[B-Greek] The music of Homeric verse
Carl Conrad
cwconrad2 at mac.com
Mon Apr 20 14:32:57 EDT 2009
Upon some reflection on the consequences of reading the passage in
question, Iliad 1:34
βῆ δ’ ἀκέων παρὰ θῖνα
πολυφλοίσβοιο θαλάσσης·
[BH D' AKEWN PARA QINA POLUFLOISBOIO QALASSHS]
using the pronunciation of Modern Greek, I'm struck by how much of the
sound of the original is lost, even if one does retain the rhythm of
the dactylic hexamer, with the leveling of vowels and diphthongs into
the sound of an Iota:
"Bee d' akeon para theena poleefleesbeeo thalassees."
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
On Apr 20, 2009, at 6:16 AM, Carl Conrad wrote:
> Maybe I just want to see if our list software is still working after
> the hiatal silence of the weekend. While what I call attention to is
> admittedly tangential to the study of Biblical Greek and the Biblical
> Greek text, it is a tangent that I have consistently heretofore urged
> B-Greekers to pursue, on grounds that, for readers of any Greek
> literature, the Homeric poetry is a wellspring deserving of fresh
> visits by mid-life learners as well as old codgers like myself.
> Michael Gilleland's blog-entry of April 19 is entitled "Para Thina
> Poluphloisboio Thalasses" (παρὰ θῖνα
> πολυφλοισβοῖο θαλάσσης = PARA QINA POLUFLOISBOIO
> QALASSHS) -- "along the strand of the much-roaring sea." I can still
> vividly recall the first time I encountered, as a sophomore in the
> fall of 1953, this recurrent formula in line 34 of Book 1 of the
> Iliad, where the aged priest of Apollo, Chryses, cursed and sent off
> fruitless in his endeavor to ransom his daughter, Chryseis, makes his
> way despondently over the sands of the Trojan littoral. It is a
> majestic-sounding roll of syllables, and it constitutes one of the
> reasons why it is worthwhile reading more than a restricted corpus of
> texts composed within a century and a half of the long life-span of
> Greek literature. At any rate, the snippet cited by the Laudator
> Temporis Acti is from a traveler''s reflections on ways in which the
> ancient Greek experience of the sights and sounds of the sea found
> echoes in the music of Homeric poetry:
>
> http://laudatortemporisacti.blogspot.com/2009/04/para-thina-poluphloisboio-thalasses.html
> = http://tinyurl.com/cv4jed
> tp://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-greek
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