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Imperial Dope

Alan Hollinghurst, 4 June 1981

Creation 
by Gore Vidal.
Heinemann, 510 pp., £8.95, April 1981, 0 394 50015 6
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... and the most relevant to the novel, comes in the work of Pigres, a poet who claims to be ‘Homer born again’ and who rewrites the Iliad interjecting a line of his own after each of Homer’s. Here both art and history are threatened, but in a potentially creative way: Pigres’s interpolations into the received ...

The Everyday Business of Translation

George Steiner, 22 November 1979

The True Interpreter 
by Louis Kelly.
Blackwell, 282 pp., £15
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... translation or recasting which can range all the way from the Augustan stylisation in Pope’s Homer to the ‘variations on a source-theme’ which we find in Mallarmé’s Poe or Pound’s Propertius. With rare exceptions, it is around these two formal poles and in terms of this executive triad that treatises on the theory and business of translation are ...

Odysseus’ Bow

Edward Luttwak: Ancient combat, 17 November 2005

Soldiers and Ghosts: A History of Battle in Classical Antiquity 
by J.E. Lendon.
Yale, 468 pp., £18.95, June 2005, 0 300 10663 7
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... at all. Unlike literature, history must ignore both suitors and Odysseus, but this passage in Homer still counts as evidence because it brings back to whatever date is chosen for its composition the arrival in Greece of the most powerful personal weapon of antiquity, which could nevertheless plausibly be unknown to stay-at-home suitors because it was so ...

When Demigods Walked the Earth

T.P. Wiseman: Roman Myth, Roman History, 18 October 2007

Caesar’s Calendar: Ancient Time and the Beginnings of History 
by Denis Feeney.
California, 372 pp., £18.95, June 2007, 978 0 520 25119 9
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... use dates, but since Greek historiography had by that time achieved a chronology into which to fit Homer’s tale of Troy, Naevius’ story implies that Romulus founded Rome some time around what we would call 1130 BC. Fabius, who as a historian had to provide dates, put the foundation in the first year of the eighth Olympiad, 747 BC, with Romulus the ...

Glorious and Most Glorious City of the Oxyrhinchites

Christopher Kelly: Roman Egypt, 21 February 2008

City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish: Greek Lives in Roman Egypt 
by Peter Parsons.
Phoenix, 312 pp., £9.99, December 2007, 978 0 7538 2233 3
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... adult male population could read or write to some degree. The well-educated enjoyed poets such as Homer, and even attempted their own verses in imitation; highly-skilled craftsmen might not manage much more than their own names. For those able to read and write with confidence, documents were not only conveyers of information, they were also eloquent ...

Ach so, Herr Major

Nicholas Horsfall: Translating Horace, 23 June 2005

Horace: Odes and Epodes 
edited by Niall Rudd.
Harvard, 350 pp., £14.50, June 2004, 0 674 99609 7
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... and Nausicaa back to share your Phaeacian sand, then it is wonderful to be able to stick the Loeb Homer (unreadable though it is) in your beach bag. Translations are peculiarly ephemeral. It is unnerving to think that a generation assumed that Jackson Knight’s Penguin ‘was’ the Aeneid. For Greek tragedy, Housman’s wildly funny ‘Fragment’ says it ...

A Life-Exam

Robert Crawford, 6 June 1996

... appropriate to EITHER masturbation OR the purchase of a used car. 38. Write a poem in the style of Homer, beginning ‘If I won the National Lottery ...’ 39. Make love. 40. Do not read Finnegans Wake. 41. Which of the following domestic items seems to you most useful for the practice of augury? tealeaves; crazy paving; used nappies. 42. If you were given ...

Assurbanipal’s Classic

Stephanie West, 8 November 1990

Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, The Flood, Gilgamesh and Others 
by Stephanie Dalley.
Oxford, 360 pp., £35, November 1989, 0 19 814397 4
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The Epic of Gilgamesh 
by Maureen Gallery Kovacs.
Stanford, 122 pp., £29.50, August 1989, 0 8047 1589 0
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... and Hurrian from Hattusas, the Hittite capital in northern Anatolia. One of the ancient Lives of Homer credits the poet with an epitaph composed for the grave of King Midas of Phrygia, whom we know from cuneiform sources to have been a vassal of Sargon II (722-05 BC); whether or not there is any truth in this tradition, it indicates that the poet was ...

