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Classics
Posts about Classics
READIN
READIN started out as a place for me
to keep track of what I am reading, and to learn (slowly, slowly)
how to design a web site.
There has been some mission drift
here and there, but in general that's still what it is. Some of
the main things I write about here are
reading books,
listening to (and playing) music, and
watching the movies. Also I write about the
work I do with my hands and with my head; and of course about bringing up Sylvia.
The site is a bit of a work in progress. New features will come on-line now and then; and you will occasionally get error messages in place of the blog, for the forseeable future. Cut me some slack, I'm just doing it for fun! And if you see an error message you think I should know about, please drop me a line. READIN source code is PHP and CSS, and available on request, in case you want to see how it works.
See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.
READIN has been visited approximately 236,737 times since October, 2007.
Alice Oswald has won the 2013 Warwick Prize for Writing for her astonishing Memorial. Here is the final scene of her vision of the Trojan War, the death of Hector:
posted evening of October third, 2013: Respond ➳ More posts about Iliad
Okay, who knew about this? I did not know about it and now I am blown away, stunned. This is the best thing ever. (Thanks for the link, Henry!)
In 1957, the Italian government commissioned Salvador Dalà to paint a series of 100 watercolor illustrations of Dante’s Divine Comedy, the greatest literary work written in the Italian language. The illustrations were to be finished by 1965, the 700th anniversary of the poet’s birth, and then reproduced and released in limited print editions. The deal fell apart, however, when the Italian public learned that their literary patrimony had been put in the hands of a Spaniard.
Undeterred, Dalà pushed forward on his own, painting illustrations for the epic poems that collectively recount Dante’s symbolic travels through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. After Dalà did his part, the project was handed over to two wood engravers, who spent five years hand-carving 3,500 blocks used to create the reproductions of DalÃ’s masterpiece.
I got interested in this passage yesterday... I was trying to find out more about Œdipus and about Thebes, and one of the references was to Pindar's second Olympian ode. That particular reference* didn't turn up so much of interest; but I found the beginning of the first Olympian ode enchanting. Diane Svarlien translates it as "Water is best, and gold, like a blazing fire in the night, stands out supreme of all lordly wealth." I don't know Greek, but let's see how this works. The Perseus Digital Library makes it easy:
ἄÏιστον μὲν ὕδωÏ: Water is best. This seems clear enough, I know "arist-" from its use in English, and "udor" is close enough to "water" for my ear. What does Pindar mean? That water is the most virtuous/noblest of the elements? It looks sort of like he's setting up water in opposition to gold; the lexicon at Perseus says μὲν ... δὲ can be rendered as "on the one hand... on the other hand" -- this does not come through in Svarlien's translation.
χÏυσὸς αἰθόμενον Ï€á¿¦Ï á¼…Ï„Îµ... νυκτὶ: Gold blazing just like fire at night.
διαπÏÎπει: It catches the eye.
μεγάνοÏος ἔξοχα πλοÏτου: It looks to me like this phrase is meant to modify "gold" -- it's not too clear to me what "meganoros" is meant to do -- maybe in English this could be rendered as "but then again gold, the greatest wealth of great men, catches the eye; it blazes just like fire in the nighttime."
What does it all mean? ...Pindar is setting up some standards of greatness, it looks like, and then he is going to say that the greatest of all is the exploits of the Olympic contestants. Today in the NY Times magazine, Gary Wolf uses a different superlative in a similar construction when he calls gold "the most primitive form of wealth" -- seems like you could argue against that assertion, but anyways it caught my eye on the heels of reading Pindar.
Another sort of amusing detail, for me anyways: AOTW one of the top Google hits for this passage is Belle Waring's post a few years ago at Crooked Timber about the badness of comments sections at various moderate-left political blogs.
* "In such a way does Fate, who keeps their pleasant fortune to be handed from father to son, bring at another time some painful reversal together with god-sent prosperity, since the destined son met and killed Laius, and fulfilled the oracle of Pytho, spoken long before." -- Svarlien's translation
Update: I found my copy of Lattimore's translation of Pindar. (Which also is online at archive.org.) His rendering of the opening lines:
Best of all things is water; but gold, like a gleaming fire by night, outshines all pride of wealth beside.
rings most pleasantly in my ears.
posted morning of May 14th, 2011: Respond ➳ More posts about Readings
I was happy to stumble upon Dion Chrysostom's 11th discourse, Maintaining that Troy was not captured. Kirill Yeskov cites Chrysostom as "the founder of this literary tradition of playing with others’ masks and backdrops" -- Chrysostom argues that Homer cannot be trusted as a reliable narrator, that the Achæans were in fact defeated at Troy. A refreshing read. Chrysostom's To Plato in defense of Homer has been lost to the ages.
"Or discendiam qua giù nel cieco mondo," cominciò il poeta tutto smorto. "Io sarò primo, e tu sarai secondo."
'Now let us descend into the blind world down there,' began the poet, gone pale. 'I will be first and you come after.'
In Borges' lecture on the Commedia, he says that his experience of reading the Italian text with a parallel, line-by-line translation taught him that "a translation cannot be a replacement for the original text: the translation may however serve as a means, a stimulus to bring the reader closer to the original." This seems arguable to me as applied to translations in general,* though I'm pretty sympathetic to the thought; but I think there's no arguing with the idea that this is the proper role for a bilingual edition of poetry, to bring the reader closer to the original, foreign text.
