Convening

[emo_snal]

Tuesday, May 16th, 1214 BC - Jason woke with a headache from all the wine the night before. It took him a moment to remember where exactly he was, what ceiling exactly this was spinning above him and why was he here. He groaned a bit remembering. He had sworn in front of everyone yesterday that he would retrieve the golden fleece from far

Comments

[karmasoup]

Oh, yes! What a perfect direction to take this topic! It would not have occurred to me, but absolutely, this was not a solitary Herculean effort. I love it - I love how much you humanized this! <3

[emo_snal]

I really want to rewrite the argonautica as an actual prose story that's readable. The original is seriously harder to read than legalese. I listened to it as an audiobook and honestly I could barely tell you what was going on most of the time. Even reading the actual text I sometimes have to seriously scrutinize a paragraph to sort it out. Anyway in the original in a paragraph or two they set up Jason coming to this festival and ending up vowing to get the fleece, and then there follows three pages of introductions of people supposed to be on the journey with him, and then tehy start with the journey. It doesn't at all say how he got everyone together or got the boat. The hardest part of this entry was sorting through all the characters introduced in that section to find the few I wanted to focus on. Many never appear again in the text at all so I think they're a relative waste of space (and scholars note they are probably only there because their descendants added them so they'd have an ancestor among the argonauts), and I

[halfshellvenus]

A bearskin seems a seriously odd choice for... well, almost every occasion, really. Except possibly for hunting or for some sort of tribal ceremonial event, which wouldn't be the Greeks in any case.

Please tell me this strange, strange person figures in later installments. ;)

[emo_snal]

Probably! I had done a search through the whole Argonautica for people's names to try to only spend time on fleshing out the ones that appear more than just in the introduction and "Ancaeus" appears throughout... except there's actually TWO Ancaeuses sooo it remains to be seen. But I really liked the description of him showing up wearing the bear skin and axe, it was possibly the most colorful introduction, so I'm sure I'll fit him in!

In fact his introduction paragraph is the classic example of what tedious reading the original form of it is. Look at this shit:

Moreover from Arcadia came Amphidamas and Cepheus, who inhabited Tegea and the allotment of Apheidas, two sons of Aldus; and Ancaeus followed them as the third, whom his father Lycurgus sent, the brother older than both. But he was left in the city to care for Aleus now growing old, while he gave his son to join his brothers. Ancaeus went clad in the skin of a Maenalian bear, and wielding in his right hand a huge two-edged battleaxe. For his armour his grandsire had hidden

[halfshellvenus]

Ancaeus followed them as the third, whom his father Lycurgus sent, the brother older than both.
Yes--who is the "brother older than both" in THAT construct? Yikes!

This is dreadful sentence structure-- almost as if someone translated it word-for-word from the Greek, without making any attempt to change the word order to how things would actually be phrased in English.

It seems a poor translation, but there is also the possibility that it's somewhat intentional? As in, "Let us now, in high-worded fashion, intertwine language exceedingly grandiose and archaic, indeed obfuscatory, that we, heralds of this fine work, might adventures epic relate."

/o\

[roina_arwen]

Very cool take on the topic!

[d0gs]

Oh, I adored this <3