Decipherments

Windows 7 is released today. Somehow it seems like old news since I have been running it for almost a month now. Still I hope it does well.

Last night I worked on a translation from the Greek. I used to do a lot of translation, but haven't done any for a long time. I went to one of my favorite sites on the web.http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/. The site is amazing to me. It has hundreds of Greek and Latin texts, translations, grammatical and lexicography tools. (They also have Sanskrit, German and English Renaissance materials. It was the only place I was ever able to find Christopher Marlowe's translations of Ovid.) I realize others will probably not be as enthused, but I have spent years trying to collect classical texts. They are expensive and hard to come by. Perseus makes them available for free with a host of scholarly tools.

Despite my years of working with Greek and Latin texts, I am not that good at it. I call my efforts "Decipherments." So, last night I picked a short text, a fragment of Bacchylides, at random. It is about a formal request by the Greeks for a return of Helen before the Trojan war. There is a passage very typical of Greek sentiment:

Zues who dwells on high and sees all
is not to blame for the great sufferings of mortals
All men have it in them to reach
unwavering (straight) ἰθεῖαν justice, attendant
of holy Eunomia and prudent Themis.
Prosperous whose children live with justice.

Anyway, today I am going to work on another appendix and start making notes for rewriting the chapters.