SA 12/30 Ithaka
Dec. 30th, 2002 12:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cthulhiaI was all set to grumble about her translation of Ithaka since it seemed to remove the monsters and battles and replace it with shopping! (I picked that URL of many for its jpg of the vase depicting a cephalopod.)
As it turns out, the shopping is in the original.
She still removed the monsters, and there's a key lesson in their stanza:
you won't encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.
And she rather embellishes the ending. Then again, I have no idea of what colloquial embellishment was lost in translation. (It was written in Greek.)
Whenever I visit planet Circlet, I ask Ctan to hand me a book. This time, she loaned me Gates of Fire, a novel of the Battle of Thermopylae. The (fictional) narrator grew up near Ithaka. another minor synchronicity.
Another story of Greeks confounding the Persians. This is one the Greeks lose, but not before taking out 10-20 times their numbers. What if the Greeks hadn't ultimately prevailed? No (or different) Roman empire, republic, messiahs, dueling claims on Jerusalem, crusades, jihads, holidays, dark ages and loss of information. What animosities would not exist now?
My Greek warns me that he may have to cancel tentative plans for tomorrow (he called, it matters to him to not just disappear at me, another fine time for my mantra du jour what a difference a year makes!), deploying... somewhere, probably Persia. Everything always seems to go back to Persia.
As it turns out, the shopping is in the original.
She still removed the monsters, and there's a key lesson in their stanza:
you won't encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.
And she rather embellishes the ending. Then again, I have no idea of what colloquial embellishment was lost in translation. (It was written in Greek.)
Whenever I visit planet Circlet, I ask Ctan to hand me a book. This time, she loaned me Gates of Fire, a novel of the Battle of Thermopylae. The (fictional) narrator grew up near Ithaka. another minor synchronicity.
Another story of Greeks confounding the Persians. This is one the Greeks lose, but not before taking out 10-20 times their numbers. What if the Greeks hadn't ultimately prevailed? No (or different) Roman empire, republic, messiahs, dueling claims on Jerusalem, crusades, jihads, holidays, dark ages and loss of information. What animosities would not exist now?
My Greek warns me that he may have to cancel tentative plans for tomorrow (he called, it matters to him to not just disappear at me, another fine time for my mantra du jour what a difference a year makes!), deploying... somewhere, probably Persia. Everything always seems to go back to Persia.
