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What Colour Are Odysseus’ Words? Traces of Synaesthesia in Homeric Scholarship
- zabzonk 3y agoone thing i have never really understood is "the wine-dark sea", used in several translations, as the Med is bright blue, or perhaps green or grey if things are stormy.
- ggm 3y agoConsidering how much of Homer must have been oral tradition, and in parallel the fidelity of the oral tradition of the Hadith, there's the outsider question "yes, but did Homer have the Synaesthesia, or did somebody else" in this too. I tend to think highly alliterative, poetic language has licence to use words for their descriptive quality, their synaesthetic quality, their meter, and just because you goddam' like them. But then, somebody has to remember in the moment and pass it on. We can all remember "but madam, we're now just dickering over the price" but we tend to confuse Oscar Wilde and Churchill. And that isn't exactly what either of them said either. Thats under two centuries of distortion of the mostly oral, partly written tradition. The Iron Curtain was only a passing comment to a graduation ceremony in a University. Who knew it would spawn the Iron Lady in half a century? Iron Curtain. It's going to live forever. The Berlin wall was mostly Concrete. The barbed wire is made of steel, because Iron isn't very suitable for the job. The man of steel was something else. Is that why Churchill went to the Iron curtain? Remember, he'd lived through the politics of "the Iron guard" in Romania. "Iron" as a metaphor had been around politics for a while. Iron fist in a velvet glove was Bismark. If you're doing the barrier between east and west, in the immediate post war period, the break line is Germany. Iron it is then. Really? the Iron curtain was the guns and tanks and bayonets behind the barrier(s) not the curtain/wall itself. It was the posture. Was the sea wine-coloured? Do we infer Greek wine was green? No.. not really. But it's a great line.
- percivalflavour 3y agoElucidating reply. In Ulysses, for Joyce, the sea was snotgreen
- mFixman 3y agoFor the vast majority of human history, the only transmission of information between generations were oral stories. Modernity defines nations by their borders, medievality defined it by their feudal alliegances, but true antiquity defined it by their mythologies. I always wondered how much was lost in the long transition from the natural oral to the new written tradition. Do we humans learn things differently when hearing them than when reading them? After all, voice is multidimensional: pronounciation, tone, gestures are completely lost when conveyed into text. Why do people go to political rallies or speeches instead of just reading their contents? Why do children go to school instead of just reading books? History is full of lettered peoples being guided by oral traditions. Maybe there's a good reason why the Rabbis took 1500 years to write down the other half of the Torah.
- renewiltord 3y agoNot to be a clown or anything? Like if you take a glass of dark red wine that's half-full and you shake it lightly, it looks like a choppy ocean in the dark on night. Ocean certainly does not look red, but the wine isn't noticeably red. It just looks like dark water, more black than red. I don't think I'm particularly colour blind or anything (certainly not any of the online tests, except one I accidentally took with Flux on at max) but a little bit of poetic licence solves this, surely?