Classical Bookworm

Neruda: Ode to the Dictionary

I happened into a book store today and the spirit of Chilean literature led me to a copy of The Poetry of Pablo Neruda. When I got the book home, it opened to this (apologies in advance for any typos):

Odo al Diccionario Lomo de buey, pesado cargador, sistemático libro espeso: de joven te ignoré, me visitió la suficiencia y me creí repleto, y orondo como un melancólico sapo dictaminé: "Recibo las palabras directamente del Sinaí bramante. Reduciré las formas a la alquimia. Soy mago." El gran mago callaba.

Ode to the Dictionary Back like an ox, beast of burden, orderly thick book: as a youth I ignored you, wrapped in my smugness, I though I knew it all, and as puffed up as a melancholy toad I proclaimed: "I receive my words in a loud, clear voice directly from Mt. Sinai. I shall convert forms to alchemy. I am the Magus" The Great Magus said nothing.

Learn About Your Tongue

The Guardian has posted a list of top-ten books on the English language from linguist David Crystal. The "Quirk Grammar" and the Cambridge History of the English Language sound very tempting.

via Light Reading

Sr. Miriam Joseph: Allusions

One of the rewards of literary study is the possession of a heritage of poetry and story which causes many names and phrases to echo with rich reverberations down the centuries.

—Sister Miriam Joseph, The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric

This is partly why I am endeavouring to read all the classics, though, as Sister Miriam Joseph points out, three sources in particular dominate our "heritage of poetry and story": the Bible, classical literature, and Shakespeare. She recommends that the novice make use of a concordance of the Bible, a dictionary of classical literature, and a concordance of Shakespeare. I have a couple of NRSV Bible concordances but, now that I think about it, most literary allusions in English literature would be from the King James Version, so perhaps I should invest in something like this. I believe I have classical Greece and Rome covered with my new OCD, but a concordance of Shakespeare? I had no idea such a thing existed. How delightful! A quick search turns up only one edition in print, Bartlett's Complete Concordance to Shakespeare. It's a hefty volume (7 lbs!) with a hefty price tag. I'm a fool for reference books but $20 a pound is a bit much for me. Perhaps an out-of-print concordance will do the job just as well, and they have much more interesting titles, such as:

• A Concordance to Shakespeare: Suited to All the Editions, in Which the Distinguished and Parallel Passages in the Plays of That Justly Admired Writer Are Methodically Arranged. to Which Are Added Three Hundred Notes and Illustrations, Entirely New. (1787)
• AN INDEX TO THE REMARKABLE PASSAGES AND WORDS; Made Use of By SHAKSPEARE; Calculated to Point Out the Different Meanings to Which the Words are Applied. (1791)
• Complete Works of Shakespeare With Notes By Malone, Steevens, and Others Together With a Biography, Concordance of Familiar Passages, Index to Characters, and Glossary of Obsolete Terms.
  or
  Complete Works of Shakespeare - Includes Poems and Sonnets With Notes By Malone, Steevens and Others Together with a Biography, Glossary of Obsolete Terms and Concordance of Familiar Passages In Eight Volumes. (1887)
• A Compendium and Concordance of the Complete Works of Shakespeare: Also, an Index of Every Character in the Dramas and Where They Appear. (1889)
• A Complete Concordance Or Verbal Index to Words, Phrases and Passages in the Dramatic Works of Shakespeare: With a Supplement Concordance to the Poems. (1896)

Those dates make me wonder if there is a Shakespeare craze every hundred years or so. Perhaps the Oxford Shakespeare and it's spinoffs, the Norton Shakespeare, and the Oxford Companion to Shakespeare, are just the latest manifestations of this publishing cycle. Long live Shakespeare!

A Good Dictionary

Few books are so readable as a good dictionary.

—Author unknown, from a review of Hensleigh Wedgwood's A Dictionary of English Etymology in The Living Age (No.76 (1863) 542-543), quoted at OUP Blog.

Ah yes, the Hyperboreans are lovely at this time of year

I read this the other day:

When Zeus was born, Rhea entrusted the guardianship of her son to the Dactyls of Ida, who are the same as those called Curetes. They came from Cretan Ida—Heracles, Paeonaeus, Epimedes, Iasius, and Idas... Olen the Lycian, in his hymn to Achaeia, was the first to say that from these Hyperboreans Achaeia came to Delos. Then Melanopus of Cyme composed an ode to Opis and Hecaërge, declaring that these, even before Achaeia, came to Delos from the Hyperboreans. And Aristeas of Proconnesus—for he too made mention of the Hyperboreans—may perhaps have learnt even more about them from the Issedones, to whom he says in his poem that he came.

[Pausanias, Description of Greece, from A Loeb Classical Library Reader]

I might as well have tried to read the Greek on the facing page for all the sense this made. Zeus I know, the rest is a blur. Actually, I didn't even know Zeus had a mother, so I'm pretty much 0 for 23 on the proper nouns in this passage. What to do? Buy a book, of course! And not just any book, but a weighty tome. Behold the Oxford Classical Dictionary. This is the reference for classical studies, with 1700 pages of obscure, tongue-twisting names and scholarly articles on all aspects of ancient Greek and Roman life and culture. Perhaps it's overkill, but who cares?! I'll admit it, I have a reference book fetish, and there are few more worthy objects of desire than the OCD. Come to mama!