Pandion was a king of Athens who had two daughters, Prokne and Philomela, one of whom was the wife of Tereus, while the other was raped by Tereus, who cut out her tongue so she could not tell. Silenced, she wove a cloth to reveal her sad story, which her sister read and, to punish Tereus, killed their only child (Itys). Both girls were turned into birds, one into a swallow and one into a nightingale, according to Ovid whose version does not make clear which is which (Metamorphoses 6.412-674). There are other ancient versions of this myth, including one where the killing of Itys is inadvertent: cf. Homer Odyssey 19.518-29 and Sappho fr. 136....
Aristotle describes the nightingale as having no tip on its tongue (Historia animalim 616b8)....
-- Anne Carson, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, page 376
Showing posts with label Homer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Homer. Show all posts
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Monday, September 7, 2009
Homer Reading (the Bible)
Some time back, blogger Ken Brown started a blogger game (aka "a meme") which resulted in "more than fifty people having offered their top five most influential books or scholars." Ken's question was who has "had the most immediate and lasting influence on how you read the Bible"?
My listing starts this way: "Homer's most influenced how I read the Septuagint. The Septuagint's most influenced how I read the rest of the Bible." (This is before any explicit acknowledgement of feminisms.)
In this post, I want to talk some about how Homer influences (me). In another post perhaps, I'll say a bit on the Septuagint.
The funny thing is, the story goes, is that Homer was blind. That's funny because until the braille books of the nineteenth century and the audio books of the twentieth century, people could only read his works by, well, by reading them with their eyes open.
But that's not how my story begins. I myself first heard the voice of Homer (the voices in his epics that is) in the voice of my mother. When my siblings and I were growing up as missionary kids in South Vietnam the last decade of the war, Mom would read to us. And she had a huge library of books. And she taught us each one to read. But Homer. He was a stand out even back then. The heroes and heroines and goddesses and gods and plot turns and places and violence and beauty and tensions sustained and subsiding and happy points and deep sadnesses. The Illiad was Truyện Kiều and The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe and Little Women and The Red Badge of Courage.
Fast forwarding a good bit, and moving across the Pacific Ocean, the story of my Homer Reading picks up again. As an undergraduate college kid learning Greek in Texas, I heard something new in the voice of the Hellene.
Wordplay.
The Odyssey and Odysseus are obvious enough in English translation even. I'm talking about the playfulness of these two words, the Journey and the Journeyman. But in Hellene, the Cyclops is no longer just Polyphemus who some critics glossed as "famous," but he's ironically Πολύ - φημος without Many eyes or Much vision at all. And the "Much - Legendary" monster, we now hear in Hellene, is "blinded" literally and figuratively by our Hero. Our Hero, Ὀδυσσεύς, tells his name to the creature: it's οὔτις. O-Dysseus, says our blind Homer, is called hO-Tis. SomeBody is NoBody. And if we listen like the Cyclops, then we're blinded, and dead.
Wordplay. Playfulness of words. And also Wiggleroom in how one sees and hears those words, in hermeneutics, in how one can or might not interpret words. With consequences.
(We could talk all day about Homer's wordplay, and Hesiod's, and Sappho's. We could take a graduate course in an American university. We could write a dissertation. We could devote a literary career to their study.
The only other thing I want to say about that is this: that there have been some mighty important things noticed about Homer. First, Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle noticed how what he did with words threatened the Republic and the pan-Hellenic Politics. A great preface to some of the things Plato noticed is Eric Havelock's Preface to Plato. Second, Eva Brann has much more recently noticed many Homeric Moments that open up wordplay. And third, Sylvie Honigman has noticed Homer's influence in the legend on the development of the Septuagint--she has the best history on the subject ever: The Septuagint and Homeric Scholarship in Alexandria: A Study in the Narrative of the Letter of Aristeas. Perhaps I'll post on the Septuagint next).
