Daniel Mendelsohn

speaker

599 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 16 Jul

Daniel Mendelsohn’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Bad um but um bad um bad um bad um

Right.

So Homer's line is dum dun dum dum dun dun dum dun dun dum dun da dum dum dum.

That's one line of Homer.

And then in English you've got bum bad um bad um bad um.

So I thought it was very important as a kind of uh way of bringing across Homer's stylistics is to develop an English line that was also very long.

And especially since I'm doing a line-for-line translation, which almost nobody does because of the discrepancy I just mentioned.

So if I want to reproduce everything I see in a given line of the Greek, I'm going to need a very long English line to do that.

So I am a calamitor.

It's not going to work.

So I developed a a long

six beat line.

Not

perfectly aping the Greek line, which you don't want to do, but sort of giving a sense of the rhythm of the Greek line.

And that I think is a big difference.

So I would say when you're reading my translation, I I like to think that you're in the Homeric mode in the terms of the sound of the line.

I'm also trying to reproduce a lot of his subtle stylistic gestures, for example, alliteration, which he uses quite a lot.

I'm reproducing assonance, which is the repetition of vowel sounds.

Uh is something I studied very hard and I'm trying to bring across.

The way he breaks the line is something I also looked at very carefully.

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