Study Leave: Occasional Posts on Research, Writing and Other Academic Matters: August 2012

Thursday, 30 August 2012

Myth on the Map

Fresco on canvas mounted on board (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Spent my productive time today looking over Myth on the Map. I see that two months ago I was wildly optimistic about getting onto a new author: Homer, perhaps, or Pausanias, this summer. But it is now the end of the summer, and I have spent all the grant money, and we still aren't finished Apollodorus. I don't believe we will ever finish Apollodorus, so there's no point even beginning to wonder what author we should do next. This depresses me.

On the other hand mapping Apollodorus is not such a bad project. I am unlikely to get any more money from the university for this project, but at least Apollodorus on the Map will be a useful website.

Wednesday, 29 August 2012

Dolops, and whirlwinds

English: Menelaus (Ancient Greek: Μενέλαος) was a king of Sparta, the husband of Helen, and a central figure in the Trojan War. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A particularly dense passage today. In Homer, Dolops tries to kill Meges, remains hopeful of victory even after his spear bounces off Meges' armour and Meges slices off his helmet crest (or possibly yanks off the whole helmet), but is killed by Menelaus, who gets around him and rams a spear through him from behind. Oswald renders this as Dolops not believing he could die even after his spear fails, even after he loses his helmet:

"It was not until the beak of death
Pushed out through his own chest
That he recognized the wings of darkness".

She follows this with a short simile:

"Like when god unwinds his whirlwind
A single cloud moves into the middle sky "

which, like most weather similes, took awhile to locate; but it seems to be the beginning & end of a simile from book 16, where Patroclus has routed the Trojan army and the cloud of dust whirling up from their chaotic retreat is like a cloud sent by Zeus when he's sending a storm. There is a double shift here from Homer to Oswald.

First, the single cloud from Zeus heralding a storm = the 'beak of death' heralding Dolops' own death (the "wings of darkness").

But using a simile from the route of the Trojans in this passage, where they're still winning, reminds us of their coming defeat; so the spear through his chest heralds Dolops' death to him, as a single cloud augurs a storm; but Dolops' death, in turn, is the single cloud for us, that augurs the whirlwind of the coming Trojan rout.

Then spent the afternoon, or some of it, contemplating sacrificial virgins. We have decided to write the easy version of the paper - that is, the chunk that will be the easiest to write, about S1 Buffy - and see if we can find a journal that wants it.

Related articles

Saturday, 25 August 2012

three balls in the air

Jacques-Louis David - Homer Reciting his Verses to the Greeks - WGA06120 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

First, Myth on the Map. Spent an hour today in conversation trying to disentangle when we should, and when we shouldn't, indicate group membership in the xml coding. I don't think like a computer programmer at all and this made my head hurt.

Second, sacrificial virgins. Agreed that we would go over our notes and meet on Tuesday and decide if we actually want to write this paper, since we both have things we are supposed to be doing and will get more credit for doing. But this would be fun. But.

Third, Oswald p. 56, on the deaths of 2 Greeks and 2 Trojans, in a list (though she doesn't identify them by group affiliation, which was particularly striking to me as I'd just spent the morning thinking about groups in Homer; in Homer, the group is the whole point; in Oswald, each individual death is the whole point). She then has a simile which she's pulled from Iliad 12, the battle at the walls where the Trojans and Greeks are flinging boulders at each other:

"As the flakes that fall thick upon a winter's day, when Zeus is minded to snow and to display these his arrows to humankind - he lulls the wind to rest, and snows hour after hour till he has buried the tops of the high mountains, the headlands that jut into the sea, the grassy plains, and the tilled fields of men; the snow lies deep upon the forelands, and havens of the gray sea, but the waves as they come rolling in stay it that it can come no further, though all else is wrapped as with a mantle so heavy are the heavens with snow - even thus thickly did the stones fall on one side and on the other, some thrown at the Trojans, and some by the Trojans at the Achaeans; and the whole wall was in an uproar."

(Perseus website translation).

Oswald's translation is much prettier, and repurposes, this time from active to passive. In Homer, the stones thrown by the Greeks and Trojans at each other fall as thickly as snow in a blizzard. In Oswald, after another list of bodies, it's the deaths; the bodies falling so thickly and fast that they obscure the landscape, the trees, the fields, the harbours and beaches, and are obliterated in the sea.

And it has indeed occurred to me that I would make much faster progress on any one project if I had only one project.

Tuesday, 21 August 2012

Home Again

English: Aerial view of the village of Passchendaele (north is to the right of the photo) before and after the Third Battle of Ypres, 1917. Français : Vue aerienne du village de Passendale, avant et après la troisième bataille d'Ypres, en 1917. Le nord est à droite sur les photos. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A CWGC cemetery from the First World War: Tyne Cot in the Ypres Salient (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

THE THIRD BATTLE OF YPRES The Battle of Pilckem Ridge : A British 18 pounder field gun battery taking up new positions close to a communication trench near Boesinghe, 31 July 1917. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Map of the Third Battle of Ypres (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

After a month away, I'm back in Victoria and have finally unpacked and got back to my desk. Today, Kaletor, Lykophron and Kleitos have all been killed, "it goes on and on" as Oswald remarks, partly because the list of dead soldiers in the Iliad is so bloody long, but partly because those are a sequence of vengeance-deaths. Ajax kills Kaletor; Hector, enraged at the death of his cousin (N.B. we've never been told that Hector had a cousin called Kaletor until this instant), tries to kill Ajax, misses, and nails Lykophron; Ajax, enraged that his good friend of the family Lykophron who lived with Ajax' family because he'd killed someone back home and whom Ajax honoured like his own father (and we've never been told any of that before either), calls up Teucer to avenge the death. Teucer sends out a hail of arrows but misses Hector and gets Kleitos, who is just riding up into the thick of the battle to help Hector out. "It goes on and on".

Oswald skips all the made-up-this-instant retconning Homer inserts to give these deaths some emotional resonance. First Kaletor, then Lykophron, then Kleitos. They don't, in Oswald, need some made-up reason for someone important (Ajax, Teucer, Hector) to care about them for their deaths to matter. Their deaths already matter.

While we were in Belgium went to Ypres and Passchendaele, and the German and Tyne Cot World War 1 cemeteries. I stood at Ypres, where young men had died by the thousands, mired to the waist in a bog of mud, and blood, and corpses, and ordinance, and mustard gas, and poison, and rain; and knew that I was certainly standing over bodies, or parts of bodies, of soldiers whose corpses had never been found. I thought about the Iliad, where at least the dead, or most of the dead, had names.