Poetry
Posted: October 20th, 2017, 6:27 pm
Last couple of days I've been looking at Agamemnon's address to his daughter Iphigenia Aulidensis 1255-1275. It isn't terribly difficult. The syntax makes sense if you stare at it long enough.
Wondering what it would have been like for Euripides to translate Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Autobiography (1958, Coney Island of the Mind) into Attic.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/ ... 221842ab9d
I first encountered this poem in a significantly reduced prepublication recension, in Ralph Gleason's Jam Session 1958. The book fell directly from heaven and landed face down on a rain wet street in Seattle during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I got off my bicycle picked it up, took it home and packed it around with me for a very long time. I knew about Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Herbie Mann, Dave Brubeck, Milt Jackson, Paul Desmond, Thelonious Monk but Ferlinghetti wasn't writing about any of these folks. What did Ferlinghetti have to do with jazz? He was a bookseller who earned a doctorate from Sorbonne University Paris.
Looking at this again this morning, I think it would be almost impossible to translate this poem and this leads to question about reading ancient Greek authors. Why do we expect to be able to read and understand these texts? I picked up Jam Session several years after it was published on the west coast in San Francisco a culture very much like Seattle. The fascination with the poem was a combined response to the flow of the words, rhythm of the lines and the obscure references on almost every line. I understood enough of it. But there was a long list of references to unknown people, places and events. It took me half a century to discover the significance of Dover Beach. Matthew Arnold wasn't a popular poet in the 1960s. I will never know why Ferlinghetti changed the wording "ignorant armies" in Jam Session to "educated armies" in Coney Island of the mind.
So why do I expect to be able to read and understand Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus?
Wondering what it would have been like for Euripides to translate Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Autobiography (1958, Coney Island of the Mind) into Attic.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/ ... 221842ab9d
I first encountered this poem in a significantly reduced prepublication recension, in Ralph Gleason's Jam Session 1958. The book fell directly from heaven and landed face down on a rain wet street in Seattle during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I got off my bicycle picked it up, took it home and packed it around with me for a very long time. I knew about Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Herbie Mann, Dave Brubeck, Milt Jackson, Paul Desmond, Thelonious Monk but Ferlinghetti wasn't writing about any of these folks. What did Ferlinghetti have to do with jazz? He was a bookseller who earned a doctorate from Sorbonne University Paris.
Looking at this again this morning, I think it would be almost impossible to translate this poem and this leads to question about reading ancient Greek authors. Why do we expect to be able to read and understand these texts? I picked up Jam Session several years after it was published on the west coast in San Francisco a culture very much like Seattle. The fascination with the poem was a combined response to the flow of the words, rhythm of the lines and the obscure references on almost every line. I understood enough of it. But there was a long list of references to unknown people, places and events. It took me half a century to discover the significance of Dover Beach. Matthew Arnold wasn't a popular poet in the 1960s. I will never know why Ferlinghetti changed the wording "ignorant armies" in Jam Session to "educated armies" in Coney Island of the mind.
So why do I expect to be able to read and understand Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus?