Essay / Art

Making Comics with Scott McCloud

by Fred Sanders on

Cartooning is an art form that communicates with great immediacy. We don’t rely on comics for the best literary writing of all, and we don’t look to cartoonists to be the greatest visual artists. Good as the writing and art may be in a comic,

Essay / Art

Moby-Dick: Inscrutable Tides

by Fred Sanders on

(Spoiler alert: the whale is mean and the captain is crazy.) What a book is Melville’s Moby-Dick! Everyone knows that it’s a whopping leviathan of a novel. There are almost four hundred words just in the titles of the chapters. Melville, rarely subtle, spends more

Essay / Art

On Great Artistic Ages (Like the Athens of Aeschylus)

by Fred Sanders on

How did Aeschylus do it? His plays are so powerful and engaging that he will never lose his place in the front ranks of dramatists. We only have seven of his plays extant —a tenth of what he produced— but even if we had only

Essay / Art

“Empowered Am I to Sing” This Translation Literal

by Fred Sanders on

In 1877, renowned poet Robert Browning published a translation of the play Agamemnon by Aeschylus. Or perhaps “translation” is not quite the right word for it –on the title page, Browning claimed credit not for translating, but transcribing. Since the transcription crossed the language barrier