people have complained that the gods being in disguise to check your behavior is a Christian addition the Odyssey. That is not true - consider, for example, this passage from the Odyssey.
@philologistgrc.bsky.social
First pass at supporting Classical Persian: selections of the Shahnameh from Pizzi 1883. work of @farnooshamsian finally starts to surface. tinyurl.com/5n8yfh9v
Thanks to OAI Sol 5.6, we have a first version of the first vernacular translation, Segni, aligned to our other versions. It is not perfect but it is a start. 3 years ago, I would not even have tried to enter this. Amazing what we can do. tinyurl.com/3wetnhyf
for those who have not studied Greek but want to deal with Homer: we have glosses and transliteration in the Homer Treebanks: glosses done with Qwen -- not as good as frontier models but we can run them at scale. tinyurl.com/59xcvjba
A day after the one image that haunts me from Nolans @odysseymovie is Agamemnon -- surely designed to recall the Dark Night--appearing when the Greeks finally open the gates of Troy. Why does Nolan have Agamemnon echo the Dark Night? I will have to go back to the earlier movie.
LLMs unleashed a new wave of development, with individuals now able to produce reading environments that reflect the features that they consider important. Take a look at Brandon Lucas' lyceum.quest, e.g., his glossed Homer with code github.com/lyceum-quest
To complement the ballad Iliad of Newman that was released yesterday, we now have the 1911 Cotterill translation into English dactylic hexameter. tinyurl.com/bd7c2h6r
on seeing the Odyssey: (1) I can't help it: "Its a very pretty movie, Mr. Nolan, but you mustn't call it Homer." (2) Could be a killer app to boost the study of Greek among a wider range of people speaking US English. Travis Scott as Homeric bard? Thank you!
Low tech bilingual searching Homer: e.g., search for Greek μῆνις and see Greek/Eng at the sentence level: tinyurl.com/5fe4e6fw AT Murray archaic xlation (for now) but useful
It took a couple of days but I have now the 1856 Newman Iliad in ballad meter - which provoked Arnold's attack. I had identify 500 places where Newman's English skips line numbers. Gemini did a solid first pass job combining half lines scrambled by OCR. gregorycrane.github.io/persverscomp/
I encountered an unexpected move that I will definitely pair with the Odyssey when I next teach comparative epic. Love is the driver and it climaxes with the wrong returning husband against his enemies in a hall-like restaurant. And, of course, dancing and singing in Telugu.
Putting off other duties a bit more, I added the Cowper c. 1790 Iliad and Odyssey. Now you can go from Chapman->Hobbes->Pope->Cowper->Bryant. gregorycrane.github.io/persverscomp
with all the translations we are adding, we have enabled 7 columns for comparison: gregorycrane.github.io/persverscomp/
In preparation for Nolan's Odyssey, we now have Chapman's Homer. You can use the treebank to compare Chapman, Hobbes, Pope, Bryant and other translations: gregorycrane.github.io/persverscomp/
Just a reminder that people have been arguing about how to translate Homer for a long time. Matthew Arnold going at multiple translators and Francis Newman fighting back -- much to learn for those interested, even when we disagree.
Hobbes' Homer translations are much underrated. You can see for yourself, compare the with the treebank and other translations. Long url in next tweet.
Bentley reportedly said to Pope of his Iliad: its a very pretty poem but you must not call it Homer. You can now use a treebank and other translations to see for yourself how Pope relates to the Greek. gregorycrane.github.io/persverscomp...
A surprisingly engaging read: M. Bossu's 17th century book in Epic poetry. Stumbled on it in researching our new Poetics edition and found myself nodding along as I read it. Could be a text book -- or core reading -- for a seminar on classical epic today.
For those of you reading Homer (whether for Nolan or not), we have two new translations up, side by side with treebanks and metrical analysis for both poems: the underappreciated American Bryant translation and Butler, Nagy et co. gregorycrane.github.io/persverscomp/
How to create reading experiences that "go beyond information transmission and toward reader transformation.” Great paper by @blue-phia.bsky.social @lepidopterane.bsky.social @yijunliu.bsky.social Sarah Sterman @sh1m.bsky.social @maxkreminski.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2606.04308 >
Congratulations to Sasha Spala for passing her Computer Science PhD Quals at Tufts and beginning a diss to explore integration of LLMs with Corpus/Computational Linguistics @sashaspala.bsky.social
automatically watch maps for each chapter in Thucydides or Xen's Hellenica -- data thanks to topostext: gregorycrane.github.io/perseusmapvi...
We are beginning to add treebank support for Aristotle Arabic. Lots of fine tuning to do but it is starting to appear: gregorycrane.github.io/persverscomp
thanks to Riccardo Strobino we now have the Abu Bishr Matta Arabic source for the poetics aligned at the section level to the Greek as well as the Moerbeke's Latin -- and a Greek treebank.
With treebanks integrated to this evolving Perseus6, I consulted the analysis of @francescom.bsky.social as I read Sophocles on the early morning beach. Thanks for @jtauber.com for the inline treebank viz concept. Evolving work: gregorycrane.github.io/persverscomp
We have the mechanics for translation alignment starting to appear. Automatic alignments are disappointing for now but you can see how we can show aignments: tinyurl.com/3jwnudtb
Even as bots take down our Perseus sites, we are working on serverless versions. Here is one such effort that now has basic treebank support (and commentary). Lots of rough edges but progress. gregorycrane.github.io/persverscomp...
We are testing new layouts to compare multiple versions of a work (and perhaps to be part of a new serverless Perseus). gregorycrane.github.io/persverscomp...
