Birds flying high you know how I feel – Nina Simone “Feeling Good” Why you wanna fly Blackbird You ain’t ever gonna fly Why you wanna fly Blackbird You ain’t ever gonna fly – Nina Simone, “Blackbird” The tension between the bird’s desire to fly and the failure of its flight in Nina Simone’s ‘Feeling […]
Today, to commemorate Classicist Emily Watson as the first woman to translate Homer’s Odyssey into English, I want to take us back to the first English translation of a Greek play, which was also by a woman, Jane Lumley, way back in 1557. Harold Child in his 1909 edition of Lumley’s translation remarks on how […]
Euripides, the beautiful boy in the HSBC T-Shirt – Q(uinn) L(atimer) to M(oyra) D(avey) The Athenian cult of beauty had a supreme theme: the beautiful boy. Euripides, the first decadent artist, substitutes a bloody moon for the golden Apollonian sun. Medea is Athens’ worst nightmare about women. She is nature’s revenge, Euripides’ dark answer to […]