#gilbert highet

[waiting-eyez]

A good teacher is determined person.

(Gilbert Highet)

[aeide-thea]

(like ig i just feel as though oxford-to-ivy voices like gilbert highet need a touch more unpacking if we’re serious abt not just continuing to hand down all the traditional -isms of classics?

dgmw he’s not even particularly egregious afaik but that one paragraph alone was like. why would you [highet] automatically regurgitate catullus’ sneeringly vitriolic write-off of his ex [simul complexa tenet trecentos, &c] as if it were for sure objectively correct. why a frenchman. [like best case scenario it’s the so-called gender-neutral masculine but i tend to suspect it’s a case of ‘male narrator can only imagine male narrators.’ men kiss women. men write about women. women make for variably-deserving foci of this male subjectivity. this cishet binarism is boring as an analytical framework and i want out.]

and then of course you go to wikipedia and it’s all

“History is a strange experience,” [Highet] wrote in the introduction to an essay on Byzantium. “The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles. When you go to Mexico City through space, you find it a sort of cross between modern Madrid and modern Chicago, with additions of its own; but if you go to Mexico City through history, back only 500 years, you will find it as distant as though it were on another planet: inhabited by cultivated barbarians, sensitive and cruel, highly organized and still in the Copper Age, a collection of startling, of unbelievable contrasts.”

as if “inhabited by cultivated barbarians, sensitive and cruel,” weren’t an equally good description of highet’s own world, or of ours! not to mention: why copper age. why this narrative of like. european-defined Escalator of Progress. why is he pontificating way beyond his wheelhouse abt 15th-c. mexico—ex cathedra vniversitatis colvmbiae—as a preface to talking abt a totally unrelated place and time. [like i get why but i always feel dubious abt the writing approach that does this, like, opening quick-dip for Flavor into some ~interestingly exotic milieu~ that gets summarized briefly and reductively if not incorrectly.] anyway i just think like. worth squinting at a lil more visibly, maybe?)

[duardius]

is a rose a Rose?

opening line set in digital reissue of monotype poliphilus—vide ‹poor poliphilo›. body set in digital reissue of monotype blado; small-caps from poliphilus roman are fitted to the blado italic to attain period compositional style—renaissance typographers sought to recreate scribal custom; they adapted the scripts of humanist scribes.  blado is the 1923 recutting [english monotype 119] of antonio blado’s larger italic adapted from the 2nd italic of ludovico degli arrighi da vincenza, & first shown in the Apologi IIII of petrus collenucius, printed by arrighi, rome, 1526 [stanley morison, A Tally of Types, cup, 1973, p53]. «It originated in Rome in 1526 but it was the Vita Sfortiae of Paolo Giovo printed by Antonio Blado in 1539 that served as the basis for the recutting in 1923.» [ibid., p60].  (2nd illustration.)  separator is a line of monotype digital reissue of their recutting [uk monotype 280]—vide ‹granjon arabesque?›.

[duardius]

happy bloomsday

excerpt, symbolist prose, from james joyce’s Ulysses [the bodley head, london, 1967 (seventh impression, w/ corrections), p245]. «So, to take a complex personal emotion and to embody it in a symbolic figure of legend is to immortalize it, to make it art.» [gilbert highet, The Classical Tradition, oup, new york, 1949, p507].

set in gill sans light.

more from Ulysses: ‹ineluctable›, ‹dante roman›.

[pandaemoniumpancakes]

   Translation, that neglected art, is a far more important element in literature than most of us believe. It does not usually create great works; but it often helps great works to be created. In the Renaissance, the age of masterpieces, it was particularly important.    The first literary translation from one language into another was made about 250 B.C., when the half-Greek half-Roman poet Livius Andronicus turned Homer's Odyssey into Latin for use as a textbook of Greek poetry and legend. (Traditionally, it was about the same time that a committee of seventy-two rabbis was translating certain books of the Hebrew scriptures into Greek for the use of the Jews scattered beyond Palestine, who were forgetting Hebrew and Aramaic; but that version was not made for artistic purposes, and was not such a great milestone in the history of education.) The translation made by Livius Andronicus was a serious and partly successful attempt to re-create a work of art in the framework of a different language and culture. It was the first of many hundreds of thousands.    To the precedent set by Livius we owe much of our modern system of education. The Greeks studied no literature but their own: it was so various, original, and graceful that perhaps they needed nothing more. But the native Roman literature and Roman culture were rude and simple: so, from the third century B.C., Rome went to school with the Greeks. Ever since then the intellectual standards of each European nation have closely corresponded to the importance assumed in its education by the learning and translation of some foreign cultural language.

Gilbert Highet, from ‘Chapter 6. The Renaissance: Translation’ in The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature.

   “Roman literature and Roman thought rose to their noblest when all educated Romans spoke and wrote Greek as well as Latin. The poetry of Vergil, the drama of Plautus and Seneca, the oratory and philosophy of Cicero, were not Roman, but, as we have often called them, a perfect synthesis which was Greco-Roman. When the western Roman empire ceased to know Greek, its culture declined and withered away. But after that, throughout the Dark Ages, culture was kept alive by the few persons who knew another language as well as their own: by the monks, priests, and scholars who understood not only Anglo-Saxon or Irish Gaelic or primitive French, but Latin too. With the spread of bilingualism through the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, European culture deepened and broadened. The Renaissance was largely created by many interacting groups of men who spoke not only their own tongue but Latin too, and sometimes Greek. If Copernicus, Rabelais, Shakespeare, if Queen Elizabeth and Lorenzo de’ Medici had not known Latin, if they had not all, with so many others, enjoyed their use of it and been stimulated by it, we might dismiss Renaissance latinity as a pedantic affectation. But the evidence is too strong and unidirectional. The synthesis of Greco-Roman with modern European culture in the Renaissance produced an age of thought and achievement comparable in magnificence to the earlier synthesis between the spirit of Greece and the energy of Rome.”

[quotes-by-dilanka]

The real duty of man is not to extend his power or multiply his Wealth Beyond his needs, but to enrich and enjoy his imperishable possession: his soul.

—Gilbert Highet

[withinthesplendor]

“Poetry is halfway between prose and music: it is sometimes like an intimate conversation, in words and phrases which need not be fully uttered, and sometimes like dancing and wordless music.”

— Gilbert Highet

[muhammad-ubaidullah-khan]