[B-Greek] Modern Greek pronunciation for poetry
Jeremy D. Brightbill
jeremy_brightbill at sall.com
Tue Sep 20 06:57:53 EDT 2005
Bert de Haan wrote: "Obviously I am in a different league than either one of
you, (I am a boy scout and not a marine.) If I try to read it in meter I
have no idea what I am reading. I have not found that the hexameter
sustains itself in my mind. I would love to hear someone read a page or so
of the Iliad with an organ in the background playing the pitch and the vowel
length. I enjoy reading the Iliad without getting the meter but it would be
great if "getting" the meter would increase the enjoyment.
Bert de Haan."
Oh, you would enjoy it ten times more with the meter! I don't know where I
fit on the Boy Scout to Marine continuum :) but I've found that learning to
read Homer with the meter is *definitely* worth the investment. In Homer,
the meter is everything! (Perhaps an overstatement, but still....) The
poems were originally oral compositions, and the bards would improvise on
the spot as they stood before the audience. This was possible because they
started with a pool of stock phrases that would fit at different parts of
the hexameter line. A lot of the phrases don't have much meaning in
themselves, but you see the genius of the poet as you read line after line
and see how he fits the phrases into the metrical system to carry the story
forward.
As others have mentioned, it's quite difficult to read the Iliad
with pitch and vowel length, but it's not so hard to pronounce the verse
ictus as stress. I used Clyde Pharr's "Homeric Greek" textbook, and he
recommends memorizing the first 50 lines of the Iliad in order to get the
meter in your head. That worked really well for me.
This might be getting off-topic for B-Greek, so I'll just mention
two sites that have good resources: www.aoidoi.org and www.textkit.com. The
latter has a discussion forum for people who are learning Homeric Greek.
Jeremy Brightbill
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