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Nov. 10th, 2008 12:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabeththeory books that assume you read languages other than English remain annoying.
Thus far that means that Bernard Knox is really very annoying indeed.
(I'm juggling between 'Word and Action' and 'The Heroic Temper' because it got to a bit where he said he'd proved x elsewhere, meaning 'The Heroic Temper', and it was only 44 pages so I thought I might as well.)
It's all very well him not translating a bit of german because it says it perfectly, but if it says whatever the heck it is in german then we sadly monolingual English speakers would in fact be better off with an imperfect translation.
Blasted thing.
I can skip individual articles.
But I do wish he'd write the greek words in English letters. I realise there's reasons not to do that, but since most of the other work I've read does it, it takes for sodding ever to recognise which words are the same. I mean I figured out thumos because I recognise theta and sigma (Yes DW is once again good for something) and I looked up mu, which doesn't look like m at all at all, more like y and u had an unfortunate accident. But I've been reading a whole bunch of pages before I figured out it's the exact same word that other article on Medea was using. Medea gets in a fight with herself between her thumos and her reason, her passion and her reason. So now I know what this squiggle word means I can connect the dots.
I did not set out to learn Greek.
*grumble*
On the plus side I've read a whole bunch of pages and they've got great ideas about what the qualities of a Sophoclean hero are. Since moder Tragedy works on a Sophoclean model, according to this dude anyway, this 'rules' can apply to many many things from later on.
I'm not entirely sure I agree with him as applied to Antigone, though I'm possibly quibbling over the idea of 'hero'. She buggers off half way through and dies. There's other characters learning and growing and getting messed up for the rest of the play. So, okay, she wins, but... anyway. I can keep that argument for later. There's whole sections of the book on Antigone, he probably goes through it all there. I haven't hardly read 30 pages yet. But they're 30 pages full of detailed, picky with words, specific Big Thinking.
This book is quite good.
Also it has the correct old book smell.
I have had a distressing number of books from the UEA library that have smells many and various and quite often related to gone off milk. This one smells only of old book. I like it.
... oh dear, half past midnight and I'm still reading for class.
On the plus side, 'for class'.
On the minus side, sleep is still recommended for humans.
And I've had these books out for a really long time, so why am I only reading them the night before I'm taking them back???
Thus far that means that Bernard Knox is really very annoying indeed.
(I'm juggling between 'Word and Action' and 'The Heroic Temper' because it got to a bit where he said he'd proved x elsewhere, meaning 'The Heroic Temper', and it was only 44 pages so I thought I might as well.)
It's all very well him not translating a bit of german because it says it perfectly, but if it says whatever the heck it is in german then we sadly monolingual English speakers would in fact be better off with an imperfect translation.
Blasted thing.
I can skip individual articles.
But I do wish he'd write the greek words in English letters. I realise there's reasons not to do that, but since most of the other work I've read does it, it takes for sodding ever to recognise which words are the same. I mean I figured out thumos because I recognise theta and sigma (Yes DW is once again good for something) and I looked up mu, which doesn't look like m at all at all, more like y and u had an unfortunate accident. But I've been reading a whole bunch of pages before I figured out it's the exact same word that other article on Medea was using. Medea gets in a fight with herself between her thumos and her reason, her passion and her reason. So now I know what this squiggle word means I can connect the dots.
I did not set out to learn Greek.
*grumble*
On the plus side I've read a whole bunch of pages and they've got great ideas about what the qualities of a Sophoclean hero are. Since moder Tragedy works on a Sophoclean model, according to this dude anyway, this 'rules' can apply to many many things from later on.
I'm not entirely sure I agree with him as applied to Antigone, though I'm possibly quibbling over the idea of 'hero'. She buggers off half way through and dies. There's other characters learning and growing and getting messed up for the rest of the play. So, okay, she wins, but... anyway. I can keep that argument for later. There's whole sections of the book on Antigone, he probably goes through it all there. I haven't hardly read 30 pages yet. But they're 30 pages full of detailed, picky with words, specific Big Thinking.
This book is quite good.
Also it has the correct old book smell.
I have had a distressing number of books from the UEA library that have smells many and various and quite often related to gone off milk. This one smells only of old book. I like it.
... oh dear, half past midnight and I'm still reading for class.
On the plus side, 'for class'.
On the minus side, sleep is still recommended for humans.
And I've had these books out for a really long time, so why am I only reading them the night before I'm taking them back???
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no subject
Date: 2008-11-10 11:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-10 07:02 pm (UTC)