THE GLORY AND THE GRANDEUR

...Read imaginatively, the study has an epic quality—its subject is nothing less than the whole impact of classical literature upon that of Western Europe from the first crude awakenings out of the Dark Ages and the otherworldliness of the Medieval dream until the last echoes of our own time, Eliot's momentary reminiscences, sung to "dirty ears": 'Jug, jug, Tei eu...

...The next morning his body lay in the corridor of the Gestapo building...

...Sometimes one wonders how it was possible at all that human beings could have been brought to a level at which they acted more like beasts than like humans...

...She gave refuge to a number of Jews, hid a wounded Russian soldier in her room, furnished Jewish fighters with grenades and even tried to smuggle herself into the ghetto...

...its pathetic acceptance of a role unrelated to the contemporary world...

...Schwarz translated and arranged them in three parts, each of which is dedicated to a specific area and activity...

...The story of Wladka Miedzyrzecki, a girl of less than twenty years, who smuggled arms into the ghetto and maintained contact with the "Aryan" side...

...WRITTEN FOR THE EDUCATED general reader...

...The fact that they withstood from April 19 until May 10, 1943, the full force of the Nazi SS Brigades, who used tanks and artillery against the rifles and home-made grenades of the defenders, speaks for itself...

...He suggests that something more than their resemblance to the Ciceronian tricolon unites such public utterances as "one third of a nation, ill housed, ill clad, ill nourished," "government of the people, by the people, for the people," and "blood, sweat, and tears.'1 When statesmen read Cicero they gain something more than style...

...Even military and political genius are not enough: Rome "stopped having new ideas," and this failure, more than Gibbon's, "triumph of Barbarism and Religion," spelt her ruin We, like Rome, have grown powerful through our peculiar genius...

...If Sartre, Cocteau and Valery, Eliot, Joyce and Gide turn to the classics, it is often because they are in search of "tough - minded" imaginative materials that illumine the dark places in contracted souls, materials that the contemporary imagination cannot of itself provide Civilization itself cannot stand save as Plato's "city of swine" unless it can conceive of itself as something more than accretions of money, power or possessions...

...This "something more" symbolizes the differences in dimension and equipment between the outlook of the educated and the uneducated man...

...We have received from Greco-Roman civilization...

...Grayek and Edelman fought in the uprising fought from house to house: "We are surrounded in an attic...

...Hours later, when the Germans have been driven out, we find Michal's body drilled like a sieve...

...Again the amateurs/ contribute the most — Arnold, Lang.XButler and Lawrence—but, "It seems HgaMthat future U-anslations of classical J4o/>ks must, in order to reacri ' the publif'that needs them, master and expand (the new poetic style which Eliot has done most to develop...

...They knew only too well that they did not stand any chance at all, and that their human fortress must become their grave...

...Other readers dependent upon translations will be intelrested in Professor Highet's discussion, of modern translations and the inadequacies of Gilbert Murray's insipid Greek versions...

...his eyes were pierced, his arms broken and his hair burned...

...Reviewed by FRED VIRSKI NO MATTER HOW MUCH ONE READS and hears about the Nazi bestiality toward the "inferior" nations and races during the years of war, every new experience shocks and fills with horror as much as the first one...

...Learning meant little to him unless he could translate it into living human terms...

...It involves a concomitant responsibility: "The real duty of man is not to extend his power or multiply his wealth beyond his needs, but to enrich and enjoy his only imperishable possession: his soul...

...The first part is dedicated mostly to the fighting during the Warsaw and Vilna ghetto uprisings, and to the resistance movements in the forests of White Russia...

...No literature, no idea is dead that still stimulates thought and produces results...

...Leo Schwarz, after a prolonged tour of Europe and Palestine, gathered vast material which includes some thirtyfive memoirs of the surviving members of the Jewish resistance movement, of people who miraculously escaped death in the ghettos of Warsaw and Vilna, of inmates of the various c oncentrtaion camps scattered through the face of Europe...

...Only occasionally Professor Highet commits that minor scholarly sin, the pedantic quip: "Shakespeare's bitter play (Troilus and Cressida) is therefore a dramatization of part of a translation into English of the French translation of a Latin imitation of an old French expansion of a Latin epitome of a Greek romance...

...Michal Klepfisz throws himself right on the top of the German machine-gun, firing •from behind the chimney...

...Edited by Leo W. Schwarz...

...Later, she established contact between the ghetto and a Polish group, supplying arms to the ghetto...

...Rinehart & Co...

...The selection titled "The Epic of the Warsaw Ghetto" tells us of men and women who, facing inevitable doom, decided to die with arms in their hands...

...Only the pedants in his plays quote classics, and yet what riches of imagery, situation and character are derived from a few authors known well —Ovid, Seneca, and Plutarch enrich in immeasurable ways such dramas as Julius Caesar, Cymbeline, Anthony and Cleopatra, The Tempest, the Comedy of Errors, and even the British plays yield rich classic imageries...

