Laudator Temporis Acti

Homer, Odyssey, tr. Daniel Mendelsohn (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2025), p. 57 (from "A Note on the Translation"):

Wherever possible, I have tried to avoid words whose modernity would jolt readers out of the world that is the epic’s setting. In Book 11, for instance, the ghost of Agamemnon describes how he was murdered at the feast given to celebrate his return from Troy, a passage in which he uses the word eranos, often translated as “picnic.” But “picnic” is what my late friend and mentor Bob Gottlieb, widely acknowledged as one of the greatest editors of the twentieth century, called a “stopper”: given the strong associations that “picnic” has for an Anglophone reader, its presence in this passage would stop the reader, raising questions that would interrupt the flow of the reading experience. (Did the Greeks have picnics? What were they like? What kind of food did they eat? Were there blankets and sunscreen? Etc.) The Odyssey is certainly “modern,” in the sense that its themes are always with us; but the body it inhabits, its accoutrements, are very much of its own remote time. When all is said and done, the world of the epic, its heroes and heroines, villains and goddesses and monsters, is very distant from ours; that distance is, to my mind, an essential part of what the Odyssey is, and should be felt in translation. To cast Homer in up-to-the-minute, contemporary English speech might make it feel approachably modern for some readers, especially young ones; but it is worth remembering that Homer never felt “modern,” even in his own time.

"Did the Greeks have picnics?" There is a good example of a picnic in the Odyssey itself (6.96-97, they = Nausicaa and her attendants; tr. Mendelsohn):

Once they had bathed in the water and anointed their skin with rich oil
They took their meal right there along the bank of the river...

αἱ δὲ λοεσσάμεναι καὶ χρισάμεναι λίπ᾽ ἐλαίῳ
δεῖπνον ἔπειθ᾽ εἵλοντο παρ᾽ ὄχθῃσιν ποταμοῖο...

---

Unfortunately I encounter stoppers, of one sort or another, on almost every page of Mendelsohn's translation, e.g.:

• No Accounting for Taste
• A Puzzle

Here is another example, from 5.103-104 = 5.137-138:

But it's utterly impossible for us other gods to thwart
Or void the intention of Zeus, he who bears the aegis.

ἀλλὰ μάλ᾽ οὔ πως ἔστι Διὸς νόον αἰγιόχοιο
οὔτε παρεξελθεῖν ἄλλον θεὸν οὔθ᾽ ἁλιῶσαι.

As I construe the English translation of line 103 (= 137) , "he who bears the aegis" is in apposition to "Zeus," and "Zeus" is the object of the preposition "of." But "he who bears the aegis" is a nominative phrase in English, and how, therefore, can it be the object of a preposition? I would revise the translation as follows:

But it's utterly impossible for us other gods to thwart
Or void the intention of Zeus who bears the aegis.

C.S. Lewis, letter to his brother (August 7, 1921; "the place" = an inn in Tintagel, Cornwall):

I have not yet exhausted the horrors of the place: I was glad to see a book case in the lounge. All the books were uniformly bound, and I was surprised to see such unlikely titbits as the Ethics of Aristotle and the works of the Persian epic poet Firdausi. I solved the mystery by finding out that they were a uniform series of Lubbock's HUNDRED BEST BOOKS!!! How I abominate such culture for the many, such tastes ready made, such standardization of the brain. To substitute for the infinite wandering of the true reader thro the byways of the country he discovers, a char-a-banc tour.

The Sayings of the Desert Fathers. The Alphabetical Collection. Translated, with a forward by Benedicta Ward, rev. ed. (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984), pp. 218-219 (Sisoes, #31; misprint corrected):

One day the Saracens came and robbed the old man and his brother. As he was setting off into the desert to find something to eat, the old man found some camel dung and having broken it up, he found some grains of barley in it. He ate a grain and put the other into his hand. His brother came and saw him in the act of eating and said to him, 'Is this charity, to find food and to eat it alone without having called me?' Abba Sisoes said to him, Ί have not wronged you, brother, here is your share which I have kept in my hand.'

Patrologia Graeca, Vol. 65, col. 401 C-D:

Ἦλθόν ποτε Σαρακηνοὶ, καὶ ἐξέδυσαν τὸν γέροντα καὶ τὸν ἀδελφὸν αὐτοῦ. Καὶ ἐξελθόντων αὐτῶν εἰς τὴν ἔρημον ἵνα εὕρωσί τι βρώσιμον, εὖρεν ὁ γέρων βόλβιτα καμήλων, καὶ κλάσας εὗρε κοκκία κριθῶν· ἔτρωγε δὲ ἓν κοκκὶν, καὶ τὸ ἓν εἰς τὴν χεῖρα αὐτοῦ ἐτίθει. Ἐλθὼν δὲ ὁ ἀδελφὸς αὐτοῦ, εὖρεν αὐτὸν ἐσθίοντα, καὶ λέγει αὐτῷ· Αὕτη ἐστὶν ἡ ἀγάπη, ὅτι εὗρες βρώσιμον, κὰὶ μόνος ἐσθίεις, καὶ οὐκ ἐφώνησάς με; Λέγει αὐτῷ ὁ ἀββᾶς Σισόης· Οὐκ ἠδίκησά σε, ἀδελφέ· ἰδοὺ τὸ μέρος σου ἐν τῇ χειρί μου ἐτήρησα.