My listing starts this way: "Homer's most influenced how I read the Septuagint. The Septuagint's most influenced how I read the rest of the Bible." (This is before any explicit acknowledgement of feminisms.)
In this post, I want to talk some about how Homer influences (me). In another post perhaps, I'll say a bit on the Septuagint.
The funny thing is, the story goes, is that Homer was blind. That's funny because until the braille books of the nineteenth century and the audio books of the twentieth century, people could only read his works by, well, by reading them with their eyes open.
But that's not how my story begins. I myself first heard the voice of Homer (the voices in his epics that is) in the voice of my mother. When my siblings and I were growing up as missionary kids in South Vietnam the last decade of the war, Mom would read to us. And she had a huge library of books. And she taught us each one to read. But Homer. He was a stand out even back then. The heroes and heroines and goddesses and gods and plot turns and places and violence and beauty and tensions sustained and subsiding and happy points and deep sadnesses. The Illiad was Truyện Kiều and The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe and Little Women and The Red Badge of Courage.
Fast forwarding a good bit, and moving across the Pacific Ocean, the story of my Homer Reading picks up again. As an undergraduate college kid learning Greek in Texas, I heard something new in the voice of the Hellene.
Wordplay.
The Odyssey and Odysseus are obvious enough in English translation even. I'm talking about the playfulness of these two words, the Journey and the Journeyman. But in Hellene, the Cyclops is no longer just Polyphemus who some critics glossed as "famous," but he's ironically Πολύ - φημος without Many eyes or Much vision at all. And the "Much - Legendary" monster, we now hear in Hellene, is "blinded" literally and figuratively by our Hero. Our Hero, Ὀδυσσεύς, tells his name to the creature: it's οὔτις. O-Dysseus, says our blind Homer, is called hO-Tis. SomeBody is NoBody. And if we listen like the Cyclops, then we're blinded, and dead.
Wordplay. Playfulness of words. And also Wiggleroom in how one sees and hears those words, in hermeneutics, in how one can or might not interpret words. With consequences.
(We could talk all day about Homer's wordplay, and Hesiod's, and Sappho's. We could take a graduate course in an American university. We could write a dissertation. We could devote a literary career to their study.
The only other thing I want to say about that is this: that there have been some mighty important things noticed about Homer. First, Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle noticed how what he did with words threatened the Republic and the pan-Hellenic Politics. A great preface to some of the things Plato noticed is Eric Havelock's Preface to Plato. Second, Eva Brann has much more recently noticed many Homeric Moments that open up wordplay. And third, Sylvie Honigman has noticed Homer's influence in the legend on the development of the Septuagint--she has the best history on the subject ever: The Septuagint and Homeric Scholarship in Alexandria: A Study in the Narrative of the Letter of Aristeas. Perhaps I'll post on the Septuagint next).
Even if one never reads F. A. Murray's Feminism In Greek Literature From Homer To Aristotle, I think few of us have a problem understanding that Homer's no feminist. I don't have time to go into Homer's sex biases. Nonetheless, Homer reading - with all the wordplay - opens up, for me, ways of knowing and of seeing (aka "epistemologies") that are akin to Nancy Mairs's and Mary Daly's and Alice Walker's and Maya Angelou's and Toni Morrison's. Morrison's Homer, of course, was blind but a woman. When you listen, you can see what Homer means.
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Listening to the Feminine, the Rhetorical, the Translational - in light of the heavy first line of Homer's Odyssey
Here's a bit from the wonderful Eva Brann's Homeric Moments (page 7):
"Here is the first line of the Odyssey:
Ān- dră mŏı | ēn- nĕ- pĕ | Mōu- să, pŏ | lȳ- trŏ- pŏn | hōs mă- lă | pōl- lă
It is a regular heroic line, in which the fifth foot is normally a dactyl. To have a spondee there indicates some sort of solemn havoc; it is a metric subtlety Homer uses with impressive effect. For example, the Odyssey has a villainous, draft-dodging antihero, Aegisthus, who conspires with his mistress, Agamemnon's wife, Clytemnestra, to murder the returning commander in chief of the Trojan expedition. This deed dominates the consciousness of all the 'Returns.' (The word is capitalized because it is almost a technical term in the Odyssey (15).) Hear how heavyhearted proceeds and ends the line that, early on, concludes the introduction of his baneful name:
hōs ē- phăth' | Hēr- mēı- | ās āll' | ōu phrĕ- năs | Āı- gī- | sthōı- ŏ.
