On reading in relation to literatureHearn, Lafcadio
General
On reading in relation to literature
Hearn, Lafcadio
Books and reading; Literature
know of only one, a volume in Bohn’s Library, Keightley’s _Mythology
of Ancient Greece and Italy_. It is not an expensive work; and it has
the exceptional quality of teaching in a philosophical spirit. As for
the famous Greek books, the value of most of them for you must be
small, because the number of adequate translations is small. I should
begin by saying that all verse translations are useless. No verse
translation from the Greek can reproduce the Greek verse--we have only
twenty or thirty lines of Homer translated by Tennyson, and a few
lines of other Greek poets translated by equally able men, which are
at all satisfactory. Under all circumstances take a prose translation
when you wish to study a Greek or Latin author. We should of course
consider Homer first. I do not think that you can afford not to read
something of Homer. There are two excellent prose translations in
English, one of the Iliad and one of the Odyssey. The latter is for
you the more important of the two great poems. The references to it
are innumerable in all branches of literature; and these references
refer usually to the poetry of its theme, for the Odyssey is much more
a romance than is the Iliad. The advantage of the prose translation
by Lang and Butcher is that it preserves something of the rolling
sound and music of the Greek verse, though it is only prose. That
book I should certainly consider worth keeping constantly by you; its
utility will appear to you at a later day. The great Greek tragedies
have all been translated; but I should not so strongly recommend these
translations to you. It would be just as well, in most cases, to
familiarize yourselves with the stories of the dramas through other
sources; and there are hundreds of these. You should at least know
the subject of the great dramas of Sophocles, Æschylus, and above all
Euripides. Greek drama was constructed upon a plan that requires much
study to understand correctly; it is not necessary that you should
understand these matters as an antiquarian does, but it is necessary
to know something of the stories of the great plays. As for comedy,
the works of Aristophanes are quite exceptional in their value and
interest. They require very little explanation; they make us laugh
to-day just as heartily as they made the Athenians laugh thousands
of years ago; and they belong to immortal literature. There is the
Bohn translation in two volumes, which I would strongly recommend.
Aristophanes is one of the great Greek dramatists whom we can read over
and over again, gaining at every reading. Of the lyrical poets there
is also one translation likely to become an English classic, although
a modern one; that is Lang’s translation of Theocritus, a tiny little
book, but very precious of its kind. You see I am mentioning very
few; but these few would mean a great deal for you, should you use
them properly. Among later Greek work, work done in the decline of
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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