the merlin @brecilien - Tumblr Blog

In The Odyssey, Odysseus is extraordinary for the flexibility with which he can inhabit many different names, or no name at all. It is this quality of being multinamed and nameless that enables him to survive. By contrast, almost all the warriors of The Iliad yearn to have a name and a story that lasts forever. Their many names and titles, as sons and brothers and comrades and fathers and rulers, are essential to their identities, their connections with one another, and their fame after death. They fear, above all, being humiliated (cursed with a negative name), or forgotten and nameless. The lists and catalogs of names are essential to the poem’s own work, of memorializing and mourning the dead. Once the bodies return to dust, these syllables are all that remain.

– Emily Wilson, Translator's note for The Iliad.

lionofchaeronea

An Invocation to Bacchus

Now, o Bacchus, we fall, humble, before your altar: Give me, father, peace and favoring sails. You have the power to check the pride of raving Venus: With your pure wine comes medicine for cares. Lovers are yoked through you, through you their yoke's undone: You, Bacchus, wash the fault out of my mind.

Nunc, o Bacche, tuis humiles advolvimur aris: da mihi pacato vela secunda, pater. tu potes insanae Veneris compescere fastus, curarumque tuo fit medicina mero. per te iunguntur, per te solvuntur amantes: tu vitium ex animo dilue, Bacche, meo.

--Propertius, Elegies III.17.1-6

homeric-hymnist

Baby i am aeolic i am ionic i have atticisms in me you can't even begin to comprehend. i contain multitudes

petaltexturedskies

You already know the story. You will die. Everyone you love will also die. You will lose them forever. You will be sad and angry. You will weep. You will bargain. You will make demands. You will beg. You will pray. It will make no difference. Nothing you can do will bring them back. You know this. Your knowing changes nothing. This poem will make you understand this unfathomable truth again and again, as if for the very first time.

Emily Wilson, an excerpt of her introduction to The Iliad

a-h-mad-hish

“Do not act as if you had ten thousand years to throw away. Death stands at your elbow. Be good for something while you live and it is in your power.”

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

fluentisonus

remember when vergil had aeneas meeting anchises in the underworld but instead of just going directly to the odysseus meeting his mother intertext he did it specifically via catullus 101. that was so sexy

fluentisonus

(text from biondi's Il carme 101 di C., trans. holford-strevens)

mournfulroses

Tamura Ryuichi, from Poems 1946-1998; “October Poem,” written c. 1943

madphantom

"I'm just a girl☺️🥰💖💞💅🌺🌷🦄" when you were eight and the teacher said she needed some strong boys to carry something you used to be furious, and when you convinced them to let you help, you carried twice as many chairs as the boys with the righteous anger of a girl who knew she was just as capable as them. Where did that go?

craftingtheclassics

“When we say cliché, stereotype, trite pseudoelegant phrase, and so on, we imply, among other things, that when used for the first time in literature the phrase was original and had a vivid meaning. In fact, it became hackneyed because its meaning was at first vivid and neat, and attractive, and so the phrase was used over and over again until it became a stereotype, a cliché. We can thus define clichés as bits of dead prose and of rotting poetry.”

— Vladimir Nabokov drops this brilliant bit of insight roughly half way through his lecture on James Joyce’s Ulysses, the last of his in Lectures on Literature.

pink-lemonade-rose

“The Muses were goddesses of poetry, but poetry itself encompassed a very wide domain. Many of the pre-Socratic philosophers (Parmenides, Xenophanes, Empedocles) expressed their thoughts in poetry, and Empedocles, at least, invokes the Muses for their aid. […] Empedocles’ use of the figure of the Muse should remind us of the range of the Muses’ functions in the culture of early Greece: not only are they givers of pleasure who soothe cares and immortalize the deeds of men in song, as daughters of Mnemosyne they know everything about the past and the unseen world of the gods, and they are also authorities on ethical matters and wisdom generally.”

— Penelope Murray, “The Muses and their Arts”

hamletofficial

In The Odyssey, Odysseus is extraordinary for the flexibility with which he can inhabit many different names, or no name at all. It is this quality of being multinamed and nameless that enables him to survive. By contrast, almost all the warriors of The Iliad yearn to have a name and a story that lasts forever. Their many names and titles, as sons and brothers and comrades and fathers and rulers, are essential to their identities, their connections with one another, and their fame after death. They fear, above all, being humiliated (cursed with a negative name), or forgotten and nameless. The lists and catalogs of names are essential to the poem’s own work, of memorializing and mourning the dead. Once the bodies return to dust, these syllables are all that remain.

– Emily Wilson, Translator's note for The Iliad.

forthegothicheroine

To me, all vampire stories are time-travel stories in that this person, this monster, they're not beholden to that big hourglass anymore, are they? Just, instead of a device or a magic cave, they use an infection to cross the centuries.

Stephen Graham Jones