Interconnected

1.

My favourite translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (Wikipedia) - 1,000 year old Persian poetry - is by Robert Graves from 1967.

Graves, it turns out, unknowingly based his translations on hoax sources. Which might not have gone down so badly, except that he used the his publication and the miraculous “discovery” of the sources to very publicly and with disproportionate viciousness put the boot into Edward FitzGerald, the established translator at the time.

Graves’ translation was retracted when the hoax came out and you can barely get hold of a copy nowadays.

Still great though.

Quatrains 24:

Allow no shadow of regret to cloud you,
No absurd grief to overcast your days.
Never renounce love-song, or lawns, or kisses
Until your clay lies mixed with elder clay.

2.

I am a sucker for old poems in modern English. I don’t think it adds anything to ancient translated text to have to wade through how people wrote two centuries ago.

Tales from Ovid, Ted Hughes (1997), is translation of 24 passages from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8 AD) – a mythic history of the world from creation till Julius Caesar.

Oh it’s good!

After creation and heroes, the Age of Iron finally arrives, today’s diminished and evil world…

Snares, tricks, plots come hurrying
Out of their dens in the atom.
Violence is an extrapolation
Of the cutting edge
Into the orbit of the smile.
Now comes the love of gain – a new god
Made out of the shadow
Of all the others. A god who peers
Grinning from the roots of the eye-teeth.

Now sails bulged and the cordage cracked
In winds that still bewildered the pilots.
And the long trunks of trees
That had never shifted in their lives
From some mountain fastness
Leapt into their coffins
From wavetop to wavetop,
Then out over the rim of the unknown.

I simply can’t get over seeing ships as the coffins of mountain forests.

3.

Tell me about a complicated man.
Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost
when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy,
and where he went, and who he met, the pain
he suffered on the sea, and how he worked
to save his life and bring his men back home.
He failed, and for their own mistakes, they died.
They ate the Sun God’s cattle, and the god
kept them from home. Now goddess, child of Zeus,
tell the old story for our modern times.
Find the beginning.

I’m sure everyone who’s going to read Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey has, by this point, read it. It’s wonderful, beginning with those famous first lines.

Wilson has an old substack where she talks about translation:

• Her commentary on 4 different translations of the opening lines
• Wilson’s informative unpacking of why she chose ‘complicated’

SIDE NOTE #1.

I heard Wilson on an old podcast a couple weeks back and it turns out that she’s one of those people who laughs like all the time. I didn’t realise how much hearing her voice would change (for the better) how I read her translation.

SIDE NOTE #2.

Obviously the Odyssey has been topical lately because of the Nolan movie, which I haven’t seen.

However I have seen Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey about a million times and it is one of my favourite movies.

I guess I thought about Odyssey in the title in the sense of a long journey.

But I realise now that the original Odyssey is only kinda about the journey and is actually about a homecoming.

And seeing 2001 as a 2 million year-long homecoming turns the message of the movie on its head for me, and a new perspective on a movie that I first watched, well, over 40 years ago – that’s special.

4.

Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti.

Here’s the whole poem.

“We must not look at goblin men,
We must not buy their fruits:
Who knows upon what soil they fed
Their hungry thirsty roots?”
“Come buy,” call the goblins
Hobbling down the glen.

Recommended: read it out loud. I read it to my kid at bedtime, we love it.

(Also The Wind in the Willows is amazing read out loud.)