CLAS 532
April 28, 2025

Odilon Redon, The Cyclops (1914)

Leonard Cohen, “Ain’t No Cure for Love”; Roxy Music, “Love is the Drug”; Elise Larres’ Idyll 11

Reminders:

• Tonight (11:59pm): Exercise #3 due in D2L
• May 5 (in-class): Performance/Reading of either your Exercise #2 or Exercise #3 project
  
  
  

1. Hall, “Navigating the Realms of Gold: Translation as Access Route to the Classics”

• history of translation: what gets translated, what doesn’t?
• historical beneficiaries of translation & social functions of translation? (mass marketed series: Everyman’s Library, The Modern Library, e.g. “Complete Greek Tragedies”, eds. Grene & Lattimore, Penguin Classics, etc.)
• colonialist Classics & traditional view of “(il)literacy”; elite preparation for administering England’s empire; translations as mark of weakness, “(samizdat) cribs” (crib, “manger of a cattle stable”), trots & ponies (e.g. Loebs); cf. philologist’s idea of studying Greek, not Greece (“Greece and not Greek is the real object of our study”)
  
• symbiotic role of performances in translation history
• role of translation in 21st century classical studies curricula?
  
  Hall’s conclusion:
  “Exploring the history and role of mass-market translations, disinterring long-forgotten vernacular versions of classical authors, appreciating the importance of performance as access route to the classics, and applauding the hard work and courage of pioneers in the field could therefore all have a significant role to play in breaking down the sort of prejudices that, in an era of fast-expanding higher education, lead to the study of the ancient Greeks and Romans being discarded altogether. For translation history conducted along the lines suggested above can create a sense of tradition by dispelling the notion that the study of Greek and Latin, and translation from them, have been dominated by the minority of very well-educated men—plus a few exceptional women—who could enjoy the leisure for private reading, and were somehow mysteriously endowed with an accordingly refined sensibility. Far more people have historically desired (and have been able to satisfy their desire for) access to the thoughts and texts of the ancient Greek and Latin speaking inhabitants of the Mediterranean through translation into modern languages than through reading them in languages of their original composition.” (p. 333)
  
  
• Keats (1795-1821), On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer (1612 translation); “Homer, three thousand yeares dead, now reviv’d” (Chapman, “The Epistle Dedicatory”); Chapman’s Homer, Iliad (vol. 1, with “The Preface to the Reader”: “But there is a certain envious windfucker, that hovers up and down, laboriously engrossing all the air with his luxurious ambition and buzzing into every ear my detraction − affirming I turn Homer out of the Latin only, etc. − that sets all his associates and the whole rabble of my maligners on their wings with him either become his wife or his maidservant”, Pref. A4)
  
  
  Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
  
  And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
  
  Round many western islands have I been
  
  Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
  
  Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
  
  That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;
  
  Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
  
  Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
  
  Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
  
  When a new planet swims into his ken;
  
  Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
  
  He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men
  
  Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
  
  Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
  
  

2. Reviews

• Theocritus
  Segal on Rist (U. of Toronto Quarterly, 1979): unique challenges of translating Theocritus (multiple registers, landscapes, imaginative worlds, subtle humor, etc.); objection to misinterpretation of Idyll 11.78 ὑπακούσω in “Many a girlie calls me out to play with her at night, / and when I do their bidding, don’t they giggle gleefully” (p. 397)
  Ojennus on Verity (BMCR, 2004): classroom skopos, generally distinguishes Theocritus’ registers of diction, less focus on equivalence of specific formal elements (metrical, rhetorical)
  
  
• Vergil
  Clauss on Slavitt (BMCR, 1990): why do this to Vergil’s Eclogues when the 70s are over? (too much Slavitt’s personal responses to poems, not enough Vergil)
  Rose Nagle on Krisak (BMCR, 2010): emphasis on musicality & other formal elements, marked language, (alliteration, assonance, anaphora, irregular rhymes, etc.) intertextuality (English poetry); literary translation for non-specialists
  Rose Nagle on Krisak & Van Sickle (Translation Review, 2012): reiterates praise for Krisak’s poetry & intertextuality; scholarly Van Sickle’s 288pp. as the Eclogues’ “Nabokov” of thickly annotated translation (etymology, grammatical closeness)
  Nisbet on Lee (Classical Review, 1980): Mum’s the passive-aggressive & ironic word! (“The result is elegant, readable, and close to the Latin, or close enough to be worth reacting against”)