Related post: Noctes Scatologicae: Coprophagy

Labels: noctes scatologicae

Aristophanes in his Wasps used the expression "by Zeus" (μὰ Δί᾽, νὴ Δί᾽, vel sim.) 46 times, at lines:

76, 97,
134, 146, 169, 173, 181, 184, 186, 193,
205, 209, 217, 231, 254, 297, 298, 299,
310, 396,
416, 426, 461, 478,
509, 512,
664, 680,
832, 841,
912, 934, 954, 966, 997,
1126, 1141, 1152,
1231,
1371,
1400, 1404, 1409, 1496,
1506, 1507

In not a single instance did Jeffrey Henderson, in his Loeb Classical Library edition of the play, translate the expression as "by Zeus," instead opting for more colorless renderings ("absolutely," "by god," "certainly," etc.). This is a case of impiety, of not giving Zeus his due.

Zachary P. Biles and S. Douglas Olson on Wasps 76: Related posts:

• By Zeus (in Aristophanes' Lysistrata)
• "By Zeus" in Aristophanes' Wealth

Babrius 126 (tr. Ben Edwin Perry):

A man journeying into the desert
found Truth in person standing all alone.
He said to her: "Why, venerable dame,
have you left the city and now are dwelling in the wilderness?"
To which she, deeply wise, replied forthwith:
"Among the men of old it was only with a few that falsehood found a place,
but now it has spread beyond to all mankind."
[If I may say so, and you care to hear it,
the life of men in the present age is wicked.]

Ὁδοιπορῶν ἄνθρωπος εἰς ἐρημαίην
ἑστῶσαν εὗρε τὴν Ἀληθίην μούνην,
καί φησιν αὐτῇ "διὰ τίν' αἰτίην, γραίη,
τὴν πόλιν ἀφεῖσα τὴν ἐρημίην ναίεις;"
ἡ δ' εὐθὺ πρὸς τάδ' εἶπεν ἡ βαθυγνώμων·        5
"ἐν τοῖς παλαιοῖς παρ' ὀλίγοισιν ἦν ψεῦδος,
νῦν δ' εἰς ἅπαντας ἐξελήλυθ' ἀνθρώπους."
[Εἰ δ' ἔστιν εἰπεῖν καὶ βεβούλησαι κλύειν,
ὁ νῦν βίος πονηρός ἐστιν ἀνθρώπων.]

Ovid, Amores 1.5.18-27 (tr. L.P. Wilkinson):

So there she stood all naked to my gaze.
In all her body not one fault there was.
What shoulders and what arms I saw, I held,
What dainty nipples, asking to be felt,
Beneath the shapely breast what belly smooth,
Hips large and beautiful, the thighs of youth!
Why single out? No part but stood the test.
Her naked to my naked form I pressed.
All know the sequel. We relaxed in swoon.
O, oft may Fortune grant me such a noon!

ut stetit ante oculos posito velamine nostros,
    in toto nusquam corpore menda fuit:
quos umeros, quales vidi tetigique lacertos!        20
    forma papillarum quam fuit apta premi!
quam castigato planus sub pectore venter!
    quantum et quale latus! quam iuvenale femur!
singula quid referam? nil non laudabile vidi,
    et nudam pressi corpus ad usque meum.        25
cetera quis nescit? lassi requievimus ambo.
    proveniant medii sic mihi saepe dies.

C.S. Lewis, letter to his father (December 4,1915):

There is also a 'Greek Literature' by Gilbert Murray, the bad verse-translator, which I have read with dire anger, as he degrades Homer from a poet into a 'question' and prefers that snivelling metaphysician Euripides to Aeschylus.

Psalms 21.22:

salva me ex ore Leonis.

1 Peter 5.8:

adversarius vester diabolus tamquam Leo rugiens circuit, quaerens quem devoret.

Thanks to Eric Thomson for the image.

C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1956), p. 144:

Kirk did not, of course, make me read nothing but Homer. The Two Great Bores (Demosthenes and Cicero) could not be avoided. There were (oh glory!) Lucretius, Catullus, Tacitus, Herodotus. There was Virgil, for whom I still had no true taste. There were Greek and Latin compositions. (It is a strange thing that I have contrived to reach my late fifties without ever reading one word of Caesar.) There were Euripides, Sophocles, Aeschylus.