The Mandelbear's Musings

NOTE: This has been sitting, unfinished, in my pile of drafts for over two years. It got posted unintentionally during a test. So it's unlikely to be finished now. You can get some idea of where I was going from the notes.

I am no John Keats, and this isn't anything like a sonnet. But then, Emily Wilson's new translation of the Odyssey isn't anything like Chapman's, either. I think I know a little of how Keats felt, though, like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken. (Uranus had just recently been discovered when Keats wrote that.)

This book reads like a thriller. A page-turner. Plan on losing some sleep.

The original Odyssey consists of 12,110 lines of dactylic hexameter -- that's the natural rhythm of ancient Greek. The natural rhythm of English is iambic, and in particular iambic pentameter. That's what Wilson uses in her translation, keeping the same line count. And English is actually less compact than Greek in most cases. The pace is breathtaking.

OK, time for some examples. Here's how Chapman's translation -- the one that Keats was so impressed by -- starts out:

The man, O Muse, inform, that many a way Wound with his wisdom to his wished stay; That wandered wondrous far, when he the town Of sacred Troy had sack'd and shivered down; The cities of a world of nations, With all their manners, minds, and fashions, He saw and knew; at sea felt many woes, Much care sustained, to save from overthrows Himself and friends in their retreat for home; But so their fates he could not overcome, Though much he thirsted it. O men unwise, They perish'd by their own impieties, That in their hunger's rapine would not shun The oxen of the lofty-going Sun, Who therefore from their eyes the day bereft Of safe return. These acts, in some part left, Tell us, as others, deified Seed of Jove.

And here's Lattimore's version, which was considered the best modern translation when I read it in college half a century ago:

Tell me, Muse, of the man of may ways, who was driven far journeys, after he had sacked Troy's sacred citadel. Many were they whose cities he saw, whose minds he learned of, many the pais he suffered in his spirit on the wide sea, struggling for his own life and the homecoming of his companions. Even so he could not save his companions, hard though he strove to; they were destroyed by their own wild recklessness, fools, who devoured the oxen of Helios, the Sun God, and he took away the day of their homecoming. From some point here, goddess, daughter of Zeus, speak, and begin our story.

You'll notice he's using dactylic hexameter; it's only ten lines, the same as the original. Chapman uses seventeen lines of heroic couplets -- rhymed iambic pentameter. Here's what Wilson does with it (going halfway through the eleventh line in the process):

Tell me about a complicated man. Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy, and where he went, and who he met, the pain he suffered in the storms at sea, and how he worked to save his life and bring his men back home. He failed to keep them safe; poor fools, they ate the Sun God’s cattle, and the god kept them from home. Now goddess, child of Zeus, tell the old story for our modern times. Find the beginning.

Right from the start, you know you're in for a ride.

"Complicated", there, is Wilson's rendering of “polytropos” -- “poly-” (= "many"), “tropos” (= "turn"). You can see, in the quotes above, a few of the other choices. Palmer, in 1891, used "adventurous", and Alexander Pope in 1725 used The man for wisdom's various arts renown'd. It's also worth noting that Wilson says of Odysseus's men He failed to keep them safe. Odysseus isn't always what we think of as a hero -- among other things he lies repeatedly, takes unnecessary risks, cheats on his wife with Calypso and Circe (while expecting Penelope to remain faithful, of course), and can't resist sacking a few more cities on his way home. Scoundrel doesn't begin to cover it.

In an interview in The New York Times, Wilson says I wanted there to be a sense [that] maybe there is something wrong with this guy. You want to have a sense of anxiety about this character, and that there are going to be layers we see unfolded.

One also gets the sense that Odysseus might not be a reliable narrator. One wonders just how many of his adventures are real, given that most of them -- the Cyclops, Circe, Scylla and Charybdis, the Sirens, the bag of winds, the Underworld -- are recounted by Odysseus himself, in books 9-13. Margaret Atwood has a little fun with some of the more mundane alternatives in The Penelopiad, her retelling of the story from Penelope's point of view (which I highly recommend as a follower).

