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Back to the Greek
It's far enough away now from the Open University examination for me to be able to glance at some Greek without experiencing that sick sensation in the pit of my stomach, so I've been leafing through the A396 course again this week, noting down roughly what I missed - rather a lot! - and what I'd like to revise - practically all of it!
I'm short on time, as always, but have decided to start my 'third year of Greek' - which is essentially what this will be, as I swing back through my second year course at more leisure and with less panic - with some poetry. During the period of my eviction, mid-year, I was reliably informed by my tutor that I could miss all of the work done on Greek poetry and still manage to pass the course, as poetry doesn't figure in the examination.
He noted, of course, the irony behind this advice, given that I am a poet by profession and that my original reason for studying Ancient Greek was to provide myself with a more informed foundation from which to attempt translations of the Greek poetry classics, e.g. Homer and Sappho.
But now, with no examination to frighten me, I can look back on the poetry elements of the course with complete sanguinity (which the dictionary tells me should be 'sanguineness', though it doesn't sound as elegant). Well, more or less complete. From the first thirty lines of the Iliad given in the study guide (from Book 16), I can see that it isn't easy to read and translate Homer, even when under no pressure to do so brilliantly.
Homer: a split-personality?
Firstly, Homer was probably not one man, as most subsequent ages have assumed. The poems we attribute to 'Homer' may well have been the work of several or even many poets, some of whom used quite ancient and difficult dialect forms. For a start, there's no augment. Then some common words have additional letters added or just look and sound plain different, occasionally because of the prior existence of the digamma - a letter which has now disappeared from Greek, but left its mark behind on the language forms.There are also various conventions associated with Greek verse which entail certain words being truncated (for metric reasons) or unusual compounds being scattered about in an unreasonably ad hoc manner (that sounds pretty and poetic, thought Homer, even if it doesn't make a great deal of sense).
This means a whole new way of reading Greek has to be developed if I'm to make any headway with Homer. Luckily, of course, there is an upside.
Firstly, I already have experience reading Latin verse, so I'm not that easily thrown by nouns separated from their adjectives or difficult-to-recognise poeticisms being trundled out to add drama or 'prettiness' or for the convenience of the metre - here, the grand but flexible hexameter.
Secondly, I've studied Anglo-Saxon poetry too, including those highly lugubrious pieces The Wanderer and The Seafarer. This means that odd poetic compounds like Homer's 'wine-dark' sea are no stranger to me. Besides, those 'stock poetic phrases' do tend to get repeated a fair amount too, the Iliad being (or is at least assumed to be) a written form of an earlier oral poetry, which makes the student's life somewhat easier.
