Poetry is more subtle than music. You can make anything sound like iambic pentameter (Shakespeare) if you are willing to fake the beat. Any actor can do this. But it won’t hit the soul. Similarly, if we are willing to fake vowel lengths, we can read Xenophon like it was dactylic hexameter.
I have no idea what the meter is supposed to be – and I’ve purposely not tried to analyze it. I can’t read all Greek poetry yet – usually because I trip on hard words – but some poems are beginning (just beginning) to come alive for me as I read them. In English, I read a great amount of poetry but know nothing whatsoever about what the meter should be. I would like to be at that level with Greek. I’m sure that it’s achievable.
I take your point, and I agree with you completely in regards to modern poetry in European languages. What do we know about ancient poetry though? I really don’t know much about this topic since poetry is not my main interest in Greek/Latin. But wasn’t ancient oral poetry tied to music much deeper? Modern poetry is usually not recited with music, but wasn’t that the norm with the ancients? It’s also interesting that we talk about “reading” or “reciting” poetry but the ancients talked about “singing” it: μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος and Virgil’s opening line: Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris (cano is the source of “chant” and “cantor”). How subtle was the meter when these poems were performed? I remember reading a paper that argued that one of the purposes of the meter in ancient poetry was to produce entrainment effects on the hearers and give the poem a religious/mystical atmosphere. If that’s true, I would think the poetry would need to have a strong sense of rhythm. Like I said, I know very little about this; do you know of any good resources on this topic?
The five different ways of writing the same sound (υ = ι = η = ει = οι) in Greek historical pronuntiation drives mad nowadays Greek schoolboys but if you understand the sense of the text you will be able of correctly writing when someone else reads it aloud.
Regarding verse reading here is a very interesting essay about fake accents and syllable length which you might find useful, Calvinist (1). Listen to this beautiful reading of Aeneis, where I think no accents are made up (2).
The first of these links, on how to pronounce Latin verse, by Wilfried Stroh, a wellknown German scholar, is very good (though I wouldn’t agree with quite everything, and the notes in the musical settings are best ignored). The second seems to me dreadful. There’s a recording of Stroh himself reading Aeneid 4: http://www.wiredforbooks.org/aeneid/ (non audii).
Χαίρε mwh,
I quite liked Strohl’s reading and would really appreciate if you explained wether you do not like Malone’s because of taste reasons (I personally do not enjoy Lombardo’s Homer readings) or for technical reasons related to ictus and syllable lengths.
“Dreadful" may have been overstated. There are many good qualities in Malone’s rendering. But as I listen again to the first few lines what I don’t like is how he tends to stress the metrical longum (the “ictus”) when the word accent actually falls elsewhere,
e.g. 4, vi superUM saevAE memorEM
9-11 quidve dolENS regina deUM
insigNEM pietate virUM
IMpulerit. tantaen’ aniMIS.
(I could have misheard or misnoted some of these, but they jarred as I listened.)
That’s a traditional but yes dreadful way to read hexameters, as Stroh rightly insists. In overprivileging the meter it deadens the dynamics of the line. It skews the relation between meter and accent, and in so doing masks the Vergilian heterodyning, the verse’s internal push-pull conflict that’s resolved only by the closing cadence. So I don’t think my disapproval is wholly subjective or just a matter of “taste.”
And some of the vowel quantities are off, e.g. 9 casus with short u and some of the hidden quantities.
And his vowel sounds, though I don’t care about that so long as they’re distinct from one another and the long/short distinction respected, as in general they are.
So yes, beautiful enough in its way, I agree, but not doing justice to the true beauties of Vergilian versification.