The lines preceding are also heavily spondaic, but none as discombobulatingly so as the ones whose fifth foot is, against ordinary usage, a spondee.
A long oral tradition of hexametric recital would surely prepare a professional poet for wielding a standard line with so much flexibility, and so would the memory training required to hold in mind the twenty-seven thousand eight hundred and two lines of the two epics [Odyssey and Iliad], later on divided into twenty-four books each. And hold them in mind he did, both he and his audience, for his control of significant detail over thousands of lines is demonstrable."
Brann goes on to say what Homer makes possible for William Shakespeare and J. S. Bach and Virgil and John Milton. And she notes what "Horace says in humorously awed censoriousness" of Homer and how Whitehead compares Plato to Homer and how Aristotle, through his objective aristotelian eyes, must make his logical conclusion about the Odyssey. But we have other questions also, don't we?
Our questions:
"Here is the first line of the Odyssey:
Ān- dră mŏı | ēn- nĕ- pĕ | Mōu- să, pŏ | lȳ- trŏ- pŏn | hōs mă- lă | pōl- lă
It is a regular heroic line, in which the fifth foot is normally a dactyl. To have a spondee there indicates some sort of solemn havoc; it is a metric subtlety Homer uses with impressive effect. For example, the Odyssey has a villainous, draft-dodging antihero, Aegisthus, who conspires with his mistress, Agamemnon's wife, Clytemnestra, to murder the returning commander in chief of the Trojan expedition. This deed dominates the consciousness of all the 'Returns.' (The word is capitalized because it is almost a technical term in the Odyssey (15).) Hear how heavyhearted proceeds and ends the line that, early on, concludes the introduction of his baneful name:
hōs ē- phăth' | Hēr- mēı- | ās āll' | ōu phrĕ- năs | Āı- gī- | sthōı- ŏ.
The lines preceding are also heavily spondaic, but none as discombobulatingly so as the ones whose fifth foot is, against ordinary usage, a spondee.
A long oral tradition of hexametric recital would surely prepare a professional poet for wielding a standard line with so much flexibility, and so would the memory training required to hold in mind the twenty-seven thousand eight hundred and two lines of the two epics [Odyssey and Iliad], later on divided into twenty-four books each. And hold them in mind he did, both he and his audience, for his control of significant detail over thousands of lines is demonstrable."
Brann goes on to say what Homer makes possible for William Shakespeare and J. S. Bach and Virgil and John Milton. And she notes what "Horace says in humorously awed censoriousness" of Homer and how Whitehead compares Plato to Homer and how Aristotle, through his objective aristotelian eyes, must make his logical conclusion about the Odyssey. But we have other questions also, don't we?
Our questions:
- Even if we're not literary critics, specialists using jargon such as "dactyl" and "spondee," can't we get the surprise? the profound "havoc" of the "deed [that] dominates the consciousness"?
- Don't we get that Homer and (us - yes, you and me too - among) his audiences feel something here that Aristotle, among others, is wanting (us) to be anesthesized to?
- Do you want me to blog on the "censoriousness" of the sexism of certain readers?
- Do you want to discuss with me the richness of our languages that men long ago would rob us of?
- Dare you rhetoricians and you linguists, like me, in light of Homer's heavy first line, ask questions that Eric Haveloc (in his Preface to Plato) and that Cheryl Glenn and Andrea Lunsford and so many others in their various historiographies and that Kenneth Pike ask about what it must take to recover and to uncover and to re-present rhetorics and languages?
