Can you teach me everything you know about Roman goddesses?

October 17, 2014 12:39 AM

In the American version of his autobiography, Klaus Mann uses the metaphor of Jupiter and Minerva to talk about his maternal grandparents. In the German version, he changes this to Jupiter and Juno. It seems that Jupiter and Juno are married (but are also siblings. ick), while Minerva is basically Jupiter's daughter, so Juno is a more appropriate goddess to name in the metaphor. Am I missing something?

I'm trying to work out whether this change is merely a result of fact checking and realising that the husband/wife relationship of Jupiter and Juno is more accurate when talking about his married grandparents, or whether there's some significance to Minerva in the German context or Juno in the American context that would explain why he made the change.

I'm really unfamiliar with Roman mythology, so any links to good resources are especially appreciated!

Thanks

posted by kinddieserzeit to Society & Culture (19 answers total)

Completely different myths.

Jupiter(Zeus) fucked around and Juno(Hera) took revenge on several of the women.

When Jupiter found out that the children (sons only?) of Metis( Minerva/Athena's mother )would be far stronger than and would destroy him, he swallowed Metis but she was already pregnant with Minerva, who was gestated in his head.
posted by brujita at 12:54 AM on October 17, 2014

Roman mythology is pretty much similar to Greek.
posted by brujita at 2:36 AM on October 17, 2014

What is he saying about his grandparents? That might provide a clue.
posted by Omnomnom at 2:38 AM on October 17, 2014

I.e. I can't well imagine a description of a person in which Minerva and Juno are interchangeable, but what was he actually saying about the person?
posted by Omnomnom at 2:40 AM on October 17, 2014

Minerva/Athena is explicitly a virgin - making a pretty poor fit for a married couple analogy. I'm guessing KM had a brain fart, and corrected it later.
posted by Dr Dracator at 3:14 AM on October 17, 2014 [1 favorite]

Did Klaus Mann translate the text himself or did another person translate it? Is that other person an actual real preson or a pseudonym?

I am asking because I know Peter Hoeg translated Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow/Smilla's Sense of Snow himself (cannot remember if he did the UK or US version) and some things were significantly different in the Danish/UK/US versions.

It's worth looking into the translation process - did KM alter the things himself personally, did the translator or did the translator by fact-checking with KM? By knowing that, you'd have a better shot at understand the change in "characters" too.
posted by kariebookish at 3:46 AM on October 17, 2014 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Klaus Mann wrote The Turning Point in 1942 in American exile in English and then translated the text/adapted it into German in 1948. He worked partially from a raw translation that his sister worked on for him (which he supposedly not happy with) and reworked the rest himself.

The actually quotes are:
"Is there anyone who does not know who Ofey and Offi* are? You might as well not know the name of Jupiter and his relationship with the goddess Minerva." / "Gibt es irgend jemand, der nicht weiss, wer Offi und Ofey sind? Man koennte ebenswohl fragen, wer ein gewisser Jupiter war und was er mit einer Dame namens Juno zu tun hatte."

*nicknames for the maternal grandparents.

The context is that he's saying that his grandparents were so important in his life that he can't believe that not everybody knows them. It's a strange metaphor in the American text, I think, because I don't think as many Americans pay much attention to mythology, at least not to the same extent that a Germam intellectual would.

So far I have put the change down to correcting himself (/his sister pointing out the error?) But because this project is due soon and i'm overthinking everything, I thought I would check to see if anyone here could add some insight.
posted by kinddieserzeit at 5:32 AM on October 17, 2014

Response by poster: I think I'm having a brain fart of my own and misusing the word metaphor. Ugh. Hopefully the quote from the text makes everything a bit more clear :)
posted by kinddieserzeit at 5:37 AM on October 17, 2014

So he's just saying that his grandparents should be just as well known as the relationship of Jupiter and ____. You could assume that he's trying to draw a parallel between the two relationships, but since the one example is the just two people and the second is of the relationship, it's not a strong comparison.

