Re. Speak, Memory

[jbor]

----------
>From: Heikki Raudaskoski <hraudask at sun3.oulu.fi>

>
snip
> But Lombardo opens with
> ''Speak, Memory.'' The decision to borrow the title of Vladimir Nabokov's
> autobiography is more than a poetic device. It underscores that the
> ''Odyssey'' is, at its core, about preserving memory.

Does this strike anyone else as alarmingly topsy turvy? It's not *even* "a
poetic device"! The notion that a translator of Homer would totally
*rewrite* the opening line of this literary monolith by borrowing the third
choice title from a contemporary autobiography seemed to me to be so far
outside the bounds of credibility that I didn't even begin to entertain it
in the certain knowledge of being lambasted mercilessly by one or another of
the Flat Earth mavens hereabouts. What's more, it wasn't even Nabokov's
*first* choice for a title: it was an editor's emendation of Nabokov's
second choice title, the original already remarkable for its ironical tone!
How on earth does the context of Nabokov's editor's title apply to Homer's
invocation; let alone how Nabokov's "recollections" and literary oeuvre in
general relate to the theme of "preserving memory", if indeed it is this
which has been discerned as the "core" of _The Odyssey_? What possible
reason could someone have for putting "idiomatic American slang" into it?
Was Lombardo writing a "pomo" parody (à la 'Clueless')? Or was he deadly
serious like whoever it was who did that hatchet job on Dickens' _Great
Expectations_ with Gwynneth and whatsisface?

Gobsmacked!

(best to all for 010101: "For it was now like walking among matrices of a
great digital computer, the zeroes and ones twinned above, hanging like
balanced mobiles right and left, ahead, thick, maybe endless. ... ")