[b-greek] Re: Late Summer Reading

From: c stirling bartholomew (cc.constantine@worldnet.att.net)
Date: Mon Jul 30 2001 - 14:42:53 EDT


on 7/29/01 10:26 PM, c stirling bartholomew wrote:

> I stumbled upon Ezra Pound's Electra (edited by Rudd Fleming
> and Richard Reid, 1989, Princeton). This book contains a fair amount of
> Greek text, or at least what appears to be Greek text transliterated in all
> capital letters.
>
> Does anyone know if these are all just citations from classics or does Pound
> make up some of his own Greek material?

A few comments came about this off list but no one has ventured to answer
the question. So I decided to take a look into it using the brute force
method.

I went through the first 200 lines of E. Pound & R. Fleming's "Electra"
following it in the Oxford text of Sophocles. It turns out that the answer
isn't very exciting. For the most part the Greek text is just verbatim from
the Oxford text. There are two places in the first 200 lines where a small
scrap, a phrase or two is quoted out of sequence, but for the most part it
is very direct quotation sometimes right down to the hyphenation.

This raises another question about the Oxford text. Why are words broken in
the middle of a line with a hyphen? Is this following the hyphenation of the
principle manuscripts?

Anyway, this rendering of Electra sometimes has both the Greek text and an
English translation and other times it has just the Greek text or just an
English translation. Clearly this book isn't intended for general audiences.
But not much that E. Pound wrote was intended for general audiences.

Well this isn't a classics list so I will drop the topic now and go back to
doing some work.

Clay

--
Clayton Stirling Bartholomew
Three Tree Point
P.O. Box 255 Seahurst WA 98062



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