Pound’s Friends

Donald Davie, 23 May 1985

Pound’s Cantos 
by Peter Makin.
Allen and Unwin, 349 pp., £20, March 1985, 0 04 811001 9
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To Write Paradise: Style and Error in Pound’s Cantos 
by Christine Froula.
Yale, 208 pp., £18.50, February 1985, 0 300 02512 2
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Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics and Writing 
by Peter Nicholls.
Macmillan, 263 pp., £25, September 1984, 0 333 36159 8
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... to require this. So here goes – with a justly famous poem, ‘On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer’: Much have 1 travell’d in the realms of gold, And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; Round many western Islands have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. Oft of one wide expanse had I been told That deep-brow’d ...

Diary

Jon Day: Hoardiculture, 8 September 2022

... the sound of which cured him of his ennui.A more tragic story is that of the Collyer brothers, Homer and Langley, who lived in a brownstone in New York in the 1940s. The ‘hermits of Harlem’ were known in the neighbourhood as obsessive and indiscriminate collectors of junk, and their house was a local landmark for the clutter that surrounded it. In ...

Apollo’s Ethylene

Peter Green: Delphi, 3 July 2014

Delphi: A History of the Centre of the Ancient World 
by Michael Scott.
Princeton, 422 pp., £19.95, February 2014, 978 0 691 15081 9
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... suggests they had no real knowledge of what happened, any more than they did in the matter of Homer. But both Aeschylus and Euripides suggest that an earlier shrine in Delphi belonged, appropriately enough, to Gaia (Earth), and it’s confirmed by the archaeological record, which Scott, again rightly, says is what we should rely on, though he perhaps ...

Tibbles

Barbara Everett, 17 October 1985

Alexander Pope 
by Maynard Mack.
Yale, 975 pp., £15.95, August 1985, 0 300 03391 5
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Pope’s ‘Essay on Man’ 
by A.D. Nuttall.
Allen and Unwin, 250 pp., £15, February 1984, 0 04 800017 5
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The Last and Greatest Art: Some Unpublished Poetical Manuscripts of Alexander Pope 
by Maynard Mack.
Associated University Presses, 454 pp., £48.95, June 1984, 0 87413 183 9
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The New Oxford Book of 18th-Century Verse 
by Roger Lonsdale.
Oxford, 870 pp., £15, November 1984, 0 19 214122 8
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Collected in Himself: Essays Critical, Biographical and Bibliographical on Pope and Some of his Contemporaries 
by Maynard Mack.
Associated University Presses, 569 pp., £26.50, March 1983, 0 87413 182 0
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... Jervas painted it, probably in 1717, when Pope – aged 29 – was deep in his translation of Homer, a lengthy task that not only sealed his fame as the country’s leading poet (he was admired by good judges when still under twenty) but secured him the fortune which made him free of patrons for the rest of his life: the first poet, he liked to think, who ...

Jim and Pedro

Geoffrey Best, 17 April 1980

The Ethics of War 
by Barrie Paskins and Michael Dockrill.
Duckworth, 332 pp., £18, October 1979, 0 7156 1354 5
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... moral existence are exhaustively, but never heavy-handedly, investigated, with help from not only Homer, Shakespeare and Nietzsche, many contemporary philosophers and international relations experts, but also Jim and Pedro, those standard protagonists of a moral dilemma whom Paskins and Dockrill met in Smart and Williams’s Utilitarianism: For and ...

At Dulwich Picture Gallery

Peter Campbell: Norman Rockwell, 20 January 2011

... reality that do belong to painters: to Hopper, or Eakins, or Hood, or Bierstadt, or Winslow Homer, or to quite thin commercial art like Charles Dana Gibson’s Edwardian girls, or to Thomas Hart Benton’s agrarian patriotism. That older work shows illustrators and painters finding things no one else had quite seen, things that would thereafter infect ...

At Tate Britain

Peter Campbell: Peter Doig, 6 March 2008

... and tropical pictures like Grand Rivière (2001-2) share motifs with the watercolours Winslow Homer painted in the late 1800s and early 1900s while on Canadian fishing trips and on holiday in the Bahamas. In both Homer’s and Doig’s pictures, a feeling for place arises from the look of distant figures in a ...

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