Chris and/or Jaybird Bait…

Aaron David

A fourth generation Californian, befuddled.

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25 Responses

  1. Zac says:

    I came across this by way of Slate Star Codex a few weeks ago, and yeah, this is just fishin’ delightful. I am a huge fan of both rap and the Iliad, so this is pure catnip for me. I hope you all give it the thorough read it deserves.

    EDIT: Oh, by the way…there’s no link to the piece.Report

  2. Jaybird says:

    Oh, that’s *GREAT*.

    They did a really good job of capturing the way they did poetry, as well. From what I’ve been taught about the ancients’ poetry, it’s that they weren’t really into the whole rhyming thing the way that we are.

    We rhyme vowels and consonants together.
    The ancients’ idea of poetry involved rhyming vowels but consonants weren’t really a big deal.

    So gangstas/banquets and accomplished/contest are *PERFECT*.Report

  3. LeeEsq says:

    This is a great way to get kids into the Classics. Imagine what they could do with the Oedipus Cycle or the comedies of Aristophanes.Report

  4. Chris says:

    I am enjoying it, though I’d make some changes. E.g.,:

    …all Achaeans holla’d back, that he was really good,
    to acknowledge this apologist and take the handsome ransom
    but his prayer found no favor when Atrides checked the scansion
    He ejected him, and wrecked him with invective, bomb as missiles:

    Invective should be “shade,” or maybe “mad shade” or some other sort of shade. But an awesome idea pretty well executed. I just reread both the epics last year. Now I may have to do so again.Report

    • CK MacLeod in reply to Chris says:

      Aint as much of a fan of this effort as most of you all seem to be – it’s hardly a new idea – but I think he was going for an internal rhyme or slant rhyme with “wrecked him with invective.”Report

      • Stillwater in reply to CK MacLeod says:

        it’s hardly a new idea

        I agree. I mean, surely some ancient Greek dude already rapped about all this stuff.Report

        • CK MacLeod in reply to Stillwater says:

          Translating discourse a into mode b is an old routine, and, yeah, it’s been done a lot with rap, usually for comedic effect.

          https://youtu.be/2UFc1pr2yUUReport

          • nevermoor in reply to CK MacLeod says:

            Sure, that (or its reverse – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ur1N3UyT1lE) is funny. But both are different from this guy’s argument that rap is the truest thing our culture has to what Homer was actually doing. (which may or may not be true, its just an entirely different category of artwork).

            After all, we do the ancients a disservice by pretending they were somehow ultra-refined boring folks who liked white marble statues and did nothing but heady philosophical discussions.Report

            • CK MacLeod in reply to nevermoor says:

              nevermoor: But both are different from this guy’s argument that rap is the truest thing our culture has to what Homer was actually doing. (which may or may not be true, its just an entirely different category of artwork).

              I find it a very dubious argument. In addition, as presented, it’s less an argument about what “Homer was actually doing” than about the oral tradition, or an argument based on certain notions about what the oral tradition actually was at some unspecified point or points in ancient Greece.

              The most obvious problem with the argument on this level is that MC Lula is not engaging in a live recitation. He is engaging in a literary performance that utilizes a limited slang vocabulary and associated tropes to refer to a particular style of oral performance.

              I think he and others here are also resting on some less openly acknowledged idea that the values of rap subculture somehow evoke the values of heroic culture – as when aaron refers to his lack of a “martial background” being addressed – but that argument is even more superficial.

              Referring to Achilles and Hector as “gangstas” may be amusing, but it’s also inane. The story of the Iliad was apparently already centuries old before the earliest surviving fragments of the classical literary tradition were written. Whether performances over those centuries were especially prized if “lively,” or whether different qualities in relation to other ends were sought, or whether the stories were understood by their audiences in the way we presume they were understood, or imagine we would understand them, they were traditional tales about heroic figures from an ancient time.

              Achilles and Hector were not “gangstas” and “homies” for the ancient Greeks. Achilles and Hector were ancient to the ancients. For us, they are so to speak exponentially ancient even if in some sense the epics may still serve the purpose of placing us in a living relationship with our distant ancestors, in a single culture surviving across thousands of years.

              I don’t think re-writing the Iliad as a dissonant mishmash of transplants and doggerel contributes very much to that end. So, another set of dubious assumptions in play has to do with the purposes of translation. There has been a long, interesting and complex discussion on this question, with the modern literary discussion touching on issues sometimes of great historical moment in relation to the treatment of sacred scripture. Without attempting to summarize this discussion, I’ll just say that the idea that a translation of an epic poem ought to seek to capture “the vitality, the exuberance of how it would have been recited, chanted, lived” may be one idea, but it isn’t the only idea. Among other things, this idea rests on particular assumptions about what “it” was and how it was received, and on the relation between what it was and what it is or what it should be for us and how we should receive it.Report

  5. Autolukos says:

    I like what I’ve read so far. I kind of wonder how it will hold up over the length of the poem, but I suppose there’s only one way to find out.Report

  6. This is the story of the wrath of Achilles
    Agamemnon took his woman and things got fishing chilly
    Report