There’s honorific nomenclature, but everything is grim military action, internecine butchery that leaves nobody unscarred. (There’s more information on the potential differences in translation in this article but suffice it to say they can be large.)Ĭaroline Alexander’s translation seems to situate the action in a more real-world kind of environment. It’s meant to be epic and lengthy, and Alexander’s translation certainly conveys this: you’ll have that hour-three-of- Ben-Hur twitchiness before you’re half done. I think that’s really meant to be the point, though: we’re reading a tale of both a long-lived military campaign and a gods’ pissing contest. Not an unenjoyable one, mind, just a grind. It could’ve been that younger me didn’t pay much attention to what was going on, but this time around I found it to be more of a grind. I’ve read the poem before – the Martin Hammond translation in Penguin, and parts of the Fagles/Knox version – and seem to remember that it flew by.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |