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Dithyrambs for Athens

Leofranc Holford-Strevens: The difficulties of reading Pindar, 17 February 2005

Soliciting Darkness: Pindar, Obscurity and the Classical Tradition 
by John T. Hamilton.
Harvard, 348 pp., £17.95, April 2004, 0 674 01257 7
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The First Poets: Lives of the Ancient Greek Poets 
by Michael Schmidt.
Weidenfeld, 449 pp., £20, April 2004, 0 297 64394 0
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... years. Pindar’s language is sometimes obscure to those who have not ventured beyond tragedy and Homer, since they need to look up rather more words; his thought is frequently compressed. For these reasons he has often been considered difficult; those of us who blame other people’s intellectual deficiencies, or the loss of background information, are ...

Was it really a translation?

T.P. Wiseman: Latin Literature, 22 September 2016

Beyond Greek: The Beginnings of Latin Literature 
by Denis Feeney.
Harvard, 382 pp., £25, January 2016, 978 0 674 05523 0
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... that none of the creative arts reached perfection straightaway: There must have been poets before Homer, as we can tell from the songs sung at the banquets of the Phaeacians and of the suitors on Ithaca in the Odyssey. And where is our own ancient poetry ‘that once the Fauns and prophets sang’? … The Latin Odyssey is like some archaic sculpture by ...

Two Poems

Alistair Elliot, 22 July 1993

... Shakespearean aunt taught her to eat from fairy circles and how to name a tracehorse: Forrest or Homer – coins from the wordhoard of our tribe buried in the angelic angles around home: in Long Chase, the Top, the Forty-Acre, the Pikel. School spread on this the alphabet and the best lines of Scott, and a cousin from Australia showed a way to peel an orange ...

Alive That Time

Anne Carson, 8 February 2007

... alive rival him at this. (Odyssey, 19.282-6) It’s a panel on something improbable (Godard and Homer?) in a fluorescent salon of some city’s Palais des Congrès. After your overcrafted paper sinks to cool applause you watch the back of Margaret Drabble’s head let loose hooves and Styx and stories of supper to lope the room. Applause is warm. Q&A is ...

An Epiphany of Footnotes

Claude Rawson, 16 March 1989

Social Values and Poetic Acts: The Historical Judgment of Literary Work 
by Jerome McGann.
Harvard, 279 pp., £21.95, April 1988, 0 674 81495 9
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... from Canto I: Lie quiet Divus. I mean, that is Andreas Divus, In officina Wecheli, 1538, out of Homer. This is a passage which won’t tell most readers much unless it is itself glossed by a real footnote, and which, even if it did, would act, not as an energising factual intervention of the kind McGann envisages for footnotes, but as part of the poem’s ...

He was the man

Robert Crawford: Ezra Pound, 30 June 2016

Ezra Pound: Poet: A Portrait of the Man and his Work: Vol. III: The Tragic Years, 1939-72 
by A. David Moody.
Oxford, 654 pp., £30, September 2015, 978 0 19 870436 2
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... was the first full-scale account, mentions in his opening chapter that Pound’s father, Homer, worked as an assistant assayer in the United States Mint in Philadelphia. Stock points out that in the 1890s the young Ezra ‘mixed with the assayers and drank in stories about “gold bricks”, which he still remembered in 1944 when he wrote his ...

The Powyses

D.A.N. Jones, 7 August 1980

After My Fashion 
by John Cowper Powys.
Picador, 286 pp., £2.50, June 1980, 0 330 26049 9
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Weymouth Sands 
by John Cowper Powys.
Picador, 567 pp., £2.95, June 1980, 0 330 26050 2
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Recollections of the Powys Brothers 
edited by Belinda Humfrey.
Peter Owen, 288 pp., £9.95, May 1980, 0 7206 0547 4
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John Cowper Powys and David Jones: A Comparative Study 
by Jeremy Hooker.
Enitharmon, 54 pp., £3.75, April 1979, 0 901111 85 6
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The Hollowed-Out Elder Stalk 
by Roland Mathias.
Enitharmon, 158 pp., £4.85, May 1979, 0 901111 87 2
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John Cowper Powys and the Magical Quest 
by Morine Krissdottir.
Macdonald, 218 pp., £8.95, February 1980, 0 354 04492 3
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... the States, intoxicating himself and his audience with large thoughts about Dante, Dostoevsky and Homer, while contrasting his subject-matter with his environment – years before he began forcing his physical and spiritual experiences into novels of British life. What happens in New York is that Richard takes up with an old flame, a dancer called Elise ...