Perhaps he just realized in the later edition that people would be more likely to know the relationship between Jupiter and Juno (husband and wife, whose marriage is repeatedly strained by his infidelties which result in many Gods/children), than they would be to know the relationship between Jupiter and Minerva (father and daughter, while fundamental, only the subject of one myth).
posted by polexa at 5:58 AM on October 17, 2014 [3 favorites]

I think that the relationship of Jupiter and Minerva (the whole jumping out of his head thing is only one of the versions) is more complicated and less well known than that of Jupiter and Juno (sister and wife). If the German version is the later one, he may have wanted to make himself clearer. Essentially he is saying that everyone knows what's up with J/M or J/J and this is not a safe assumption either way.
posted by Omnomnom at 6:05 AM on October 17, 2014 [2 favorites]

The myths were given equal weight in the D'Aulaires book for kids. Was it translated into German or do German speaking kids read a similar book?
posted by brujita at 7:18 AM on October 17, 2014 [1 favorite]

It's difficult to know if he wanted to change the dynamic or if he had genuinely made a mistake in the US version. However, I see he's also swapped Offi & Ofey around. Interesting - my German's rusty so I cannot see how that changes the emphasis (is there a syntactic reason for the change?) but combined with the change in mythology, that might be worth looking into? Ack, I'm being pernickety.
posted by kariebookish at 7:58 AM on October 17, 2014

> Perhaps he just realized in the later edition that people would be more likely to know the relationship between Jupiter and Juno ... than they would be to know the relationship between Jupiter and Minerva

I agree with this.

> Roman mythology is pretty much similar to Greek.

Not as much as you probably think, and in any case whatever similarity there is is utterly irrelevant since no Greek gods or goddesses are involved here.
posted by languagehat at 8:56 AM on October 17, 2014 [1 favorite]

Well, it depends a bit on how the relationship between the grandparents is portrayed in the book, but I'd lay dollars to doughnuts he just had a brain fart and meant Juno. Jupiter and Juno have an epically contentious relationship, and the problems between them and legends about them are all husband-wife problems --- Jupiter's sleeping around, Juno's jealousy, their fights. As far as I recall, Minerva and Jupiter have a much more paternal relationship --- occasionally she sneaks around and dies something behind his back that pisses him off, but mostly it's more doting father-adored daughter stuff.
posted by Diablevert at 9:18 AM on October 17, 2014 [1 favorite]

I suspect you are reading too much into this. I think it would be like saying "If you are a mefite, how can you not know who cortex is?" and later changing it to "How can you not know who pb is?"

I don't think he is implying anything about how they interacted, just that Jupiter was related to Minerva and also related to Juno and, OBVIOUSLY, "everyone" knows who Jupiter is and should know he is related to _____. And, yeah, maybe just "Oops, maybe Minerva isn't so well known. Let's try something more commonly known."

I spent my childhood listening to my dad's war stories. I kept waiting for his name to show up in one of my history books at school. I am 49. I am still waiting. It took me a long time to realize that was not terribly realistic, that he was not some big name general or whatever and he was simply not famous. So I can empathize with what I think he is saying and I think it is solely expressing a sense of astonishment that other people did not know these two figures who loomed so large in his own mind.
posted by Michele in California at 10:37 AM on October 17, 2014 [1 favorite]

If he is saying his grandfather screwed around on his grandmother, then Juno.

If he is saying his grandmother was his grandfather's daughter, then Minerva.

Minerva might also be apt if there's some kind of "sprung fully formed" analogy going on, since people say that Athena/Minerva sprung fully formed from the head of Zeus/Jupiter. But even so, as a writer I'd be wary of making this allusion to a person's spouse, since, again, Jupiter/Minerva is definitely a father/daughter sort of relationship. If I wanted to imply that a man molded the personality of his wife, or that his wife's character was particularly similar to his own, I'd probably go for more of a pygmalion analogy than an "Athena sprung fully formed from the head of Zeus" type of thing. Similarly, if I were trying to allude to incest, I would probably go for "Lot's daughters" and not anything from the Classical pantheon at all.
posted by Sara C. at 10:46 AM on October 17, 2014

Minerva = intellectual, strategic, thought-based
Juno = powerful, jealous, with great emotional depth, dangerous
(I agree with Michele that we are completely overthinking this pantheon of Gods, but it is a fun question.)
posted by Omnomnom at 1:25 PM on October 17, 2014

Response by poster: Just to reemphasis: I totally misused the word metaphor, because I don't think he's using the figures to make a comment on the nature of their relationship, he's really just making a comparison to show how he thinks everyone should know who his grandparents are. I think that it probably is just as simple as Juno being more well-known.

Thanks everyone.
posted by kinddieserzeit at 3:48 PM on October 17, 2014

Best answer: Another voice for this probably being just a mistake. I'm a Roman archaeologist and I made exactly this mistake in a presentation I gave this Thursday - got caught up in other things, read Minerva on my slide, and then said, "of course the Romans called her Juno. Wait. No. Whatever." and had to move on. Oops.
posted by AthenaPolias at 8:45 AM on October 19, 2014 [2 favorites]