So, I've been up since first thing and spent all day finishing my first pass editing a book for the old ball and chain. I'll have to take another look at it tomorrow, and do a second pass, because I'm tired after having finished a busy shift at that... place. Needless to say I ate humble pie and apologised for acting unprofessionally and speaking to Captain Bligh so disrespectfully. The bread fruit is still being well watered, but the crew are now on only a quarter rations, and the dread of the lash looms ever menacingly, imminent in the gloomy workhouse.
There is one member of staff that just graduated (her second degree: this one in business administration). Naturally, like me, she holds two degrees: therefore she does unskilled labour for minimum wage. That's just the way things are in Dark Age Britain. Education is merely an extremely expensive hobby, of no use, except for being marginalised and scorned by the base born rabble. This is not Elizabethan England, evidently.
Anyway, I have been reading more Seneca, in the bath tub, on the way to work, and on my five minute break. I must say that there are three plays which I single out for really quite excellent pieces of inspiration. One is not by Seneca, and is the least of the three, but it is Senecan in style, though it falls short of Seneca's own particular finesse: Octavia. This historical play (the only one of its kind to survive in Classical Latin, I might add) may yet find a line or two in my new play Boadicea. The second is often thought to be Seneca's greatest work (according to the Oxford Classical Dictionary at least - the old school edition): Thyestes. If one gets over the gruesome and eldritch ending, there are certain passages in there which really are sublime. A few lines from this play already feature in Boadicea but I am thinking of weaving in one or two more, maybe even a few. The third is Agamemnon. Okay, okay. It's never going to be as lofty or as great as Aeschylus' treatment, but it is still a very good play, and most of all, it's in Latin (so I can read it like I can the Telegraph, instead of trying to learn to read and write for the first time: as I am with ancient Greek, still only at the crayon learning to form letters stage. Well, maybe a little more than that, but even so, it's hard work for someone not well versed in this ancient language, still only learning it). There are a few nice lines in both Agamemnons, even if I have to spend more time pouring over Aeschylus' ancient Greek (I was foresighted enough to buy the - now out of print - John Denniston and Denys Page Oxford critical edition and commentary of Aeschylus' Agamemnon, while studying towards my master's, about a year ago now).
My play, as it stands, is certainly in good shape, but it could always be better. I ought to chop out many more lines borrowed from Marlowe, and instead translate Latin and ancient Greek lines from tragedies. (Imagination and verse from life experience go without saying - that's the easy stuff). I have set myself the task of reading all the tragedies of Euripides, Sophocles and Aeschylus (and indeed Seneca), and then come back to the play, after having made lots of notes. If I am honest, I have borrowed the odd line from lines in translation, and this is a bloody awful habit. Just glancing across at the Latin in the old Loeb version I have (Seneca Tragedies vol.2 - Frank Miller) of Seneca's Agamemnon reveals that this not how I would translate certain parts. It is imprecise in some places, and takes too many liberties with interpolated words and mistranslated verbs (especially). And more than that, it's in prose (yeuch! *sicks up*). One does not render the immortal Seneca into prose, the low born language of mere mortals. No no no no. One does Seneca justice, and renders verse into verse: the language of the immortal gods. Translating excellent verse into base prose is not only sacrilege, but it requires very little effort (scansion notwithstanding...). For example, I once began a translation project with another person at university, and my fellow translator said that it was not the translation which was bothering them, but the arduous task of making it fit the metre. It's not easy, I can tell you, trying to hammer it into shape, bend it to your will, without losing accuracy. Prose is for petty wits.
In other news, the luthier gave me a ride home yesterday, and we had a nice jam. It is surprising just how much high culture he is versed with (an avid listener of Radio 3 and knows a fair amount about art), and indeed how much life experience he has, having travelled extensively. I like people like that. They are not the boring usual 9-5 types that have lived in the same village their entire lives. Sure, everyone has a story to tell, but interesting people are hard to find.
Max.
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