Sam Terry > Recent Status Updates

I just finished Antigone and it is probably my favorite so far. Maybe Prometheus Bound after that. The Elizabeth Wyckoff translation was as good as the David Grene ones. I’m still shocked that Lattimore’s Agamemnon was as difficult as it was but it has me questioning my loyalty a bit. Maybe I will do Fagles’ Odyssey instead

Oedipus Rex ought to end with the theme from Curb Your Enthusiasm

Oedipus the King is the only one of these I’ve actually read before, but that was 10 years ago and it was the Fagles translation. I remember enjoying it and have been meaning to revisit it. I’m a little relieved that Lattimore was only responsible for Agamemnon because so far the Grene translations in this collection are way easier to read.

Prometheus Bound was oddly bleak, but I enjoyed the translation a lot more than Lattimore’s Agamemnon. Prometheus drops some of the coldest bars of all time. Free my boy

The David Grene translation of Prometheus Bound is far to read so far than Agamemnon was. The Agamemnon translation was credited to Richmond Lattimore but syntactically it seemed a lot more baroque than his translation of the Iliad so I assume he was credited for making adjustments to an earlier translation.

Agamemnon finished. Really cool but I don’t have time to unpack it right now so I will circle back later with my notes

Ohhhhh so that’s why this one is called Agamemnon

I haven’t picked this up in a week or so but I’ve resolved to finish it this year. Agamemnon is tough so far, but I loved the Iliad so I’ve grown really fond of these characters. I’m pretty sure the translation of Agamemnon used here was done by H. W. Smyth so I wonder if I wouldn’t find a more recent translation easier to follow .

I picked this up because I saw that Richmond Lattimore edited it but so far I’m finding the translation of Agamemnon pretty difficult to parse. I have been too busy too make much progress but hopefully I’ll be able to make more sense of it next week.

A friend and linguist sent this to me for my 18th birthday. It looks short, but I’ve found that Chomsky’s work demands some scrutiny. I’m only about halfway through the first lecture and I’ve been giving him total hell in the margins. It’s nice that he uses examples from Spanish though

The fun continues! I liked Lattimore’s translation of the Iliad and you don’t change horses in the middle of a race. I do wish Richard Martin wrote an introduction to this edition, too, but maybe a lot of that material would be redundant. In any case I’m glad to hear more from Lattimore in this introduction.

“Just love people for who they are, and for all the things they’ve chosen to keep away from you.”

“Sometimes you meet people you love but that still won’t be enough because you won’t know who you are, when you are someone who isn’t alone.”

Don’t you know? You’re always making the world you live in, friend, right up until the moment you die. And then after that, too.

I did not expect a strong emotional response to anything in this poem, but the image of Astyanax tugging on the clothes of adults (22.493) after his father’s killing was really vivid and really sad.

“…I was excited by the possibility of living as I wanted outside a city, what with cities seeming like this kind of queer inevitability, necessary if I wanted to fuck and dress weird.”

It’s interesting that I no longer feel such sympathy for Hektor as I did in and around book 6. The fight over Patroklos’ armor and body was really unflattering. It feels like his selflessness and nobility vanished as soon as the war shifted in Troy’s favor; he’s now more invested in seeking glory for himself (to the outspoken distaste of Glaukos) than in protecting his home and his people