- Would you like to consider together the ways that the Jews are so like Homer? Like him in first forming / and continuing traditions? Doesn't he generate the genesis of orality married profoundly with literacy? And don't they (in what Tel Aviv University Professor Sylvie Honigman calls "the Homeric paradigm') generate the genesis of Hebrew scripture rendered profoundly into Hellene?
- And, if we still had time, wouldn't you bibliobloggers think it's a fantastic idea to muse about how the writer of the "New Testament" "book" called "Hebrews" starts its "first line" with "a metric subtlety" like "Homer uses with impressive effect"? Jared Calaway started playing the pipes, but few of us so far have danced.
Monday, March 16, 2009
Listening to Moses in the Desert? Why? How? Who?
Beneath the sheets of paper lies my truth
. . . and the bible didn't mention us, not even once.
--Regina Spektor's "Samson [and Delilah]"
I knew all the stories
and I learned to talk about How
You were mighty to save
Those were only empty words on a page
--Jenny Simmons' "What Do I Know of Holy"
. . . and the bible didn't mention us, not even once.
--Regina Spektor's "Samson [and Delilah]"
I knew all the stories
and I learned to talk about How
You were mighty to save
Those were only empty words on a page
--Jenny Simmons' "What Do I Know of Holy"
So we want to understand what Moses said to men to say to their wives? We want to get a handle on the words of God, to him, to them? Now why would you or I want that?
Some today believe the words are meant for them; yes, the Hebrew words. Yes, the words rendered, translated in a book, as an inspired bible, the God-breathed Bible. Others read the words as male dominance of women then and there (if not also a perpetual force here and now).
There are lots of readings in between:
>"If God said it, then how can I question it if it were sexist!";
>"Since I'm a cultural and linguistic relativist, and since Tvi Abusch has researched 'a number of cultures' using prescribed ordeals in which women inflict abuse on the poor men, then who am I to judge Moses?";
>"The whole thing's a fable, so who cares?";
>"Might be history, but it's not mine, so who cares?";
>"Water torture of those not yet proven guilty? Sounds like the Bush administration so it stinks";
>"It's the old covenant - read Jesus or Paul or Emerson Eggerichs instead";
>"It's the error of the infidel - read the Quran's Surah 24 of the holy Prophet of Allah instead";
>"Did somebody say 'chocolate'? - if housewives are fooled by such 'sweet' womanizers, then shame on them!"
If you've come around this blog of mine before, you know I'm interested in Aristotle's persistent influences on us. It's a curious thing, of course, to bring Aristotle into a discussion about Numbers 5 (or a segment of the fourth book [ בַּמִּדְבָּר, Bamidbar] of the Torah). Or is it?
What I'm doing in this post is pausing a bit. Responding to some of the comments of the previous post. Giving everyone time to look over the Hellene translation of the Hebrew linked to there.
Finding myself excited that Robert Alter would ask, "From what do you translate the Bible? . . . . from what language? . . . . from what text? . . . . The oldest of . . . translations, the Greek, or Septuagint, done in Alexandria in the third century B.C.E., is the one that scholars have drawn on most heavily for solutions to puzzles in the Masoretic Text. . . . And the fact remains that the Greeks were translators, obliged as translators to clarify obscure points, resolve contradictions, and otherwise make the Hebrew text with which they labored intelligible to their Greek readers."
Reminding myself that these are Alter's notes "To The Reader" [of English] on "The Text" [in Hebrew and in Greek] of "I and 2 Samuel," which he translates beautifully and comments on intelligently.
Thinking about what Aristotle taught Greek men only, that flowed into the alert mind of and the mighty army of Alexander the Great. Considering how Sylvie Honigman at Tel Aviv University says it's not the "Alexandrian paradigm" or the "Exodus paradigm" but the "Homeric paradigm" that most informs the history of the Greek translation of the Hebrew Torah.