Pond of Gloop

Claire Hall: Anaximander’s Universe, 18 May 2023

Anaximander and the Nature of Science 
by Carlo Rovelli, translated by Marion Lignana Rosenberg.
Allen Lane, 209 pp., £16.99, February, 978 0 241 63504 9
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... younger than Sappho and Alcaeus, from nearby Lesbos.It’s hard to overstate how completely Homer dominated Greek intellectual culture at this time. He was seen as the fount of all knowledge: not only myth, history and theology, but agriculture, navigation, geography, zoology, medicine, even cooking. Early Greek reverence for ...

Writing to rule

Claude Rawson, 18 September 1980

Boileau and the Nature of Neo-Classicism 
by George Pocock.
Cambridge, 215 pp., £12.50, June 1980, 0 521 22772 0
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‘The Rape of the Lock’ and its Illustrations 1714-1896 
by Robert Halsband.
Oxford, 160 pp., £11.50, July 1980, 0 19 812098 2
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... says the next couplet,             when t’examine ev’ry Part he came, Nature and Homer were, he found, the same. There is a tacit transition in the narrative from critic’s law to Homeric poem, as though they, too, were much the same. The rules were Nature too: ‘To copy Nature is to copy Them.’ The sliding, whether cunning or ...

Mad for Love

Tobias Gregory: ‘Orlando Furioso’, 9 September 2010

‘Orlando Furioso’: A New Verse Translation 
by Ludovico Ariosto, translated by David Slavitt.
Harvard, 672 pp., £29.95, November 2009, 978 0 674 03535 5
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... that the Greeks won at Troy and that Penelope was faithful to her husband because it pleased Homer to say so, but the facts are otherwise: E se tu vuoi che ’l ver non ti sia ascoso, tutta al contrario l’istoria converti: che i Greci rotti, e che Troia vittrice, e che Penelopea fu meretrice. If you wish the truth not to be hidden from you, turn the ...

Ciao, Fighter!

Rodney Pybus, 31 August 1989

... with tanks). But even a tireless tale-teller at the top of the class must sleep (okay, so that was Homer!), and I imagine you flying high over the Atlantic, Prof, en route for Voshing’DC, forced even now to dream of what your next meal might be. ‘Fighters! Fellow writers!’ (Excited, your brows go into furrows like one of Huss’s diacritics ...) ‘Let ...

Tickle and Flutter

Terry Castle: Maude Hutchins’s Revenge, 3 July 2008

... I want to go alone,’ and They had let her. ‘They’ are Victorine’s oddly named parents, Homer and Allison L’Hommedieu, upper-middle-class denizens of a staid New England village. As official family changeling, Victorine will ignore them for much of the novel, even as her older brother, Costello (shy and broody and horny, ‘as if there were milk ...
Finding the Walls of Troy: Frank Calvert and Heinrich Schliemann at Hisarlik 
by Susan Heuck Allen.
California, 409 pp., £27.50, March 1999, 0 520 20868 4
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... in the First Cemetery at Athens adds the most Wagnerian touch of all. His statue, a volume of Homer in its hand, looks out from a classical temple atop a podium. Accompanied only by Sophia, he supervises the excavation of a resurrected Troy. The sides of the temple are adorned with reliefs from the Iliad and the Odyssey, as well as other traditions that ...

Never Not Slightly Comical

Thomas Jones: Amit Chaudhuri, 2 July 2015

Odysseus Abroad 
by Amit Chaudhuri.
Oneworld, 243 pp., £12.99, February 2015, 978 1 78074 621 0
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... man and his uncle on their uneventful wanderings around London on a mid-1980s summer’s day. Homer and Joyce are clearly present, too, but Ananda isn’t impressed by Homer, ‘noting that the “rosy-fingered dawn” recurred without volition, like a traffic light, every few pages of the Iliad, and, with greater ...

The Loneliness Thing

Peter Campbell, 5 February 1981

Nature and Culture 
by Barbara Novak.
Thames and Hudson, 323 pp., £16, August 1980, 0 500 01245 8
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Edward Hopper: The Complete Prints 
by Gail Levin.
Norton, 128 pp., £9.95, April 1980, 0 393 01275 1
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Edward Hopper as illustrator 
by Gail Levin.
Norton, 288 pp., £15.95, April 1980, 0 393 01243 3
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... relation’ characterise a whole tradition of American realism which includes Eakins, Homer and Hopper. Worthington Whittredge, writing of his return to America in the 1860s, says: It was impossible for me to shut out from my eyes the works of the great landscape painters I had seen in Europe, while I knew well enough that if I was to succeed I ...

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