Homer
I have been unusually quiet since I got back to Toronto, which is a good sign, because it means I am too well-occupied to hang about online honing my deathless prose. Last term spending two hours blogging I regularly considered preferable to the alternative, i.e. two hours spent on Polybius; and who will disagree? This term I am being kept off the internet by the fact that it is my delicious duty to read the best poem ever composed by man (at least in any of the four and a half languages I read, which I concede may not be the final word there. However.) I have been in seventh heaven, not a description usually associated with a routine that involves rising at 6am, but this is a positive pleasure for the sake of starting my day with a few more lines of Homer before breakfast. To say that The Iliad is brilliant would be like saying that Miles Davis can play the trumpet. On the other hand, I don't know if I could say anything about quite why The Iliad is so marvellous that wouldn't sound ingenuous and affected. Answers on a postcard.
The dismal thing is that my terrible didactic streak and offensive glee make me desperate to get everyone else to read it and see what I mean. But I don't know if it's any good in English. It probably doesn't come off the worst of any classical work in translation (the Aeneid surely takes that laurel), but I do think that the limpid beauty and deceptive simplicity of the Greek do a lot to make, say, the battle scenes palatable. Not to mention that scenes of any emotion come over crushingly flat once you translate them. I'm told there's a similar problem with Pushkin. Then you have the issue that people won't render certain phrases the way you think they ought, so that the greatest half-line in all of Homer (Iliad 1.47) should, as far as I'm concerned, be "and his coming was like the night" and I get quite cross with translators insufficiently telepathic to anticipate my disgust at their ineptitudes.
Anyway, I doubt I could do better in any sustained way, so I will spare you translations of my personally compiled florilegia (really, what's wrong with me?) and just say that if you can read Greek you must go to the OCT and read the last 200 lines of Iliad VI this very minute; and if you can't read Greek then be grateful that by the end of term I will be back to gnashing my teeth over things I don't understand. And blogging furiously...
The dismal thing is that my terrible didactic streak and offensive glee make me desperate to get everyone else to read it and see what I mean. But I don't know if it's any good in English. It probably doesn't come off the worst of any classical work in translation (the Aeneid surely takes that laurel), but I do think that the limpid beauty and deceptive simplicity of the Greek do a lot to make, say, the battle scenes palatable. Not to mention that scenes of any emotion come over crushingly flat once you translate them. I'm told there's a similar problem with Pushkin. Then you have the issue that people won't render certain phrases the way you think they ought, so that the greatest half-line in all of Homer (Iliad 1.47) should, as far as I'm concerned, be "and his coming was like the night" and I get quite cross with translators insufficiently telepathic to anticipate my disgust at their ineptitudes.
Anyway, I doubt I could do better in any sustained way, so I will spare you translations of my personally compiled florilegia (really, what's wrong with me?) and just say that if you can read Greek you must go to the OCT and read the last 200 lines of Iliad VI this very minute; and if you can't read Greek then be grateful that by the end of term I will be back to gnashing my teeth over things I don't understand. And blogging furiously...
posted by Scarlet at 5:54 am
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