GREEK MYTHOLOGY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 488, 29 October 1948, Page 18

GREEK MYTHOLOGY

GODS AND MEN. By Albert Dasnoy, trans. lated by Marjorie Villiers, Harvill Press, Londori. SENSITIVE people who lived under the German occupation in Europe found it natural to look backwards for sources of comfort. French writers, not

for the first time, made use of Greek tragedies, engrafting on their classic themes new affirmations of destiny and freedom., Albert Dasnoy, a Belgian painter, went beyond history and tragedy and amused himself b) reconstructing the myths through which the ancient Greeks explained the human situation. He also fitted them into a consecutive narrative, a task which could scarcely be successful amidst su¢h an embarrassment of material. There is, however, enough comment from the author to give the myths an interesting quality of newness-as if, in their passage through the mind of a man who was looking about him at a world which appeared to be declining into an earlier chaos, they had acquired a relationship between primeval and historic elements in western culture. This effect is occasional rather than pervasive; and perhaps it could not be otherwise in a translation, no matter how faithfully it has been done. It may be heightened, too, by the black and white drawings by Charles Leplae. copied from

Grecian vases,

M. H.

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