On memory

[yendi]

Wrote a long entry that got munched by LJ earlier. Short summary: Am working from home (as this is one of those hell work weeks), Elayna's off from school until tomorrow (but thankfully slept until 7:45), shadesong is home sick, and I am constantly reminded how much OS9 (and any other OS, too) sucks compared to OSX.

Anyway, I took a break for some reading, and found something I liked. Elayne Riggs, in her recent blog entry, sums up so many of my problems with memorizing pop culture, and has a very similar attitude to mine. It's one of the reasons I don't buy trilogies or series books until they're all released, and also why I prefer buying graphic novels to comics.

And the whole memorization thing is why I really wanted to bitch-slap every single character in Pamela Dean's Tam Lin, much as I enjoyed the book.

Anyway, back to work. Coffee good.

Comments

[amberfox.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I only recall Janet and the Classics majors doing that, though I haven't read it recently. From them it made sense, since literature was the center of their lives.

And alas, I got it off the website. It would have been interesting to have met her. I did email her once to ask if she knew where to find a copy of Chapman's Homer, but hers was old and had been bought used. It was reprinted a few years ago, though, and I bought both the Iliad and Oddysey then. It's beautiful. Not terribly accurate all of the time, but beautiful nonetheless. Plus he puts in these wonderful side-notes criticizing other translators, or with the original phrase in Greek, for those who doubt his accuracy. ^_^

[yendi]

Hmm. I only recall Janet and the Classics majors doing that, though I haven't read it recently. From them it made sense, since literature was the center of their lives.

Well, my memory of books in general is pretty bad, after all. :-)

As for Chapman, I dug up a copy at my high school library after reading the Keats poem, and found it unimpressive. He was poetic enough, but it didn't seem to really capture the spirit of Homer (although I don't doubt it was leagues ahead of the translations of his peers). Given a choice, I always prefer translaters who capture the true spirit of a work (Fagles for Homer, Ciardi for Dante).

[tanaise.livejournal.com]

HATE!Fagles. ew, yuck, ptui.