Ysabetwordsmith's Poetry Fishbowl is Open!. Go feed the fish! This is a bonus fishbowl; the theme is The Big One.

ysabetwordsmith's Poetry Fishbowl is now open! The theme this month is "History written by the losers." Go fishing!

At YsabetWordsmith's Poetry Fishbowl. Today's theme is "all creatures great and small."

From the Crowdfunding Creative Jam.

We called it Grand Central Starport.
It was our home for almost four decades --
We had parties, concerts, children, friends,
Laughter and tears, love and music.

We added a bedroom for each of our daughters,
And a ramp when Colleen lost her mobility.
There were more computers than people, 
Most of the time. We lined the walls with books.

I thought we would grow old and retire there.

It's up for sale now.

You can find it at 343LeighAve.com.

Ysabetwordsmith's Poetry Fishbowl is open!. I posted a prompt there.

A pretty good day, including a nearly 2-mile walk, and a full day of work on technical reports. Not just writing them; I'm also maintaining the group's document repository and web page. Kind of mindless, but fun.

Bears are easily amused.

On the way home I stopped at Whole Paycheck for dinner, and made coho salmon (baked with butter and lemon), mixed veggies (carrots, broccoli, and cauliflower, stir-fried in butter with garlic and crushed red pepper, then left to steam with a little white wine). Tasty. Then I fried up the salmon skin for a snack, and we had fried bananas for dessert.

And I left a prompt on ysabetwordsmith's Poetry Fishbowl, which ended up as one of the inputs to "A Song for the Road". I like it a lot -- go read.

Lots of links.

A good day. A walk, a couple of good insights, new meds for Colleen, music, conversation about poetry, music, and growing old... yeah. Good day.

I've already posted about the insight.

Naomi suggested that a lot of my free-floating anxiety (also see the Wikipedia article) may be due to the fact that I'm getting old, and starting to deal with a transition as unfamiliar and scary as becoming an adult in the first place. Yeah, there are probably some songs about growing old in my near future. They're my way of coming to terms with reality.

For today's link sausage we have Siegfried Sassoon -- a selection of his poems can be found here. He started out as one of the WWI poets, and later wrote about growing old. Detect a theme here?

Also, 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know - it will eventually become a book; right now it's a wiki, with the list of edited contributions here.

For some reason I'm feeling absolutely exhausted. It's also possible -- likely, even -- that I've had a little too much coffee. The fact that my current cup of it has a little Frangelico in it may help, but probably not enough.

Meanwhile the song I've been working on is threatening to become a rhymed sestina, and to turn from a song into poetry of the most intimate sort. I shall probably be forced to fork it. The form intrigues me greatly, though; the Wikipedia article points to a wonderful example[pdf] that expounds on its underlying group theory. (Aside: go check out today's xkcd. Not as far off-topic as one might think.)

My mind seems to make a fairly strong distinction between song lyrics and poems. Some poems can be set to music -- I've done it -- but they tend to remain recognizably poems.

Meanwhile, I'm about 2/3 of the way through The Dream of Scipio by Iain Pears, a book which presents its own fascinating difficulties for me. You see, it's historical fiction. In science fiction and fantasy, the genres that I'm comfortably familiar with, you can generally count on the author to give you all the information you need to make sense of the book. You are, after all, a guest in the author's private world: it's the author's job to make you feel at home there, at least by the time you get to the end.

The problem with historical fiction is that you're not in the author's private world: you're in this world's past. And history has been a subject I've mostly avoided, in my past. So there's always the question, when I run across a character or an incident in the book, of just how much is history and how much is fiction. And there's always the question of whether I'm missing something important by not knowing. As a result, I find myself spending a good deal more time in Wikipedia than I do with most of the novels I've read. Fascinating in its own right, if somewhat dangerous.

From patoadam, we get a link to this Guide to Verse Forms by Bob Newman. It's remarkable both in its completeness and the fact that Bob wrote all the examples himself to avoid copyright problems.