Gretchen's Descent

Today I attended a Capstone seminar taught by one of my professors. I arrived 30 minutes late - of course she expects no better - and I sat and listened to the guest professor speak. He asked who in the audience uses Wikipedia for research; of course, everyone did, but I alone raised my hand. The professor asked me how, and I answered truthfully: usually, to gain a superficial understanding of the issue, to find sources by checking the article citation, to generally define the parameters of the topic under study. I also added that even biased articles are useful - to understand the topic in the framework of the controversies surrounding it - and that books are not inherently less biased than internet articles. The professor was overly pleased with my response, and seemed to stare at me for the rest of the class. This is a common theme in my life: people put me on some sort of pedestal, or develop an inflated estimate of my intelligence after I open my mouth for only a few minutes. It's very oppressive.

Anyway, one topic mentioned in the lecture was the editing and changing of classical works, or how they can evolve over time as their format and content is adjusted for new settings, often creating wholly new works in the process. It wasn't mentioned, but the most obvious example of this is the works of Shakespeare. I half-heartedly raised my hand, in kind of an awkward gesture - allowing the professor to discreetly ignore it and my long-windedness if he so desired (he did)...but what I wanted to mention, I thought I would mention  here, something I wrote on FUBU-BH:

..Polyphemus cried out,
"No-One is killing me by some sort of trick!"

The adventurers hastened to the sea to make froth with their oars,
When they were just offshore but still within earshot,
Odysseus called out to the Cyclops - just to rub it in:

"So, Polyphemus, it turns out it wasn't a coward
Whose men you murdered and ate in your cave,
Fool! You got your just reward in the end,
You had the gall to eat my men in your own home, and you paid for it."

The Cyclops got even angrier when he heard this.
He broke off the tip of a mountain and hurled it towards our ship.
It landed just off the prow. The sea billowed up where the rock came down.
And the wave pushed them back to the mainland, like a flood tide.
The crew leaned on the oars and strove to get the ship out of there.
When they were twice as far out to sea as before, Odysseus called out to the Cyclops again,
Even though his men hung all over the man, begged him not to:

"Don't do it, man! The rock that hit the water pushed us in,
We thought we were done for. If he hears any sound from us,
He'll heave half a cliff at us and crush the ships and our skulls,
With but one throw. He can do it, you know."

They tried, but could not persuade him - he was really angry,
His heart was set. Odysseus called back to the Cyclops again:

"Polyphemus, if anyone, any mortal man
Asks you how your eye got put out,
Tell them it was not 'No-One' who did it,
But I, Odysseus the maurader,
Son of Laertes, who makes his home on Ithaca!"

The Cyclops issued a fearsome groan, and said this in response:

"...This puny, good-for-nothing runt, has put my eye out by way of a trick..."

Stretching out his arms, he prayed to starry heaven,

"Hear me, Poseidon, lord of the seas,
If you are the father you claim to be,
Grant that Odysseus, son of Laertes,
May never return to his home on Ithaca.
But should he be fated to see his family again,
And return to his home and native land,
May he come late, having lost all his friends,
In a ship not his own, and find trouble at home."

Polyphemus then broke off an even larger chunk of rock,
Pivoted, and threw it with incredible force,
Barely missing the rudder.
They were propelled forward... 


I had cited this passage from the Odyssey in the context of a discussion about various degenerations of the name "Achilles" being assumed by DKs and FotM ret pallies played by retarded teenagers who had seen Troy and had absolutely no awareness of the Iliad, and how I personally identified with Odysseus from the original Illiad.

Initially, I Googled for a decent translation of Book IX, suitable to the audience, but most were written in the King's English, and the translation given for the class last year (which was only in paper form anyway) went to the opposite extreme: too watered-down to have impact. Book IX is actually related from a first-person perspective, which if read literally wouldn't make sense in context of comparing myself to the protagonist. So instead, I loosely transcribed the translation from the book, changing it from first to third person, abridging certain parts, but also embellishing others, to make the story more fluid and coherent. I also completely broke the pentameter, without wholly disregarding it, to focus on the story, the experience being related.

I was expecting to be trolled both for actually relating to a Homeric hero (typically Aestu superiority complex at work), and also for not only editing but adding to the classical work. As I saw it, the "creative excess" didn't matter - what mattered was I retained the theme, the substance of the story. After all, I thought, this story was originally a sort of ballad, that changed in its particulars with the teller, although the tale itself remains universal.

Had the professor decided to call on me, I would have glossed over the exact context of the discussion about the Odyssey by saying something along the lines of, "In an online context that would be very strange to most, we were discussing the Odyssey and..."