Letters

Emily Wilson, reviewing Aaron Poochigian’s translations of four comedies by Aristophanes, claims that the playwright’s works are ‘full of obscenity’ and complains that Poochigian undersells this aspect of their language (LRB, 21 October). In doing so she reinforces the common misapprehension that the plays are more linguistically ‘obscene’ than they really are. Take two examples. Wilson suggests that the term kopros was much closer to ‘shit’ than ‘manure’ – Poochigian’s choice in a context relating (sarcastically) to feeding chickens. But kopros was a standard term, even in polite discourse, for animal excrement. More pointedly, Wilson thinks ‘linguistic realism’ would have been better served by frequent use of ‘cunt’ instead of ‘twat’ (another of Poochigian’s choices). But there is only one term in classical Attic which can legitimately be deemed to match the force of the c-word, and in Lysistrata, to which Wilson’s comment is directly linked, it occurs just once. Most references to female genitalia in Aristophanes involve euphemistic metaphors and/or slang; one can argue about the various registers to which they belong, but lumping them all together as obscenity displays a blunt judgment of linguistic tone.

The Isle of Sheppey, described by Patrick McGuinness as ‘a stereotype of terminal England and insular Englishness’, has a fixed place in my childhood imagination (LRB, 21 October). Though only twelve miles from where I grew up, to get there you had to make a perversely sharp turn off the A2 (which was heading sensibly to Canterbury), and into a timeless estuary world whose coastal outpost was the scuffed seaside resort of Sheerness.

This was the first place my mum trusted me to go by train without her. Naturally, my friend Patrick and I bought a dozen eggs and had a fight on the seafront. There was an ancient coin-operated telescope, whose one purpose was for gazing out at the tilted masts of the SS Richard Montgomery, which, as McGuinness relates, foundered on a sandbank in 1944. Mum used to go on boat trips around the wreck soon after the war. Whenever someone remarks that the explosives on board could obliterate Sheerness, the response is an unkind or self-deprecating joke about the place.

There is no consensus about either Sheppey’s decrepitude – Uwe Johnson, the subject of McGuinness’s essay, exalted the town’s emotional resilience – or the chances of Kent acquiring its own Pompeii. Many – including the US government, which in theory still owns the Richard Montgomery – believe that the cargo of TNT and bombs is getting safer as it degrades. But there’s no denying that if the ship did go up it would be the one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history.

‘When an experimental result is described as statistically significant,’ John Whitfield writes, ‘that usually means a statistical test has shown there is a less than 5 per cent chance that the difference between that result and, for example, the corresponding result in a control experiment is attributable to random variation’ (LRB, 7 October). Not quite. It means that under the assumption the results are entirely due to random variation, one would obtain a difference at least as extreme as the observed difference less than 5 per cent of the time. This (unfortunately) is not the same thing as the chance that the difference is attributable to random variation. This distinction bores many people – including researchers who calculate p-values. So, practically speaking, the real meaning of p<0.05 is usually ‘Thank god, now we can publish the paper.’

John Whitfield notes that Tucker Carlson ‘cited a preprint posted on ResearchGate claiming that the Wuhan wet market suspected of being the origin of the outbreak was close to a coronavirus research lab’. The Wuhan seafood market is in fact close to two institutions that conduct research on coronaviruses in animals: the Wuhan Jiang’an Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The preprint – ‘The Possible Origins of 2019-nCoV Coronavirus’ by Botao Xiao – was retracted because physical proximity alone is flimsy circumstantial evidence for a laboratory-leak theory, especially given how incendiary this claim was in February 2020.

Describing Richard Wright’s reception by the French left, Adam Shatz writes: ‘Though Sartre and Beauvoir were fellow-travellers, they were willing to overlook his hatred of Soviet communism’ (LRB, 7 October). If Sartre could legitimately be described as a ‘fellow-traveller’ in 1952, that certainly hadn’t been the case in the late 1940s, when Sartre (and Wright) were supporters of the Rassemblement démocratique révolutionnaire (RDR), which explicitly rejected both ‘the rottenness of capitalist democracy’ and ‘the limitation of communism to its Stalinist form’. As Wright put it in 1948, ‘Mississippi gave me my body; the Russian October Revolution gave me my heart. But today these two giant nations … are outdoing each other in efforts to establish plans to brutalise the human spirit.’

Wright’s account of his experiences in the Communist Party of the USA was published in Sartre’s Les Temps modernes in July 1949 and was included in the notorious Cold War anthology The God that Failed. When the RDR drifted towards a pro-American position, Sartre and Wright resisted. They boycotted an RDR meeting but sent a joint message with Merleau-Ponty which was read out to much applause: ‘We condemn equally and for the same reasons the more or less disguised annexation of Central Europe by the USSR and by the Atlantic Pact.’ This wasn’t a question of ‘overlooking’. At this time Sartre and Wright shared a ‘third camp’ opposition to both sides in the emerging Cold War.

Caroline Campbell describes St Sebastian, in Antonello da Messina’s painting (c.1475-79) for the Venetian church of San Giuliano, as ‘tied to a tree in the middle of the image; the arrows shot at him have pierced his flesh, but haven’t yet killed him’ (LRB, 7 October). If they had it would have been a grave error. The efficacy of Sebastian’s image in helping supplicants endure the plague rested on his survival as an archery target, like an urchin ‘full of pricks’, as William Caxton had it in his translation of Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend of 1483. Sebastian was revived by Irene of Rome.

The discrepancy between ecclesiastical tradition and artistic iconography can be interesting. St Sebastian’s transformation – from the middle-aged Praetorian guardsman of Church history into the handsome plague-prophylactic and youthful pin-up of late medieval Church painting – is a good example. His final reputed martyrdom, a consequence of heckling Emperor Diocletian, came from being stoned to death and his body flung into the cloaca, (‘great privy’ in Caxton); a more challenging pictorial subject for Antonello, in whatever medium.

Thomas Jones’s account of Milman Parry’s work on Homer raises the problem of whether the poet of the Iliad is also the poet of the Odyssey (LRB, 7 October). Douglas Young, one of the few professors of Greek who was a fine poet (in Lallans) published an incomparable article in 1959 showing how the recent arguments of Denys Page, a not unpompous Regius Professor of Greek, could, if applied to a more recent work, conclusively demonstrate that the author of Paradise Lost could not have written Paradise Regained.