- buy no book for six months
- check no book out of the library for six months
- read no new book for six months, reading only things I've already read (important exception below)
Maybe, just maybe, in those six months, I can begin the huge reading project I've had for years, reading in succession: Chapman's 17th C. translation of The Iliad, The Odyssey, followed by Kazantzakis' sequel -- a few thousand pages of narrative poetry there? I'm not getting any younger, so if I'm going to do this, I'd better begin! But what a nice image, walking around with Chapman under my arm as the Pop Culture universe screams all around me. I have the first two books on my shelf. Long out of print, they got republished maybe five or six years ago and I was among the first humans to purchase them. I'd read bits and pieces in anthologies and loved Chapman's lyrical translation. This is slow reading, at the pace of reading aloud, but filled with gems to put to memory.
On first looking into Chapman’s Homer
MUCH have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
John Keats
And, finally, this ...
Young men think old men are fools; but old men know young men are fools.
George Chapman, All Fools. Act v. Sc. 1.
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