Wondering if the Homeric paradigm isn't what Krista Ratcliffe has recovered in theorizing "rhetorical listening" by listening rhetorically to an afrafeminist or two. Noticing the reductive difference Aristotle makes in certain words that Homer and the Hebrew-to-Greek translators of Numbers 5 use.
Therefore: what if we, any of us, were to listen to Moses speaking in the desert? Could we hear (as Alter does in his translation of The Five Books of Moses) how "The woman is rhetorically buttonholed" in this text? Might we have eyes to see and ears to hear (as Julia E. Smith does in her translation of Numbers V, a literal translating, as if a writing of the woman's body)?
Some today believe the words are meant for them; yes, the Hebrew words. Yes, the words rendered, translated in a book, as an inspired bible, the God-breathed Bible. Others read the words as male dominance of women then and there (if not also a perpetual force here and now).
There are lots of readings in between:
>"If God said it, then how can I question it if it were sexist!";
>"Since I'm a cultural and linguistic relativist, and since Tvi Abusch has researched 'a number of cultures' using prescribed ordeals in which women inflict abuse on the poor men, then who am I to judge Moses?";
>"The whole thing's a fable, so who cares?";
>"Might be history, but it's not mine, so who cares?";
>"Water torture of those not yet proven guilty? Sounds like the Bush administration so it stinks";
>"It's the old covenant - read Jesus or Paul or Emerson Eggerichs instead";
>"It's the error of the infidel - read the Quran's Surah 24 of the holy Prophet of Allah instead";
>"Did somebody say 'chocolate'? - if housewives are fooled by such 'sweet' womanizers, then shame on them!"
If you've come around this blog of mine before, you know I'm interested in Aristotle's persistent influences on us. It's a curious thing, of course, to bring Aristotle into a discussion about Numbers 5 (or a segment of the fourth book [ בַּמִּדְבָּר, Bamidbar] of the Torah). Or is it?
What I'm doing in this post is pausing a bit. Responding to some of the comments of the previous post. Giving everyone time to look over the Hellene translation of the Hebrew linked to there.
Finding myself excited that Robert Alter would ask, "From what do you translate the Bible? . . . . from what language? . . . . from what text? . . . . The oldest of . . . translations, the Greek, or Septuagint, done in Alexandria in the third century B.C.E., is the one that scholars have drawn on most heavily for solutions to puzzles in the Masoretic Text. . . . And the fact remains that the Greeks were translators, obliged as translators to clarify obscure points, resolve contradictions, and otherwise make the Hebrew text with which they labored intelligible to their Greek readers."
Reminding myself that these are Alter's notes "To The Reader" [of English] on "The Text" [in Hebrew and in Greek] of "I and 2 Samuel," which he translates beautifully and comments on intelligently.
Thinking about what Aristotle taught Greek men only, that flowed into the alert mind of and the mighty army of Alexander the Great. Considering how Sylvie Honigman at Tel Aviv University says it's not the "Alexandrian paradigm" or the "Exodus paradigm" but the "Homeric paradigm" that most informs the history of the Greek translation of the Hebrew Torah.
Wondering if the Homeric paradigm isn't what Krista Ratcliffe has recovered in theorizing "rhetorical listening" by listening rhetorically to an afrafeminist or two. Noticing the reductive difference Aristotle makes in certain words that Homer and the Hebrew-to-Greek translators of Numbers 5 use.
Therefore: what if we, any of us, were to listen to Moses speaking in the desert? Could we hear (as Alter does in his translation of The Five Books of Moses) how "The woman is rhetorically buttonholed" in this text? Might we have eyes to see and ears to hear (as Julia E. Smith does in her translation of Numbers V, a literal translating, as if a writing of the woman's body)?
18 And the priest made the woman stand before Jehovah, and uncovered the head of the woman, and gave upon her hands the gift of remembrance, this is the gift of jealousy: and in the hand of the priest shall be to him the waters of contradiction, causing the curse.
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