#pudentilla

[elucubrare]

Your personality!!! God I'm always so happy to see you on my dash. You have this playful clever quick witted side, but also like. Backed by this calm wisdom underneath? And you seem so genuinely curious about so many things and topics? Would 100% hike with you or like. Complain about prose

ok this was from this morning from a thing that wasn't meant to be an ask meme but honestly i am so touched???

[slow-burn-sally]

NOVEL

I haven't used this word in any wips!!!

So I'll give you a Henry and Jopson hang out excerpt to go with your beautiful new Henry and Tamsin hangout fanart. It mentions the novels you recommended for me <3

"John’s absence was not passing as swiftly for Henry, who missed his husband terribly. To distract him, Thomas told him funny stories about the children he taught during the day and asked him to talk about whatever book it was he was reading at the time. Thomas has recently read Pamela, Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison, and is curious to know if Henry has read them and what he thinks, as they address some very startling attitudes toward differences in class and stature in English society. Henry has indeed read them, and so a few evenings are passed in discussion of Richardson’s works, which distracts Henry temporarily from his worries."

[lacnunga]

For the ask game! Rain or earth.

Oh ho, I thought I didn't have anything for these ones, but there is just about a mention of earth in here.

"It was two days after he and Le Vesconte returned with the lead party, that he smelled the rot. It was fitting, in a way, that dear Graham was at the moment disassembling in some icy trough far away from English earth, as Hodgson’s own, living flesh fell inward upon itself."

[thebeautifulsoup]

For the ship meme:

Johnsquared (eh eh)

Childermass/Norrell

IS THIS A SURPRISE TO ANYONE REALLY THEY OWN MY SOUL. Mirrors! Foils! Common love! Slowly evolving and re-evaluated relationship! Enemies Begruding contact to friends to lovers! Mutual encouragement! OLD!!!!

This looks bad okay i know but i must clarify that i LOVE their relationship and the complexities of it, the inequalities and the balances and the loyalties and all that, they are FASCINATING but i just do not ship them. I can understand why people DO but they are just not for me, sorry

[fol-de-lol]

FRIEND HAVE YOU ALREADY TOLD US WHAT STREGUNDUS IS???

I have not!

so I’ve been into any pairing that isn’t Johnsquared lately. why? I DO NOT KNOW. but Strange/Segundus makes sense since it’s 100% canon that Strange is bisexual and that Segundus has a huge crush on Strange.

uhhh this might be a spooky fic only I haven’t gotten to the spooky part yet so I’ll just have to see if I can finish my other two spooky WIPs before Halloween? because then I can get back to this. and add something spooky.

[elucubrare]

Came for the poetry stayed for the makeup

<3 

[elucubrare]

Flower shop AU (plant shop au)???

yes 

i'm a dryad who had to get a Job

[elucubrare]

Dear Elucubrare, I have a question and only you can answer it! I'm going to Sicily for a week soon, so of course I've decided I should read the Odyssey to prep for SEA and SANDCASTLES and RAFT BUILDING. I grew up in Italy where our proprietorial relationship with the classics means every translation is a verse translation, but I am now in London, and flabbergasted at THE SHEER amount of PROSE! I'm a bit at loss at what's the best English translation- everyone seems to go for Fagles but IS IT?

Dear Pudentilla, 

First, I hope Sicily is wonderful! Raft building sounds amazing (and Homer can give you advice on that!). 

Second, it’s a hard question. It really depends on what you’re reading for and the feel you want to get from it. The most prominent translations are Fagles, as you know, Lattimore, Fitzgerald, Stanley Lombardo, and now Emily Wilson (a lot of people like her translation, but she makes a lot of choices I don’t really like; that said, a lot of them are probably more things you’d only care about if you’re doing actual academic work on it – I’m thinking of translating the epithets differently, which I don’t approve of). I’ll post the beginnings below, though they’re fairly similar:

Fagles 

This is fine – readable and fairly faithful, though “Launch out on” for a story about seafaring seems a little precious, and ἀφείλετο, which he translates as the vivid “blotted out” is really just “take away.”

Lattimore

The problem with Lattimore is that he tries very hard to be faithful to the Greek, which sometimes causes his English to suffer. “From some point here” in line 9 is weak; “hard though/he strove to” feels slightly awkward to me; “driven/far journeys” strikes me as ungrammatical. 

Fitzgerald

I think I might actually go with Fitzgerald – he has a good sense of a line and is fairly close to the Greek; my only quibble is with “townlands,” because it might be an archaism in English but it doesn’t really feel like one.

Lombardo

I remember liking Lombardo’s Iliad, but this seems over-written, really. I’m specifically looking at “the minds he grasped,” “the suffering deep in his heart at sea” and “that god snuffed out.” That said, his verse has movement and cadence, so it would at least be readable. 

Wilson

I’m biased against hers from the start by “complicated” – πολύτροπον, which it’s supposed to be translating, is hard to find equivalents for, I admit - it’s literally “much-turning,” but that’s awkward; still, it’s an epithet that’s not solely applied to Odysseus, but is pretty much confined to wily people and other tricksters in the wider Greek corpus, and to Odysseus in Homer. “Complicated” is much too common and colloquial a word to be a good translation. That sets the tone: I think her register is off. 

She wants to simplify and modernize, which is fine if you call it a “version” rather than a translation, but the problem with modernizing translations of Homer is that, while it’s true that Homer was originally (probably, insert disclaimer here) fireside entertainment, the language was never colloquial or demotic: it’s a separate dialect created for the purpose of telling these stories. 

So! that’s a lot of words, apologies, but if you want a recommendation I’d say Fitzgerald; you can judge from these excerpts if you agree. 

I close as I began: I hope you have an amazing time in Sicily! 

Best, 

E. Lucubrare