There are several reasons Virgil is considered the greatest Latin poet: His poetry is a beautiful portrayal of human emotions, his words that describe actions and events are so mesmerizing that one would forget about the significance of these events.

The Aeneid, the result of eleven years of composition, that Virgil didn’t live to complete and ordered to burn before his death but which was published later against his wishes, is Aeneas’ journey from Troy to Italy chasing his destiny to find the Roman race in Italy.

Then, as now, there was a struggle to win a relatively unimportant prize. The main theme of the Aeneid is who will marry Lavinia. The cause of the Trojan-Latin struggle is a woman; the main theme of one of the greatest pieces of literature is a woman (talk about treating women as objects) . Sadly it seems to me that all human efforts such as literature, creativity, wars and struggles are driven by desire for power and conquest.
In the Aeneid, the Gods, just like humans, are rivals who avenge each other over perceived wrongs and who focus on individual glory, but with the power to use others as their tools to achieve their goals. Minerva, the Goddess who protects the Greeks during the Trojan War and helps them conquer Troy, was driven by her anger towards Trojan Paris’s judgment that announced Venus as the most beautiful among goddesses.
Oddly enough, the reason for the Trojan war in the Aenied is not much different than the reason for the war in Homers’ Iliad, where a woman, Helen, was the cause of a crazy war(in this story, Venus played a feminine/evil game to get the title of the most beautiful Goddess).

In 19 B.C., the Aeneid was A tale of vengeance, power, desire, love and prophecies, that is not substantially different from today’s’ tales of craziness. At least then, the words were charming and had some meaning.

Zip file of the entire book 393 MB

Westfahl’s essays in Science Fiction, Children’s Literature And Popular Culture, range widely over American children’s and YA popular entertainment, starting with a little known children’s series but covering Superman, Horatio Algier and the Hardy boys, SF film (esp. the fifties) Star Trek and even music video in the context of film and advertising. Westfahl, a well known SF critic, allows himself more free-play in these essays. His playfulness gives rise to many intriguing speculations, connecting popular culture phenomena in convincing but previously unarticulated ways.

I greatly enjoyed each of the essays, even the first one about a now-obscure children’s series that features a too good to be true boy called Charlie (”How Topsy Made Charlie Love Him,” from the Better Homes and Gardens Story Book), which he analyzes from a developmental and a feminist perspective. The chapter “Giving Horatio Alger Goosebumps,” supplements the Sands and Frank book referenced above with critical perspectives on both production and marketing and social contexts for YA series fiction. “Opposing War, Exploiting War: The Troubled Pacifism of Star Trek,” should be read alongside Bartter’s essay in Sullivan’s collection, listed below. “Legends of the Fall: Going Not particularly Far Behind the Music,” offer basic analyses of MTV and VH1 stories of rock star legends, asking basic questions about their accuracy and comparing different ‘kinds’ of stories told about these famous people. My favorite essay is “Even better than the Real Thing: Advertising, Music Videos, Postmodernism and (Eventually) Science Fiction.” In this essay, he describes for us the similarities in the stories told within advertising on the media. Media-based advertising for products tells stories within which the products are set, just like music videos which are used to promote artists and to promote music sales, and film trailers use some of the same techniques to summarize or condense the film, telling a story about it that may or may not be true.

Westfahl makes a convincing argument for their inter-related development (similar to the critical argument made by Palumbo on comic books in the Sullivan collection) and this is only one of several insights provoked by this essay. As Westfahl’s fifth through eleventh chapters emphasize, there are many more intersections between media which can be productively explored, from the realization of written as film to the expansion of television SF through written series fiction. More than any other sub genre, SF has adapted itself to the new media and made them an intimate link in the definition of the genre. The links between fiction and other popular culture phenomena are pervasive, fascinating, and in need of further attention. Thus, in addition to addressing age-based demarcations of SF, the critical works address defining moments in the history of SF are we know understand it’s ability to expand and adapt to changing tastes, habits, and indeed needs, of its audience.

Westfahl does not attempt a summary chapter, but ends with an analysis of The Time Machine and its many permutations in cinematic productions, giving us, by example, a socio-historical perspective on the film industry that also reflects on the history of science fiction. Since Wells’ story is so tied up with the history of SF as a genre and with all the media carrying the SF story, including radio, television and film, the final essay does give us some sort of summary in that it covers the earliest and the latest forms for the story.

Zip file of the entire book 59.0MB

The Jumping Frog is an interesting tale, but this book is more about the difficulties of translations than about the Jumping Frog itself. You can probably find the Jumping Frog in other collection of Twain’s books, so don’t bother to buy this book if you are only interested in the tale. It is only a three-page tale.

To make a long story short, the Jumping Frog was translated into French with the objective of demoralizing Twain’s humor. Obviously, the humor in this tale was more in between the lines and in the form it was written than about the story itself (which was silly and not funny.)

As Twain says, however, the translator “has not translated it at all; he has simply mixed it all up; it is no more like the Jumping Frog when he gets through with it than I am like a meridian of longitude.” To prove his point, Twain proceeded to translate the French translation “back into a civilized language” [i.e. English] to show that the French translation did not do justice to his work.

This book has the original tale in the first pages, then the French translation, and then the English version of the French translation.

It is more a personal vendetta from Twain than a work of literature. But it is an important work for those interested in translation.

Zip file of the entire book (31 MB)