In the middle of an epic western ...

From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Thu Jul 23 1998 - 21:20:18 EDT


Page 348 of the paperback edition of Larry McMurtry's _Comanche Moon_: A
Harvard-educated Captain of the Texas Rangers who has been captured by an
ageless Mexican torture artist and put into a cage held over a steep cliff
to die begins to imagine ways of keeping himself alive and keen; with a
tiny file that he has come upon by chance he starts to carve into the face
of the rock cliff beside him the Greek hexameters of Homer describing the
watch fires of the Trojans from the Iliad:

        hOI DE MEGA FRONEONTES EPI PTOLEMOIO GEFURAS
        hEIATO PANNUCIOI, PURA DE SFISI KAIETO POLLA. ...

I am an avid reader of some kinds of popular fiction, mostly mysteries, but
I eat up novels by some writers such as Ann Tyler, John Irving, and Larry
McMurtry. I was enthralled by McMurtry's great western epic, _Lonesome
Dove_, when it appeared several years ago and while enjoying a rip-roaring
story kept pondering the strange Latin motto that recurs in it:

        UVA UVAM VIVENDO FIT ...

It doesn't make a lot of sense: a nominative, an accusative, a gerund, and
a verb that can't take a direct object--and yet the line suggests something.
At any rate, I've snapped up each of the sequels and prequels of _Lonesome
Dove_ as soon as they were published as paperbacks, which status _Comanche
Moon_ finally reached a couple weeks ago. I am enjoying the story
immensely, even if it is not all that edifying; nevertheless, the last
thing I expected to find in the middle of a western epic was the Greek text
of a celebrated passage of Homer.

My apologies to those who will have noted at once that this message has
absolutely nothing to do with the Greek New Testament; I just felt that
this was a surprise worth sharing with someone who might conceivably share
my astonishment.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University
Summer: 1647 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/

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