Tag: lines of Greek
The Cost of Making ‘The Iliad’ Modern
Early in Norman Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost, perhaps the greatest novel about an American bureaucracy, the narrator describes a most unbureaucratic figure, a Maine fisherman named Snowman Dyer who died in 1870 in his sister’s home. Dyer once “bartered five lobsters for a small Greek tome that belonged to a classics scholar at Harvard.” The English translation, which was printed between the lines of Greek, so intrigued Dyer that he decided to read the original. Having no teacher other than