trilogy and Euripides' Alcestis. As William Arrowsmith pointed out in his review of Fitzgerald's Odyssey in The Nation, Fitzgerald avoids a mere word-by-word rendering of the original poem. Rather, he totally recasts the Greek into English,...rethinking and reshaping the Greek by turning the thrust and power beneath the words rather than...
...text of Les Troyens was drawn from Virgil's Aeneid by Berlioz himself. It is an Iliadic arch that spans the siege of Troy, the death of the Trojan women and Aeneas' departure to establish Rome. Indisputably the most epic of all grand operas, it has not yet achieved the popularity of Boris Godunov or Otello, but it is on its way. Britain's Covent Garden has successfully done it twice. The earlier English production, in 1957, was the first full staging in a single evening that even approximated the composer's original intentions. (Berlioz broke...
...Antonioni and claustrophobic chamber works by Bergman. But the movie's greatest debt is not to the preceding era's prestigious portraits of European decadence but to the laws of the universe--the ways of the world--as the porno movie sees them. Ferreri's is a porn epic in the grand manner, a mordant, chilling, hilarious dirty movie that, for sheer audacious lubricity, out-tangoes "Last Tango in Paris" and almost gives the devilish Miss Jones a run for her money...
...seen Elia Kazan's film of East of Eden (1954) until last summer. I was stunned by its emotional power, particularly by the performance of James Dean in his first starring role. Though based on just a part of Steinbeck's giant novel, Kazan's film possesses an epic authority far beyond most American films. Ted McCord's camerawork is one of the first outstanding uses of cinemascope...
Even Latin Americans who challenged his political views found it hard to quarrel with the honor. In such works as the surrealistic poem cycle Residence on Earth, and the massive Canto General, an epic on the origin of the Amer icas, he proved himself to be the continent's most creative and authentic literary voice. In one of its best-known sections, The United Fruit Co., he mockingly writes of "Jehovah" parceling out the universe to "Coca-Cola, Inc., Anaconda, Ford Motors, and other entities," while the United Fruit Co. "reserved for itself: the heartland/ And coasts...