ellauri026.html on line 214: I had spent a summer in Greece while in college, travelling with a Greek text of the Odyssey, and I remembered in particular Odysseus’s final journey to Ithaca (the beginning of book 13; well worth revisiting as a specimen of Homeric narrative), the poetic effect of which overwhelmed me. Odysseus climbs aboard the ship and—forgive my literal translation—lies down, “in silence,”
ellauri026.html on line 225: The idea is there, but all the lingering emphasis in the original has been smoothed away. This, too, unfortunately, is typical of the whole. I have said that Wilson’s translation reads easily, and it does, like a modern novel: at shockingly few points does one ever need to stop and think. There are no hard parts; no difficult lines or obscure notions; no aesthetic arrest either; very little that jumps out as unusual or different. Wilson has set out, as she openly confesses, to produce an Odyssey in a “contemporary anglophone speech,” and this results in quite a bit of conceptual pruning. If you wait for the “Homeric tags,” the phrases that contained so much Greek culture they have been quoted over and over again by Greeks ever since—well, you are apt to miss them as they go by. A famous one occurs in book 24, when Odysseus and Telemachus are about to go into battle together: Odysseus tells Telemachus not to disgrace him, and Telemachus boasts that he need not fear. Laertes, Odysseus’s father, exclaims (Wilson’s translation), “Ah, gods! A happy day for me! My son and grandson are arguing about how tough they are!”
ellauri160.html on line 488: ⁶This phrase comes from Dartona's Homeric Hymns. The particular line appears in the "Second Hymn to Aphrodite." Scholars provide a variety of translations for the passage. Kearns's translation reads: "the high places [walls, fortifications] of Cyprus are her appointed realm" (25).
ellauri160.html on line 489: The Homeric Hymns (Ancient Greek: Ὁμηρικοὶ ὕμνοι, romanized: Homērikoì húmnoi) are a collection of thirty-three anonymous ancient Greek hymns celebrating individual gods. The hymns are "Homeric" in the sense that they employ the same epic meter—dactylic hexameter—as the Iliad and Odyssey, use many similar formulas and are couched in the same dialect.
xxx/ellauri114.html on line 593: After the 1995 finding of a Luwian biconvex seal at Troy VII, there has been a heated discussion over the language that was spoken in Homeric Troy. Frank Starke of the University of Tübingen demonstrated that the name of Priam, king of Troy at the time of the Trojan War, is connected to the Luwian compound Priimuua, which means "exceptionally courageous"."The certainty is growing that Wilusa/Troy belonged to the greater Luwian-speaking community," but it is not entirely clear whether Luwian was primarily the official language or it was in daily colloquial use.
xxx/ellauri199.html on line 893: In homage to the Greeks, who still defiantly call Neptune Poseidon, I started with the Homeric ‘Hymn to Poseidon’. This ancient song opens by acknowledging the earth shaker’s desolate domain, but ends with a trusting appeal to his better nature:
xxx/ellauri199.html on line 901: from The Homeric Hymns (Penguin, 2003)
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