What occurred in the museum lootings in Iraq and how significant is this on a historical scale?

There is wholesale looting day and night and illicit digging at major sites, and it marks one of the most horrendous instances of cultural destruction of a society in history. There is no parallel to it. We in the field are heartbroken. Iraq represents the culture in which world civilization as we know it developed, the first places where writing and cuneiform were established. This is a major loss to world civilization and not just Iraqi or Mesopotamian heritage.

The situation of the looting of the National Museum in Baghdad is a bit confused. The big news is that a great number of the artifacts were hidden before the war and that the level of theft in the museum was nothing close to what had been thought. It’s not that there were hundreds of thousands of artifacts stolen—some of the major items are in hiding, and the Iraqi Antiquities Authority has not revealed their whereabouts to anyone, including the Americans. But in the looting that did take place, many things of importance were taken: thousands of mostly small items that could be grabbed on the run, as it were.

One positive development is that an American archaeology salvage group was awarded $2 million to start recovery operations at certain sites under the funding of the USAID [U.S. Agency for International Development]. But we’re talking very modest forms of support. There are some very serious people giving a lot of attention to the problem, but how they will ever get on top of it without major resources being devoted to it, I don’t know. It’s a very sad story.

— Eric Meyers, the Bernice and Morton Lerner Professor of Judaic Studies, is a past president of the American Schools of Oriental Research, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the archaeology and cultural studies of the Near East

Reading List

We asked professors of foreign languages and literature:
What is your favorite book by a foreign author and which English translation is best in capturing the true spirit of the original?

Thomas Pfau, associate professor of Germanic languages, says he’s fond of Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg, The Magic Mountain, translated by John Woods. “A study of European society on the eve of World War I, it focuses on a Swiss mountain sanatorium for patients suffering from tuberculosis,” says Pfau. The Woods version, he adds, is an achievement “infinitely more careful and readable than the old Helen Lowe-Porter translation.”

Assistant professor of Korean Hae-Young Kim recommends Land (T’oji) by the female Korean writer Park Kyong-ni. Park’s 7,000-page epic, published in serial form over twenty-five years (1969-1994), chronicles Korean history from pre-colonial times through Japanese colonization and liberation from Japan. “As you read, you feel transported. You experience it intimately,” says Kim. The size has intimidated translators, but the first two volumes have been made available to the English-speaking world by Agnita Tennant.

Poetry in India is not yet a bookish thing, says Satti Khanna, associate professor in Hindi. “It is sung.” Fortunately, someone wrote down the poetry of Kabir, “a weaver and a madcap mystic who lived by the Ganges 600 years ago.” Kabir “jams casual speech up against cosmic perspective,” he says. “His more mystical writing is difficult to translate, but Robert Bly has a very beautiful touch in The Kabir Book.”

La Celestina by Francisco de Rojas was among the many recommendations from Margaret Greer, professor of Spanish and Latin American studies. Only a Spanish-speaking audience will truly appreciate this one, she says. “No translation comes close! Rojas plays with and invents language as did Shakespeare.”

“ The Idiot—who could not love a title like that?” asks Jehanne Gheith, associate professor in Slavic languages. “Dostoevsky poses great questions about whether it’s better to act or not act in life.” The best translation Gheith is aware of is by David Magarshack. “You can’t get the same things out of the English, but you can get something equally good, sometimes better.”

--compiled by Patrick Adams