Word: bard
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...King James Version, thanks to its felicities of language and the imprimatur of the Church of England, ruled supreme and largely unchallenged among English-speaking Christians for about 350 years. Chapman's Homer, a redaction of the secular words of a pagan bard, naturally received no such binding spiritual and temporal authorization. But Chapman's translations were both thrilling enough--see Keats' sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's Homer--and challenging enough to provoke competing versions. Since Chapman, nearly four centuries' worth of British and, later, American writers have taken on Homer...
...oral poems in preliterate Greece. (No one really knows how the written texts came into being.) But only in the past 40 or so years have linguists and anthropologists come up with a plausible theory of how those poems must have been made. Homer--or the collection of bards given that name at some point in the murky past--did not wander around Greece with 12,109 lines of the Odyssey committed to memory. Instead, the Homeric repetitions so familiar to readers of English translations--all those "wine-dark seas" and "rosy-fingered dawns"--were actually stock formulas allowing...
...Homeric audiences had presumably heard of them too. For all its narrative speed, the Odyssey is remarkable in the way it resists modern notions of suspense. The question is not what will happen next but how thoroughly the bard recounts the particulars of every scene. Fagles' translation captures this peculiar quality perfectly. Late in the story Odysseus is back in Ithaca; he has revealed his identity to Telemachus and two loyal servants and challenged the hundred or so of Penelope's suitors to a fight to the death. All hell is about to break loose, and yet Homer pauses...
Shakespeare, it turns out, doesn't need CAA. As if to say, "So there, Jane Austen!", the Bard is back in maximum force. There are two films based on Romeo and Juliet: one using the text but transplanted to a Miami-esque beach town; the other, Love Is All There Is, set in the Bronx and retold by writer-directors Joseph Bologna and Renee Taylor. Royal Shakespeare Company alumnus Trevor Nunn has a Twelfth Night starring Helena Bonham Carter and Nigel Hawthorne. Richard III, recently modded up by Ian McKellen, gets the Al Pacino treatment in Looking for Richard...
There is a separate requirement that students take at least one class on the Bard, but faculty members said students would rather not study other early works...