I finished the book last night. Since I went the audiobook route (which I almost never do with fiction) it took me a little while. But I ended up driving a lot over the weekend (in real life, not in SnowRunner) and that helped. The narrator was very good.
This wasn’t something I’d ever read for school or for fun and I’m glad this thread pushed me to finally get around to it.
I wondered why young Dawn’s rosy fingers came up so many times, and it makes sense that a toolkit of descriptors would help in maintaining the meter and in reciting the story. I guess these are word-for-word the same each time they appear in the original, but translators change them up to different degrees for variety.
I started reading again, too. I thought I was going to put Chapman down and go for Pope. I was worried I was losing some meaning. But I like Chapman’s verses so much that I’ll just tolerate whatever loss that’s there. In one of the lines, he compared the winds which blew from every direction to a game of tennis. So bizarre…I loved it of course.
He answer’d nothing, but rush’d in, and took
Two of my fellows up from earth, and strook
Their brains against it. Like two whelps they flew
About his shoulders, and did all embrue
The blushing earth. No mountain lion tore
Two lambs so sternly, lapp’d up all their gore
Gush’d from their torn-up bodies, limb by limb
(Trembling with life yet) ravish’d into him.
Both flesh and marrow-stuffed bones he eat,
And even th’ uncleans’d entrails made his meat.
Not exactly; it’s metrical. Contracting “the” into a following vowel is a trick to make them only take one syllable together. Sometimes they need “the” to occupy an entire syllable, in which case it will stay “the”.
Same with ed vs 'd at the end of a past tense verb: written fully it takes its own syllable (lapp-ed, 2 syllables, sounds Shakespearean), written contracted it merges with the previous syllable (lapp’d, the way a normal person would say “lapped” now).
For here the whuling Scylla shrouds her face,
That breathes a voice at all parts no more base
Than are a newly-kitten’d kitling’s cries,
Herself a monster yet of boundless size,
Whose sight would nothing please a mortal’s eyes–