...But only continual creativity, generated out of the clearly understood ideals of our civilization can withstand the twin perils of a new barbarism and a new pagan religion...

...Nothing more on the part of the "armed beasts" could have surprised their victims...

...Throughout the work he emphasises the connections between style and character, between history past and history in the making, between what has been the total educational heritage of men and their response to crisis...

...Richard Archer U studying at the Harvard Divinity School...

...And so, pictures resembling masterpieces of Goya slide through before the eyes of the reader...

...The failure of classical scholarship to be alive, influential and humane in the last half century Professor Highet blames directly upon its cultivation of research rather than interpretation, acquisition rather than the dissemination of knowledge, and...

...explorations...

...In our own age of increasingly expert and specialized scholarship, it is heartening to note the simplicity and unpretensiousness of Shakespeare's "small Latin and less Greek...

...3.75...

...Many of the stories overlap any literary value...

...Nevertheless, this record of courage and hope cannot be ignored...

...One feels in these words the lack of any astonishment at the fact that one could be struck with a whip...

...Forty thousand of these heroic people fought with utmost endurance, courage and sacrifice...

...THE STORY of Itsik Vitenberg, commander of the United Partisan Organization — when facing an ultimatum either to surrender himself to the Gestapo, or to have the Vilna ghetto bombed from airplanes as a reprisal — took leave of his comrades and gave himself up to the Nazis...

...The story of the Mother Superior of the Benedictine nunnery near Vilna is most touching...

...Only the pitifjJl remnants of the heroes found Uj|ir way to life, crawling through the sewers to the "Aryan" side of town...

...The Germans are right there, in the same attic, and we cannot reach the stairs...

...the second part depicts hair-raising examples of mass annihilations which took place in various parts of Eastern Europe and the instances of miraculous individual survival...

...An Odyssey of Horror THE ROOT AND BOUGH—The Epic of an Enduring People...

...Reviewed by RICHARD ARCHER THERE IS RIGOR and simplicity in the structure of the Classical Tradition...

...In detailing the incredible odyssey of ideas and forms, images, myths and styles as they penetrated modern Europe from the classical literature of Greece and Rome, Professor Highet's account is frequently as exciting as a novel, always stimulating, and often sharp and witty in its criticism...

...Fred Virskl Is the author of My lift in the Red Army...

...Bernard Goldstein, a member of the Bund (General Jewish Labor Union), gives an account of the period of the organization of the resistance movement...

...Twenty-four neat chapters contain centuries of rich material —four on the Dark and Middle-Ages, seven on the Renaissance (containing a particularly excellent study of the brilliant amateur, Shakespeare), half a dozen on the Baroque period, a superb section on the Romantic era (Professor Highet prefers, "The Time of Revolution"), with the remainder on the modern period including an acute treatment of the Symbolists and James Joyce, and a sympathetic account of the work of the contemporary neo-Hellenic French playwrights...

...360 pp...

...a priceless legacy...

...ULTIMATELY, GILBERT HIGHET'S book has a missionary purpose over and beyond its zestful scholarly one...

...T. S. Eliot has remarked that Shakespeare had a particular ability "to extract the utmost possible from translations...

...Shakespeare was saved from being merely an "Ariel warbling his native vvoodnotes wild" by his lively amateur interest in the classics...

...The Classical Tradition contains numerous stimulating sections of special interest...

...For example, his comment on the French Baroque critic and poet, classicist Nicolas Boileau, would satisfy the most iconoclastic: " 'What wise and sacred drunkeness This day overmasters me?' --cries Boileau: but he knows perfectly well that he is stone sober, and determined to write a Pindaric ode...

...even the wildest beasts have some kind of jungle decency, some sense of honor and fair play, but all of these were completely absent from the brains and souls of the Huw murderers...

...In the -md it is the "moral" dimension that concerns Professor Highet...

...Finally, the Germans "saved their military honor" by setting house after house on fire...

...There are tales of people from every walk of life told in half a dozen languages...

...Such translation will have to overcome the modern hostility between scholarship and literature, a hostility grounded in the incompatibility between the broad and humane literary imagination and the "scientific" exactitude of specialized studies, that fragmentation of classical study into erudite little "original" papers and sepulchral Ph.D...

...We do not notice Sewek, Dunski and Junghajzer crawl up the stairs, get behind the Germans and throw a grenade...

...But even this pedantic tour de force summarizes the pattern of almost incredible combinations and permutations of classical literary influence...

...I felt a sharp pain in my head and then realized I had been struck with a whip," he says, describing one of the raids at the time of the mass deportations...

...All we see is that a path has been cleared...

...Finally the third, perhaps most horrifying and at the same time most touching, are stories written by children ranging in ages from eight to sixteen...