Douglas Frame talks about assorted Homerica and his book Hippota Nestor over at the Center for Hellenic Studies site:
Category: Homerica
Afrikaans+ Iliad
This one’s getting quite a bit of press coverage in various venues … the Telegraph piece has been brought to my attention by myriad readers, so myriad tips o’ the pileus accrue:
Richard Whitaker, the Emeritus Professor of Classics at the University of Cape Town, said he wanted to celebrate South African English, a patois that takes in words from Afrikaans and the country’s 10 other official African languages, while helping his students to gain a clearer understanding of the polemic poem.
The 3,000-year-old text has been translated into virtually every language in the world, and there are more than 70 English versions, tackled by Greek scholars, poets and even British Conservative Prime Minister, Edward Smith-Stanley, the 14th Earl of Derby.
But Oxford and St Andrews-educated Prof Whitaker said that aspects in common between the traditional Greek and African societies was lost in European-centric translations.
“There are traditions that resonate far more for South Africans,” he said.
“The references to a bride price, where brides were sold for cattle, for example, is much more understandable to an African audience than a European elite.” The resulting translation took him 10 years to produce and sees European concepts such as kings, princes and palaces replaced with “amakhosi” (the Zulu and Xhosa word for chiefs and headmen), “kgotla” (the Tswana word for community councils), and “kraals” (Afrikaans for homestead).
Achilles, armed with his “assegai” (traditional spear), vanquishes many Trojan “impis” (the Zulu word for regiments), before he and his men celebrate with a feast of grilled meat which South Africans of all races refer to as a “braai”.
It took 61-year-old Prof Whitaker ten years to produce his South African version and, given the cold shoulder by the country’s university presses, he has published 300 copies of the 528-page text himself in the hope that it will be of interest both to scholars and ordinary South Africans.
He has already had some success: the respected Rhodes University in Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape has put it on the curriculum for the next academic year, along with the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal in Durban and Prof Whitaker’s own University of Cape Town.
Prof Whitaker now has his eyes set on a similar translation of Homer’s Odyssey. He hopes others will follow his lead in celebrating South Africa’s melting pot of languages, like all other aspects of race so fiercely kept apart previously by the apartheid government.
“It’s important for postcolonial countries to make their own connections with the classics – they belong to all of us,” he said.
- via: Homer’s The Iliad translated into South African English (Telegraph)
Also Seen: Donum natalicium digitaliter confectum Gregorio Nagy septuagenario a discipulis collegis familiaribus oblatum
A different approach (i.e. online) to a Festschrift over at the Center for Hellenic Studies:
… a pile of Homer-related articles, as one might suspect
Poets and Profs ~ Homer as Slam Poetry
Owen Cramer mentioned this article in UChicago Magazine yesterday on the Classics list … here’s the incipit:
For Mark Eleveld, MLA’10, and Ron Maruszak, MLA’10, the realization was inescapable: Homer, the blind bard, ancient Greece’s greatest poet, whose epics on the Trojan War and its aftermath founded the Western canon and influenced 3,000 years of literature, was, basically, a slam poet. What else to call a man—a showman and writer—who made his living turning poetry into entertainment, who traveled from town to town performing memorized verses before crowds of listeners? “I imagine that if Homer was alive today, and he had to go hang with a crew, he’s either going to the playwrights or to the performance poets,” says Eleveld. “In my head, it’s the performance poets. They take a hit in academic circles, but they’re closer to Homer than people realize.”
That’s the argument running through a documentary by Eleveld and Maruszak, Poets and Profs: Looking at the “Iliad,” in which ivory tower luminaries like Robert Pinsky and Nicholas Rudall, Herman Sinaiko, AB’47, PhD’61 (who died in October 2011), and James Redfield, U-High’50, AB’54, PhD’61, share the screen with leading lights from the slam poetry world: Taylor Mali, Bob Holman, Regie Gibson, Marc Smith. West Point English professor Elizabeth Samet provides some of the film’s most stirring moments, discussing the Iliad’s lessons—literary, military, and moral—for future soldiers. […]
- via: Iliad out loud (University of Chicago Magazine)
A trailer for the doc came out last year:
… and the comments to the UChicago piece link to a marathon reading primarly by the younger set in Louisville:
You’ve heard Keep Louisville Weird, how about Keeping Louisville Classical?
A local group of students are trying to keep the past alive and well.
At the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft on West Main Street– a trip back in time.
Dr. John Hale from the University of Louisville is reading book two of the Iliad by Homer and it is all complete with musical accompaniment.
He’s one of 100 featured readers who will finish the epic 24 book poem about the Trojan War by Saturday.
The poem is complex, but the point is simple, Keep Louisville Classical; all in thanks to students from the Louisville Classical Academy.
Students are reciting part of it in English and in Greek.
These students take both Latin and Greek – it’s part of the curriculum here at the school near U.S. 42 and Prospect, Ky. It opened just a few years ago.
The Iliad is the earliest surviving written work from ancient Greece.
It’s this book that changed the course of life for the school’s founder Marcia Cassidy.
The former attorney read it in her mid forties and thought what if for a classical school.
Seventy-five children grades three through 12 are now enrolled at Louisville Classical Academy. They learn the basics and the classics and they love it.
They say all roads lead back to the Iliad — from literature, to language to culture.
They say it’s hip to be classical, and it’s hip to read Homer.
… it includes a video news report which is quite good …
Iliad Translation Contest ~ Winner Announced!
About a year ago we mentioned a contest sponsored by the Simon and Schuster folks wherein contestants were asked to translate a chunk of the Iliad and Stephen Mitchell would judge which was best (Iliad Translation Contest ~ Stephen Mitchell as Judge). A winner has been announced and Layne Evans’ version can be read here:
… even better, LE is a rogueclassicism reader! Congratulations!
rogueclassicism 