Pennies crash down from the sky

[sovay]

I did not sleep at all last night. This is much less entertaining than it sounds. I am hoping not to repeat the trick tonight.

I know the last time I read Watership Down (1972) was in seventh grade, two years before I started Latin, but I still have no excuse for realizing only this afternoon that it is completely the Aeneid if someone had listened to Kassandra. The book's first epigraph is even some stichomythia from Agamemnon: φόνον δόμοι πνέουσιν αἱματοσταγῆ (line 1309). Hey, Dawn, how're the wife and kids? Marblehead says hello.

Comments

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

Bother, I tried to reply but lost what I'd written whilst attempting to google the line from Aeschylus. (And I hope I'm correct in thinking that's the author of Agamemnon. ;-)

Any road, I'm sorry that you didn't sleep and I hope that tonight's a better night.

I've never read Watership Down. I suppose I should correct that at some point. I did read Maia, which, along with US$ 1.96, will get me a grande tea in Starbucks.

I think you've got an excuse, personally. It's sometimes hard to sort things out, with having them sideways to each other like that.

[sovay]

Bother, I tried to reply but lost what I'd written whilst attempting to google the line from Aeschylus. (And I hope I'm correct in thinking that's the author of Agamemnon.

You are correct. I don't know whose translation Adams quotes:

CHORUS: Why do you cry out thus, unless at some vision of horror?
CASSANDRA: The house reeks of death and dripping blood.
CHORUS: How so? 'Tis but the odor of the altar sacrifice.
CASSANDRA: The stench is like a breath from the tomb.

Just in case we were in doubt as to whether the disregarded Fiver should remind us of any mythical seers . . .

I did read Maia, which, along with US$ 1.96, will get me a grande tea in Starbucks.

I've never even heard of Maia. How was it?

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

You are correct.

Ah. Glad to know.

I don't know whose translation Adams quotes:

Hmm... might it be his own, if he's got enough Ancient Greek? I might well do likewise, in a similar position to his.

I've never even heard of Maia. How was it?

Not bad. It was a fantasy set in an Iron Ageish empire with... oh, perhaps we might say vaguely Sumerian-esque elements, except not really? The sex might've been a bit excessibe, but wasn't too gratuitous; the titular heroine was a girl sold into slavery by her mother, the latter being jealous over her relationship with her stepfather. She turned out to have some sort of capital-D Destiny. There was a wicked bisexual queen, but the titular heroine and her best friend, a nobleman's daughter kidnapped from some Africa-like place in the far South, were also quite happily bisexual so presumably we weren't meant to take that in the wrong way. He used "baste" or possibly "bast" as a substitute for a popular four-letter verb.

It's been quite a few years. I mostly read it because somebody I dearly loved was reading it when we both were in high school, and then bought a paperback a few years later when I saw it used in a shop because it made me think of her. I've still got that paperback, somewhere. I should find it and read it over again, I suppose.