In other news...

[ricardienne]

So I was reading Persians this afternoon (as one does). And between the meters (The first chorus in IONICS and I love ionics!) and trying to puzzle out what the heck was going on, it becomes easy to forget how weird Aeschylus is. That is to say, A.E. Houseman wasn't making it up at all. (You should really click that link, by the way).

Exhibit A: (Department of Redundancy, and this translation is actually a little close to the original word order)

κυάνεον δ᾽ ὄμμασι λεύσσων
φονίου δέργμα δράκοντος,

(a Blue-black [glance] with his eyes gazing,
a bloody snake's look)

Exhibit B: (Or: why I hate spatiality in classical poetry -- can you guess what this refers to?)

τὸν ἀμφίζευκτον ἐξαμείψας
ἀμφοτέρας ἅλιον
πρῶνα κοινὸν αἴας

(Crossing over the yoked-on-both-sides outcrop into the sea common to both lands)

Exhibit C:

πότερον τόξου ῥῦμα τὸ νικῶν,
ἢ δορικράνου
λόγχης ἰσχὺς κεκράτηκεν.

(Whether victory is {in} the drawing back of the bow, or whether the strong point of the spear-helmet will prevail.)

Comments

[agh-4.livejournal.com]

Oh my!

I read the part about boots at the beginning, and I thought "Eugenides!" but most of the rest of it, I think, went over my head. Far over. And I wasn't even translating it.

I could sort of imagine the chorus, though. It would be cool to hear it recited. Thanks!

(And I give up. I have no idea what the yoke thing refers to!)

[ricardienne.livejournal.com]

(the link goes to a parody of Aeschylus, written by a major classicist to make fun of how ridiculous things can get & how badly and literally people tend to translate it)

(the yoked thing is the bridge across the Hellespont...which I only got because I had a paragraph-long note about it including a rewriting of the passage into a semblance of normal word-order.)

I am actually really in favor of Persians right now, since it's the play about the Persians after they were defeated at Marathon and Salamis -- I like to imagine that it is a preview of what will go down in the Mede Empire after Eugenides & co. resoundingly defeat them and they have to crawl back home to say "well, invading them was a really stupid idea, wasn't it?"