Elinor Nauen

Jun 13, 2021 2:42 PM EDT

I've been reading Robert Fagle's Iliad translation for several years now! Got half-way through and put it aside (a very bad reading habit) and then decided after a lengthy period to re-start it. I actually have two, maybe three, other translations and it's fun to compare. I love the opening sequence; i.e. "Rage Goddess - sing the rage of Peleus son...!" (Fagles) or " Sing, Goddess, of the anger of Achilleus, son of Peleus.." (Martin Hammond) etc. I have found that reading it out loud to myself is a particular source of enjoyment, first, because I tend not to get distracted and let my mind wander to another topic after having been stimulated, Rorschach-like, by a word or image in the 'read' text'; and second because this is the way it was originally meant to be conveyed and enjoyed or to have had its desired effect! I don't think my wife appreciates my doing this especially if I get over dramatic during the many, many battle scenes!

- Michael Sharpe

Jun 13, 2021 3:37 PM EDT

thanks for this response! Every summer my husband & I read a long poem aloud while sitting outside. We're using the Stephen Mitchell translation & it's great: The rage of Achilles--sing it now, goddess, sing through me the deadly rage.... We had a fight over the Mitchell vs I think Fagles. The Greek names are hard but fun. Would your wife like it more if she got to do some of the shouting?

- ~ Elinor

Jun 14, 2021 12:43 PM EDT

She is capable of that without invoking The Iliad! Ha, ha.!
I love the idea of reading long poems out loud. I recently glanced at Stephen Vincent Benet's "John Brown's Body," which is very long indeed, and Keat's "Endymion" (quite a bit shorter but still long) and would love to have a go at those. One way to enjoy and 'stay with' these poems might be to follow along with an audio version if such exist. Do you know of recording like this?

- Michael Sharpe

Jun 14, 2021 1:16 PM EDT

That's a good idea. Audible has some recordings, & we used to have a fantastic cassette of a bunch of actors reading Paradise Lost. After 30 years we are running out of long poems; I'll look at the Benet.

- Elinor

Jun 14, 2021 4:07 PM EDT

Not many years back I decided I was going to become a Milton scholar (ha, ha!) I actually got to book IV in 'Paradise Lost' and set it aside (Probably to start The Iliad :). However, his shorter poems are so finely wrought (IMO) but more or less forgotten - as are so many thing - that much of his genius and craft can and should be enjoyed through them. One of my favorite lines from "Il Penseroso"
'Hence, vain deluding joys
The brood of folly without father bred
How little you bestead [help],
Or fill the fixed mind with all your toys!'

Lyrical and to the point!

- Michael Sharpe

Jun 14, 2021 5:12 PM EDT

A Milton scholar - I totally get both the desire & the ha ha of the desire. Those lines are beautiful. One of the poems we read out loud was Lycidas:

Look homeward Angel now, and melt with ruth;
And, O ye dolphins, waft the hapless youth.

Weep no more, woeful shepherds, weep no more,
For Lycidas, your sorrow, is not dead,
Sunk though he be beneath the wat'ry floor;
So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed,
And yet anon repairs his drooping head,
And tricks his beams, and with new spangled ore ...

melt with ruth.......

- Elinor

Jun 28, 2021 6:57 AM EDT

I just ran across an incredible DVD with a recording performance of Beowulf in Old English by a guy named Benjamin Bagby which was performed in Denmark in the '90s. He is still doing them. Mesmerizing. https://www.bagbybeowulf.com/

- Michael Sharpe