Last night Borges' lecture on Nightmares sent me off to review Canto IV of Inferno; I was reading it in the Princeton Dante Project's bilingual edition, and finding to my happy surprise that I could follow the Italian pretty well, using Borges' method of reading a tercet at a time slowly in Italian, then in English, then in Italian... This evening I wanted to take another look at the canto and sat down with Pinsky's translation (which is published as a bilingual edition), and discovered that a poetic translation does not serve the function of a parallel translation. Not recommended -- I am finding it strange that Farrar, Straus & Giroux thought it would be a good idea to print the original and Pinsky's translation side by side. Back to the bare-bones parallel translation for me, thanks. Below the fold is Vittorio Sermonti reading Canto IV -- his reading is slow enough and clear enough that I was able to follow along in the text and have a fair idea which word was which...
Sylvia and I spent some time this weekend reading stories from a college book of mine, Rhoda Hendricks' 1972 edition Classical Gods and Heroes: Myths as told by the ancient authors -- a good resource although I don't love her translations. Looks like we should find some good translations of Hesiod's Theogony and Works and Days to learn more about the early Greek myths. It will probably be a lot more difficult to learn anything about the early Roman myths, since all the Roman writing about mythology seems to come from well after the Hellenization process was underway. I would like to pick up a good translation of Metamorphoses though, Ovid seems to be a good story-teller.
Anyone who is interested in this stuff and has not read the comments to the previous post should do so -- Randolph reposted a great writeup there from Bryon Boyce.
posted afternoon of February 28th, 2010: Respond ➳ More posts about Sylvia
Arachne left the ends of her warp as a delicate fringe, while her border showed ivy interwoven with flowers.
Hers was a work whose merit neither Athena nor Envy could deny. The masterwork goaded the goddess into blind fury: she shredded the fabric and its catalogue of the gods' sins. Then, snatching a branch from an olive growing on Mt. Cytorus, she lashed Arachne's face thrice and a fourth time.
The miserable girl couldn't bear the shame; she went and hanged herself. With a hint of pity Pallas said to the dangling corpse, "Live -- but for your sins, continue to hang. Your whole line will pay the same punishment."
Having spoken, Pallas sprinkled Arachne with magic herbs. At the touch of this dire elixir, Arachne's hair fell off and with it her nose and ears. Her head shrank, and then her whole body became small. Instead of legs, her wizened fingers projected from her sides, and the rest of her became all belly -- from which nevertheless she spins thread and as a spider continues the work of her loom to this day.
Sylvia's class is doing a unit on Greek mythology; she has as reading homework a pagelong summary of the story of Arachne -- she was telling me about it this morning and we agreed that it leaves out way too much detail... Before lunch, we looked up Ovid's telling of the story, which I have not read in many years; I was amazed all over again by it, and Sylvia was interested and receptive. What an extraordinary story-teller! I am thinking the summary-for-schoolkids probably has to leave out all the gods posing as animals to impregnate mortal women stuff,* which is kind of the heart of this story, and Arachne committing suicide by hanging herself is probably similarly verboten... The story's kind of weak when you take all that out.
* (It just said something to the effect of, "Arachne's weaving showed the gods behaving poorly and made fun of them," and that the gods being angry at this is why she was transformed into a spider.)
I've been reading some stories from Angel Flores' Spanish Stories/Cuentos Españoles, a facing-pages bilingual edition of Spanish short stories from Don Juan Manuel to Goytisolo. It's kind of a tricky book to recommend other than to someone learning Spanish -- for which purpose it is extremely useful -- because the translations are close to literal, rather than literary. They serve their purpose very well, of allowing me to cross-reference when I do not understand a bit of the Spanish; but if I were just reading the English I think I would look for a more polished translation. Anyways, I am loving the book and I recommend it if you find yourself in a similar position to me, interested in acquainting yourself with the literature and language of Spain.
I'm a bit surprised by how well I can understand the old Spanish of Lazarillo de Tormes -- I am not worrying too much about recognizing verb tenses, generally it is just enough to recognize that a word is some form of a particular verb, and I can get the rest from context. The text uses a whole lot of subjunctive preterites and second-person plurals which I'm pretty unfamiliar with... Lazarillo de Tormes (you can read a bilingual edition of it here, by a translator who apparently wishes to remain nameless) is according to Flores (and confirmed by Wikipædia), the first instance of Picaresque literature. Neat! I'm not real well acquainted with this genre beyond Don Quixote and The Adventures of a Simpleton... Lazarillo is fun and entertaining but did not really draw me in, I think the narrative voice just sounds too stilted for me to really get into it -- by way of comparison the first few pages of Cervantes' La fuerza de la sangre (one of his Novelas exemplares, which you can read here) have me falling in love with his clear voice -- I have only read him in translation before, I think when I am a little better at reading Spanish I need to try Don Quixote in the original, or in a bilingual edition if such a thing exists.* Cervantes was writing only a few decades later than the author of Lazarillo so I definitely think the stilted quality of the latter is a product of the author rather than of his age
*A bilingual e-book of Part I of Don Quixote is available for free download from Fusion Bilingual eBooks. Also there is an abridged bilingual edition from Anglo-Didacto which comes with a CD of readings; my first impulse is to be skeptical of the claim that the updating of archaic forms has been "done with profound respect to the Spanish text as well as its translation in English, [and] only emphasises, more if possible, the magic of Cervantes' pen."
In his playlist today, Dave Barber includes a recording of Caroline Bergvall reading the first stanza of the Inferno, in every English translation found in the British Library.
I've assembled a playlist of Bergvall readings so they're all in one place. You can download it from box.net. (Click "download folder" to get all tracks zipped, for a faster download.) The tracks are:
