For the wine aficionados among you, I’m not talking about the six-liter bottle but rather the man spoken of in Genesis.
Recently I was asked (as you are) if I really believed that Methuselah had lived to the ripe old age of 969. Using the tried and trued method of answering a question with a question, the effectiveness of which should be evident to anyone who has read Jesus responding to the Pharisees, I asked, “What do you think?”
After being told, no, I responded by saying what I found difficult to believe was not his age but that he had been struck down by a taxi cab.
It started off briliantly, and I was certain it was going to be a glorious replay of Book 1. But then a little after the halfway point came The Catalogue of Ships.
Here are a few lines from the first part:
“And as the west wind sweeps through the high-standing grain
with its violent blast, and the ears all shudder and bow:
just so was the army shaken, and in the uproar
men rushed toward the shore, and the dust from beneath their feet
rose high and hung in the air.”
(2.137-141)
It is told so clearly that even someone not familiar with the storyline would have little difficulty. The language is superb and the words flow so readily it was as if I were reading Wordsworth’s The Prelude.
Thetis says to her son Achilles:
“If only you could have stayed by the ships, without tears,
without pain, since your life is destined to be so short.
Not only must you die young, but your fleeting days
are doomed to be full of sorrow beyond all others.”
(1.408-411)
I’ll admit it’s important. However, I also know arriving at the best text is an extremely complicated matter. Seeing I’m not a classicist, am not able to read the Iliad in Greek, and know nothing about the texts under consideration, I will just have to plead ignorance.
Knowing that the earliest full text of the New Testament dates to the 4th century AD, I was very surprised to learn that for the Iliad (Venetus A) it is the 10th century AD.
I really liked what Mitchell says in his Introduction:
“I am under no illusion that I have translated the original text of the Iliad, as written or dictated by the anonymous poet called Homer-just the most intelligent attempt we have at getting back to an original, and a text that I could use as the basis for the most intense possible poetic experience in English.”
Wycliffe Bible (1380s)
“In tho daies Joon Baptist cam, and prechide in the desert of Judee,
and seide, Do ye penaunce, for the kyngdom of heuenes shal neiye.”
Tyndale Bible (1526)
“In those dayes Ihon the Baptyst came and preached in the wildernes of Iury
saynge; Repet the kyngdome of heue is at honde.”
King Jame Version (1611)
“In those daies came Iohn the Baptist, preachinng in the wilderness of Iudea,
and saying, Repent yee: for the kingdom of heauen is at hand.”
King James Version (1769)
“In those days came John the Baptist, preaching in the wilderness of Judaea,
And saying, Repent ye: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”
Darby Bible (1892)
“Now in those days comes John the baptist, preaching in the wilderness of Judaea,
and saying, Repent, for the kingdom of the heavens has drawn nigh.”
New International Version (1984)
“In those days John the Baptist came, preaching in the Desert of Judea
and saying, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.”
Here is one link and another for those who are interested in learning somethng about Stephen Mitchell, the translator, of the Iliad.
Besides his obvious literary gifts, can you think of a reason why the French so admire Edgar Allan Poe?
“Young’s Literal Translation is a translation of the Bible into English, published in 1862…The Literal Translation is unusual in that, as the name implies, it is a strictly literal translation of the original Hebrew and Greek texts.”
Here are the first few verses from Genesis:
“In the beginning of God’s preparing the heavens and the earth —
the earth hath existed waste and void, and darkness on the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God fluttering on the face of the waters,
and God saith, ‘Let light be;’ and light is.
And God seeth the light that it is good, and God separateth between the light and the darkness,
and God calleth to the light ‘Day,’ and to the darkness He hath called ‘Night;’ and there is an evening, and there is a morning — day one.”
Most people are familiar with Harry Chapin’s haunting Cat’s in the Cradle but you may be less familiar with his humanitarian side.
“In the mid-1970s, Chapin focused on his social activism, including raising money to combat hunger in the United States. His daughter Jen said: “‘He saw hunger and poverty as an insult to America.'”
You also may not know that his last music and lyrics was for a musical called, Cotton Patch Gospel, which was based on The Cottonpatch Version of Matthew and John by Clarence Jordan. Do you know Habit for Humanity? Jordan was instrumental in its founding.
It has taken a long way to get to where I was planning to go, but I hope no one has felt you’ve taken one of those dreadful detours.
Here’s an excerpt from the Gospel of Matthew.
“One day John the Baptizer showed up and started preaching in the rural areas of Georgia. “Reshape your lives,” he said “because God’s new order of the Spirit is confronting you. This is what the prophet Isaiah meant when he said,
‘A voice is shouting in the rurals:
Lay out the Lord’s highway
Straighten his roads.’ “
To begin, consider these two entries from Wikipedia:
“Sense-for-sense translation…fundamentally means translating the meaning of each whole sentence before moving on to the next, and stands in normative opposition to word-for-word translation (also known as literal translation), which means translating the meaning of each lexical item in sequence.”
“Dynamic and formal equivalence are terms for methods of translation coined by Eugene Nida. The two terms have often been understood as fundamentally the same as sense-for-sense translation (translating the meanings of phrases or whole sentences) and word-for-word translation (translating the meanings of individual words in their more or less exact syntactic sequence), respectively, and Nida did often seem to use them this way. But his original definition of dynamic equivalence was rhetorical: the idea was that the translator should translate so that the effect of the translation on the target reader is roughly the same as the effect of the source text once was on the source reader.”
Having recently completed Gershom Scholem’s monumental work on Sabbatai Sevi, I think I can safely begin.
Scholem’s introduction to the Sabbatian movement was 102 pages long. Well done, I say. I’ve always thought trying to get proper bearings was necessary before setting sail, which is what I’ll be trying to do. I know the analogy is better suited to The Odyssey but always having had a strong pacifistic streak, I feel a little awkward saying sharpening my swords – unless, of course, they’re being made into plowshares, which I am pretty sure is not the case in The Iliad.
Tom Simard 