Searching for a simile
This Google search brought a seeker to these pages: “homeric simile about assholes.”
A Homeric Faulkner simile
It’s in As I Lay Dying.
Fitzgerald, Lombardo, Mitchell
“A translation of a poem as vast as the Odyssey rises or falls not in its treatment of great, memorable lines — such as those that describe Argos, lying neglected and bug-ridden on a pile of dung — but in its treatment of what might be called ordinary lines, those that go by in a way that invites no special attention from a reader. Someone walks into town; someone offers a greeting; someone serves a meal: the translator must attend to it all.”
Eponym of the day: hector
“Hector is a brave and dutiful character, but unfortunately his name is now sullied in the language.”
Achilles in Afghanistan
“The subtitle of Achilles in Vietnam — Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character — makes a point that some readers want to resist: that good character provides no sure defense against the experiences of war, that good character can be destroyed by circumstance.”
The Interrupters
“The fatalism of so many of the film’s young people, captured in the words ‘I am next,’ written on a wall of the dead, seems straight from the Iliad: ‘I know I will not make old bones,’ as Achilles says. Yet the Violence Interrupters themselves have learned to live beyond criminality and violence, and we see them, armed only with words, convincing others to do the same.”
Homer and Limbaugh and epithets
“In Odyssey 22, it is men who have the final word over women’s choices. Current events are all too reminiscent of that scenario.”
Edward Luttwak on Homer Inc
Edward Luttwak on the Iliad in Arabic, Chinese, and English.
Selling the Iliad
Quoting a nearly sixty-year-old undated sentence on the likely longevity of a translation, a sentence whose writer went on to make his own translation of the poem, seems, well, odd.
Logic and porridge
Goldilocks, Homer, and thermodynamics.
Christopher Logue (1926–2011)
“Logue’s Homer seems to me the last great work of literary modernism, collapsing past(s) and present with grim wit and startling originality.”
An Iliad
A one-man adaptation, in Chicago.
New from Homer
why might one sit down to translate a work one has never read, either in the original or in translation?
Word of the day: aegis
Pallas Athena borrows the keys to the aegis from Dad.
Odysseus's palace discovered (?)
Guys, it's a story
The Odyssey, not a novel
Contra a Wall Street Journal article
Rock Odyssey
Homer for kids
Home sweet Homer
Turkish mayors fight over Homer's birthplace
Metaphors for life
Gilgamesh and the Odyssey rule.
Translations, mules, briars
Guy Davenport on Richmond Lattimore
Teleconference: Stanley Lombardo reads Homer
Coming in December, Stanley Lombardo reads from the Odyssey
A teachable moment
Odysseus, Polyphemus, a bug, me
Rod Blagojevich, maker of metaphors
He thinks he's Icarus (ugh)
Kirk Douglas is Ulysses, on DVD
"The film’s a hoot in any format."
"About three lines" again
Another take on Penelope in the Odyssey
"About three lines"? Wrong.
Penelope doesn't get "about three lines" in the Odyssey
Trouble in Ithaca
Some details about a film adapatation of the Odyssey
Drugs and memories
Drugs for forgetting, in our world and in Homer's Odyssey
Blagojevich and "Ulysses"
Odysseus as a role-model
Brad Pitt and Homer's Odyssey
Oh no.