I’m delighted to see someone taking an interest in the Astronautilia, an otherwise unjustly obscure epic.
I am the one who wrote that blog on translating the poem into English, a project now completed and being progressively redrafted for publication.
There is already a transcription of the entire poem by a German academic called Stefan Weise, which he has shared with me on the condition I do not do the same with others. He is planning to publish it at some point, so it will become available. You could try emailing him if you would like a copy of the transcript, but he will likely (and fairly!) want to keep it back.
Where have you gotten your copy of the (handwritten) Greek text, may I ask? From a physical book or a scan of the text online?
I don’t know about mahasacham, but I looked for this after he posted about it. The printed version is impossible to find, but there is a scan of the original Czech-Greek edition floating around online. I put it on my Kindle and have been reading it. I’m a sucker for science fiction featuring any “Captain Nemo”. (But why Οὐδεὶς Πλοίαρχος and not Οὖτις Κῡβερνήτης???)
The Greek handwriting is fine and it’s fairly readable. So far, anyway, McLeod is dead-on with the “it is an exciting story, well told, and generally intelligible, if you are moderately familiar with Homer.”
The meter isn’t clunky. It runs like a very simplified Epic, and is easy and fun to read aloud. You can tell that he composed in Greek, like Sidgwick, and this improves everything. Nor is he (so far) especially reliant on pastiched Homeric lines, which is also a strong point in its favor.
The Latin introduction to learned professors (lol, not me) makes the claim that everyone who knows ancient Greek these days also knows Latin (lol again, not me). But even for me the Latin is pretty readable, and more than enough apology for the various licenses, if the poem is not enough.
The eldest son of Jan Křesadlo, one Václav Z J Pinkava, who has been republishing his works as free ebooks by the Municipal Library in Prague, writes me to say good luck to @mahasacham in his transcription, and also to suggest that he use the more complete free e-book version instead of the bootleg, available here:
So I finished my attempt at digitizing the Astronautilia. I took my best guess at the stuff that was really really hard to figure out what was written.
As far as typos that is gonna take a while cause I can’t tell if the author was intentionally using weird spellings to fit the meter. Cause some of the corrections would break the meter…
So yeah its harder than just fixing the typos. Although I am sure there are many that are just mistakes on my part and the Authors part that would not break the meter…
I’m asking because I want to print the book. I’m Czech, so I want to make the book in Greek-Czech.
I’ll be doing it sometime in January. If you don’t fix the errors, I will. I use Spellchecker for that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E01PtlyKhnM
And then one of my programs.
By errors I meant typos like:
ἔσικεν → ἔοικεν on line 65 book 13.
Ohhh I see. I don’t think I’ll have time to do much proofing of the text until sometime next year.
I wish you great success and hope you can make use of the digitized text on Github. I do hope to one day really dive into the text and make it better with an English translation.
As I was typing it I had Ancient Greek auto correct turned on in my Word Processor (libre-office) and made decisions as I went. But in some places I did not use the auto correct. Nevertheless even with the autocorrect I am sure I made some incorrect decisions.