Re: In the middle of an epic western ...

From: Mary L B Pendergraft (pender@wfu.edu)
Date: Fri Jul 24 1998 - 09:59:47 EDT


This question bothered enough people that its discussion became an FAQ on
CLASSICS-L archives:

http://weber.u.washington.edu/~lwright/uvafaq.html

Mary

At 09:20 PM 7/23/98 -0400, Carl W. Conrad wrote:
>Page 348 of the paperback edition of Larry McMurtry's _Comanche Moon_: A
>Harvard-educated Captain of the Texas Rangers who has been captured by an
>ageless Mexican torture artist and put into a cage held over a steep cliff
>to die begins to imagine ways of keeping himself alive and keen; with a
>tiny file that he has come upon by chance he starts to carve into the face
>of the rock cliff beside him the Greek hexameters of Homer describing the
>watch fires of the Trojans from the Iliad:
>
> hOI DE MEGA FRONEONTES EPI PTOLEMOIO GEFURAS
> hEIATO PANNUCIOI, PURA DE SFISI KAIETO POLLA. ...
>
>I am an avid reader of some kinds of popular fiction, mostly mysteries, but
>I eat up novels by some writers such as Ann Tyler, John Irving, and Larry
>McMurtry. I was enthralled by McMurtry's great western epic, _Lonesome
>Dove_, when it appeared several years ago and while enjoying a rip-roaring
>story kept pondering the strange Latin motto that recurs in it:
>
> UVA UVAM VIVENDO FIT ...
>
>It doesn't make a lot of sense: a nominative, an accusative, a gerund, and
>a verb that can't take a direct object--and yet the line suggests something.
>At any rate, I've snapped up each of the sequels and prequels of _Lonesome
>Dove_ as soon as they were published as paperbacks, which status _Comanche
>Moon_ finally reached a couple weeks ago. I am enjoying the story
>immensely, even if it is not all that edifying; nevertheless, the last
>thing I expected to find in the middle of a western epic was the Greek text
>of a celebrated passage of Homer.
>
>My apologies to those who will have noted at once that this message has
>absolutely nothing to do with the Greek New Testament; I just felt that
>this was a surprise worth sharing with someone who might conceivably share
>my astonishment.
>Carl W. Conrad
>Department of Classics, Washington University
>Summer: 1647 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
>cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu
>WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/
>
>---
>B-Greek home page: http://sunsite.unc.edu/bgreek
>You are currently subscribed to b-greek as: [pender@wfu.edu]
>To unsubscribe, forward this message to
leave-b-greek-12310N@franklin.oit.unc.edu
>To subscribe, send a message to subscribe-b-greek@franklin.oit.unc.edu
>
>
>
>
Mary Pendergraft
Associate Professor of Classical Languages
Wake Forest University
Winston-Salem NC 27109-7343
336-758-5331 (NOTE: this is a new number) pender@wfu.edu



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Sat Apr 20 2002 - 15:39:54 EDT