![]() Let’s go home.Īnthony Madrid lives in Victoria, Texas. Unless even Miner didn’t invent it, but some Frenchman. He coined one of the very few classical tags that people still recognize on sight. But unlike Gruber, Miner actually created something worthy of a book of memorable sayings. We’ll call him “John Miner.” Like Gruber, our Miner was pretending to have a classical education. Okay, but then why do all these Gruber versions suddenly pop up in early seventeenth-century English, hmmm? I’m tellin’ ya: some Englishman started this. And since it’s in Latin-and worse, in a frickin’ handbook of memorable sayings-anybody could have read it and misremembered it at any point in European history. That passage was written fifteen years before Plutarch was born indeed, it might have been where he got it (?). If anyone reading this can show me such, I promise to write another piece on this same topic, giving you full credit. Here’s what would settle the matter against me: cases of the Gruber version from languages other than English, occurring before 1579. Besides! is it not remarkable that the earliest instances of the Gruber version happen to crop up a few years after those important translations into English? But think about it. No one could read Greek, not even North (he was translating from Amyot’s French). How do I know the person didn’t misremember the original Greek? I don’t. What’s surely happened is some specially eloquent seventeenth-century British smarty-pants read the North and Holland translations, misremembered ’em, and created the mot that’s been repeated ever since. Seventy pages of modern English, it’s not gonna kill ya.īut back to Gruber. “Call it a day, call it a campaign, call it an empire. Alexander’s guys beg him to call it a day. Across the river: some vast Indian army, refreshed and ready. His men are tired, the river is deep, he can’t swim. ![]() And it makes sense that he would not weep about such, because in point of fact he did not take over the world. In no case does Alexander weep because he’s accidentally put himself out of business by making himself king of the world. I’m setting out on the table all the ingredients for Gruber’s quote. Indeed, he does quote North verbatim in places, just like he did with Florio’s Montaigne.īut you see what’s happening here. Like all Elizabethan translations, it seems pretty clotted and inelegant to me, but y’know, Shakespeare is Shakespeare, and what was good enough for him, et cetera. Tears! Indeed, it’s pretty much the same thing as Exhibit 1.Įxhibits 2 and 3 are translations by Thomas North, 1579. For example, here’s Edmund Waller addressing Oliver Cromwell in 1655: It comes up in certain classic English poems from the seventeenth century. More on this another day.) The quote, I was saying, is very old. Their mandate is to regift whatever is known to have worked in the past. (And let me tell ya something: the people who write the scripts for action movies are literally forbidden to invent anything. The monkeys who wrote Die Hard did not invent that quote. And even I, right now, have been forced to attach weights to my own nose to prevent its springing upward. Except that quote would never come up in the context of a classical education, unless the instructor happened to be taking a jolly detour, nose in the air, to attack a piece of legendary crap that no student of his must ever traffic in. He puts his fingertips together and says in facetiously tragic tones (clearly quoting something from High Culture and referring with cozy irony to himself): “And Alexander wept, seeing as he had no more worlds to conquer.” Then he smiles with evil-genius self-satisfaction and says: “Benefits of a classical education.” Fans of the film, however, will recall its dapper German villain, Hans Gruber, smacking his silly lips and gloating at some private victory. That, for me, was a metaphor for watching the movie. ![]() I saw it right around the time it came out, and all I remember is Bruce Willis, barefoot, running through broken glass. However! From time to time, some bright person is forced by the laws of physics to ask: “In what ancient text does that passage appear?” Answer: it appears nowhere. It touches a theme dear to everyone’s heart: the Tears of the Monster. A legend in his own time, et cetera, he died in his early thirties, et cetera, having won many battles. “Alexander” is, of course, Alexander the Great, king of Macedon in the fourth century BC.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |