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Pound's Canto I. I had to google it, of course.
And then went down to the ship, Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and We set up mast and sail on that swart ship, Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also Heavy with weeping, so winds from sternward Bore us out onward with bellying canvas, Circe's this craft, the trim-coifed goddess. Then sat we amidships, wind jamming the tiller, Thus with stretched sail, we went over sea till day's end. Sun to his slumber, shadows o'er all the ocean, Came we then to the bounds of deepest water, To the Kimmerian lands, and peopled cities Covered with close-webbed mist, unpierced ever With glitter of sun-rays Nor with stars stretched, nor looking back from heaven Swartest night stretched over wretched men there.
I actually bought a hardcopy of the cantos, or some version in 1965 and tried and then wore out quickly, except for occasional glances. It was the same with Joyce, Ulysses and Finnegan. I was never crazy about the Wasteland, except for the general drift of the matter.
It was my anthro professor who helped most in his methods of approaching mythological systems. The layered words of long forgotten mythologies have one critical flaw. They don't register the depths they might have once, unless you study and study, and then begin to think in those terms. It must have been easier when English was a fully rippened language that already carried its layered currents of meaning as it did in say the 16-17th centuries.
But our English doesn't carry as well because its been sheared free of all the distant and errant relations that once hung on like hoary relatives begging for their due.
I've been reading Hobbes to find a way to skewer Strauss's rendition. Wow, is Hobbes quoteable or what? He had the art down of manipulating those meanings almost like a poet or playwrite with the same sort of grand scale that the King James Bible has, published new in that time. ...
Does anybody teach all this any more?
CG