a simile was left in place!

Statue of Teucer by Sir William Hamo Thornycroft (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Oswald lists the 8 Trojans killed by Teucer in the same order Homer does, with rather less focus on Teucer and no mention of Ajax' name; then  moves to Gorgythion, and this is the first place where she uses a simile that Homer uses of the same person Homer uses it for.  But it is so perfect it's not surprising; and it is used of the sort of character that interests Oswald, that is, one who is never mentioned before or after.  Teucer is aiming at Hector, misses, and hits Gorgythion, "someone's darling son", in the breast.  Homer tells us his father was Priam and his mother Kastianeira, but Oswald doesn't follow her practice until now and record the mother's name.  She moves on to the simile:

8.306-308 μήκων δ’ ὡς ἑτέρωσε κάρη βάλεν, ἥ τ’ ἐνὶ κήπῳ
καρπῷ βριθομένη νοτίῃσί τε εἰαρινῇσιν,
ὣς ἑτέρωσ’ ἤμυσε κάρη πήληκι βαρυνθέν

As a poppy in bloom in a garden drops its head to one side, 

weighed down by the spring rain,

so his head sank down, weighed down by his helmet  

(my translation: Oswald's is much better).

Really one thing reading Oswald so carefully is doing for me is renewing my appreciation of Homer.  This passage can't be matched; it's perfect; and it's thrown away, in Homer, on a redshirt, on someone we will never hear of again.  In Oswald, that's the whole point; the similes are not thrown away, but pointedly attached to the redshirts, the ones that otherwise went unmourned.  But here she and Homer agree; Gorgythion should be remembered too.

The article I've linked below is thoughtful and interesting, and reminds me why I should stop reading only for historical and social context, as I tend to, because it's easy.

Related articles

• Reading through allegory and metaphor

Study Leave: daily notes

Achilles tending Patroclus wounded by an arrow, identified by inscriptions on the upper part of the vase. Tondo of an Attic red-figure kylix, ca. 500 BC. From Vulci. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Iliad VIII 245-253 in codex F205 (Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana), late 5th or early 6th c. AD Taken from http://www.lgpn.ox.ac.uk/image_archive/mss/mss2.html (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I think I'm going to start keeping track of the progress I make on whatever the project of the day is.  I am done teaching for the term, though I am not done marking for the term heaven knows, but I'm going to spend a little time each day on a research project, by way of easing myself into my summer schedule.  And I have a study leave until January, which is such a relief!

So, first up: a paper on Alice Oswald's Memorial.  This is in the first instance going to be a conference paper, and I'll see if there's enough in it to publish afterwards.  I already think there will be.

Memorial is a re-figuring of the Iliad, a translation that skips the narrative and concentrates only on the death scenes, especially though not exclusively of minor characters, and the similes.  The writer did Classics at Oxford and from my reading of her work her Greek is excellent.

My first step is to go through the text and see where she's pulling the scenes from, and compare them to Homer, to see in each instance how her translation compares, what she's doing with the Greek.  She is being free with it, in an extremely rooted way.  And she is doing the same with the similes, though they are perhaps more direct translations; but she has so far (I'm about 1/3 of the way through) always drawn the simile from a different part of the Iliad than the death scene - so the simile, however apropos, was about someone else in the original.  I am trying (at the moment) to figure out how the original informs the choice, and what resonance the original position of the simile (if any) might give to its re-positioning in her poem.

Today I had a look at her bit on Deicoon, who gets 8 lines in the Iliad and 4 short lines in Memorial.  Followed by a simile and for the first time I couldn't place where she'd got it from; in the original it either refers to Iris or to the fight at the ships, and I suspect the latter.  In both cases it's a Trojan that does or will die.  Not sure that matters.  The death of Deicoon is followed in the Iliad with a scene in which several people die in short order; perhaps that's what made her choose that simile.  Or not.  Maybe it just sounded nice.

Must read Terry Eagleton on poetry.  There is so very much I'm not getting here.

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• Alice Oswald at the Southbank Centre
• Five-minute memoir: Alice Oswald recalls an eccentric neighbour
• Diigo Bookmarks: Week Ending February 18, 2012