Patsy Cline Greeked

About a month ago my iPod handed me a classic Patsy Cline tune, Leaving on your Mind. For some reason I decided the song needed to be translated into ancient Greek. I decided on quatrains of glyconics (xx-uu-u-) with the occasional anaclastic glyconic, a.k.a. the choriambic dimeter, xx-x-uu-. Here's the original:

If you've got leavin' on your mind
Tell me now, get it over
Hurt me now, get it over
If you've got leavin' on your mind

If there's a new love in your heart
Well, tell me now, get it over
Hurt me now, get it over
If there's a new love in your heart

Don't leave me here
In a world filled with dreams that might have been
Hurt me now, get it over
I may learn to love again

If there's a new love in your heart
Well, tell me now, get it over
Hurt me now, get it over
If there's a new love in your heart

Hurt me now, get it over
If there's a new love in your heart

I removed some of the repeats. I indulged in an outrageous aeolic future infinitive — ἀπολειψέμεν — using a verb Lucian disapproved of for men to describe "leaving." However, I don't think ἐκπέμπω quite captures the right feel for "leaving" in this song.

εἰ μέλλεις ἀπολειψέμεν,
ἐμοὶ μὲν λέγε νῦν τελῶν,
πήμηνον δέ με νῦν τελῶν
εἰ μέλλεις ἀπολειψέμεν.

εἰ δ’ ἐν θυμῷ καινὸς ἔρως,
ἐμοὶ μὲν λέγε νῦν τελῶν,
πήμηνον δέ με νῦν τελῶν
εἰ δ’ ἐν θυμῷ καινὸς ἔρως.

στᾶσαν ἐνθάδε μὴ λίπῃς
παθοῦσάν τέ με καὶ μάτην.
πήμηνον δέ με νῦν τελῶν,
ἀλλ’ αὖθίς πού μοι φιλία.

In my first pass I bungled the meter of the third line from the end. I'm still not certain about my repairs there.

Gentium in Emacs via Unicode

I spent a little time over the weekend tweaking my Carbon Emacs configuration. When I first started using it I had to spend several interesting hours to get it to use a Mac-ish font large enough that I didn't go blind. I settled on a 15 point Vera Sans Mono. Unfortunately, the Greek that it picks for this isn't so nice. So with a little more digging, I managed to get Emacs to use Gentium for the Greek, but it had to be tweaked a bit for size:

;;; Greek extended
(set-fontset-font
 "fontset-default"
 (cons (decode-char 'ucs #x1f00)
       (decode-char 'ucs #x1fef))
 "-apple-gentium-medium-r-normal--18-180-72-72-m-180-iso10646-1")

;; "Greek and Coptic"  U+0374 - U+03FB
(set-fontset-font
 "fontset-default"
 (cons (decode-char 'ucs #x0374)
       (decode-char 'ucs #x03fb))
 "-apple-gentium-medium-r-normal--18-180-72-72-m-180-iso10646-1")

Yes, it really does take an 18 point Gentium to match a 15 point Vera Sans Mono.

My next step was to tweak the fontset to include Cuneiform (via the nice Neo-Assyrian Assurbanipal font), but MULE, Emacs' internationalization library, chokes on Unicode code points in in the 0x12000's where Cuneiform lives. I suppose my commentary on the Enûma Eliš focused on interpretive dance will have to wait.

Aoidoi: Mesomedes' Hymn to Nemesis

This week, the somewhat strange Hymn to Nemesis.

The poem starts off with a fairly striking equestrian image:

Νέμεσι πτερόεσσα βίου ῥοπά,
κυανῶπι θεά, θύγατερ Δίκας
ἃ κοῦφα φρυάγματα θνατῶν
ἐπέχεις ἀδάμαντι χαλινῷ...

Winged Nemsis, scale of life,
dark-eyed goddess, daughter of Justice,
you who check the vain whinnying of mortals
with an adamant bit...

The word I've translated "scale" above — ῤοπή, rhope — covers an interesting semantic range. The basic image, if the LSJ is to be believed, is of a scale sinking. But it covers everything from balance and weight, or "outcome," out to more remote notions like "decisive influence, crisis" or even just "moment."

Aoidoi: two poems of Solon

Yet more elegiacs, this time two fragments of Solon in a single document, Solon 9 & 11

Aoidoi: "The Toils of the Sun"

Yet more Mimnermus, this time 12 (West), The toils of the sun.

Aoidoi: “Like the leaves of spring”

A new poem is ready for Aoidoi.org, Mimnermus 2, Like the leaves of spring.

Roots and Tendrils

I've been hammering away at a Common Lisp library for SVG. Last week I decided to take a break from studying the arcana of clipping windows and alpha masks to see if I could translate some of the gallery examples from NodeBox into SVG nicely. My library isn't ready for Graphic Cellular Domestication — that'll take Javascript — but some of the random walk ones turned out ok:





I quite like my modification of the tendrils algorithm, if I do say so myself:



Of course, SVG isn't recognized as an uploadable image format many places, so the pictures are PNG.