[HN Gopher] Paradise Lost
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Paradise Lost
Author : Frummy
Score : 47 points
Date : 2024-01-05 07:10 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (milton.host.dartmouth.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (milton.host.dartmouth.edu)
| user3939382 wrote:
| I'm not a big lit guy but I read this. The first 10% was hard to
| get through due to how different Milton's english is from my own.
| However I'm glad I did. It got progressively easy to read until
| it was as natural as anything else. What a payoff.
|
| Never before or since have I read something where I was
| consistently floored by the beautiful, sometimes breathtaking,
| use of my native language. Some passages stay with me probably
| forever, like Adam's description of Eve.
|
| Highly recommended.
| gwern wrote:
| > I'm not a big lit guy but I read this. The first 10% was hard
| to get through due to how different Milton's english is from my
| own.
|
| I agree. Milton's English is beautiful but easily on the level
| of an unmodernized Shakespeare in terms of deterring a reader,
| who spends as much time cracking the puzzle as they do on any
| kind of esthetic appreciation.
|
| As an experiment, I was trying rewriting _Paradise Lost_ in
| contemporary blank verse with GPT-4/Claude-2. It was OK, but
| what I discovered was that what really works is an
| _alliterative verse_ translation! (I was then informed that it
| is believed that Milton may have been drawing on an Old English
| poem about the Fall, "Genesis A", and so this may not be an
| accident.)
|
| Two example renditions of the prologue: 1.
| Man's first folly, the fateful fruit's taste, From
| forbidden tree's tempting twig it came, Death and
| doom dealt, despair in our world, Eden erased,
| exalted man to mend, Restoring realms of radiant
| bliss, sing, Sacred muse, who soared on secret
| summits, Oreb, Sinai, sharing whispered wisdom,
| With shepherds, teaching truths to chosen kin,
| Heavens and earth hewn from harrowing haze, Sion's
| slopes, Siloa's silver stream, Flowing fast by
| God's grand guiding hand, Grant thy aid to my
| aspiring anthem, Aiming high above Aonian heights,
| Pursuing paths untried in prose or rhyme.
| 2. Man's fatal first taste, the forbidden fruit Whose
| bitter bloom brought bale and sorrow bleak With
| paradise perished, till One more mighty restores what was
| lost Reclaims the radiant seats--O sacred Muse,
| Who on Sinai's summit secret And Horeb's height
| inspired Chosen seers to teach the tribes since time
| first woke, How heavens and earth arose from Chaos
| hoar, Or if thou rather tread Sion's summit steep,
| And Siloa's silvern stream that rushed thereby Where
| dwelt the oracle and rock of God, That poured forth
| fates--now lend thy light, that I May soar on song's
| ambitious wings Above Parnassus' peaks, pursuing lofty
| themes... Great matters meet for grandest strains of
| lore. Thee chiefly, thee, heart's truth, soul's purest
| shine, O Spirit blest, who scorneth shrine and show
| Inspire my strain; for thou, who knowest all, Hast
| known since earth's first sunrise. Mighty wings Did
| brood with wings outspread upon the formless void
| Kindling Chaos into teeming, shaping flame; To attain
| the epic theme, this lofty matter, In hymns that
| hallow Heaven's eternal ways.
| DrStormyDaniels wrote:
| It takes less time than you might think to get aquatinted
| with older English spellings, especially if you start at the
| deep end with Chaucer; it's plain sailing after. Personally I
| got to enjoy and prefer the absolute disregard for standard
| spellings, capitalisation, and punctuation, so much that I
| find it harder to read, e.g. Shakespeare in a modernised
| text. More interestingly, there's the problem of translating
| or updating poetry. If the poem was written with full self-
| consciousness of word choice, then the meaning really is lost
| by "updating" it, and where the poetry is best written, the
| meaning will be most lost.
| zajio1am wrote:
| https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/john-milton/paradise-lost
| dotsam wrote:
| I highly recommend the audiobook of Paradise Lost read by Anton
| Lesser.
| DrDroop wrote:
| It only becomes better when you know the backstory of the author
| and the context in which it was written. John Milton was a
| talented diplomat who spoke multiple languages and was very well
| respected by his peers who admired him for his intelligence and
| good character. He supported a popular uprising against the
| incompetent king of England out of a sense idealism. The
| revolution was initially a success but the democratic government
| that should have replaced the king turned into an even more
| unpopular dictatorship. The monarchy was restored, most
| revolutionaries where executed and Milton was banished to the
| country side where he lived out his final years in poverty going
| blind due to cataracts growing in his eyes. He dictated the story
| of Paradise Lost to a scribe to explain how hard it is to change
| the word for the better, "To serve in heaven or to rule in hell"
| as he would put it. This was his final act of rebellion, to cast
| satan as a personable anti hero.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| I hadn't clocked that he live through the wars of the three
| kingdoms.
| xbar wrote:
| Phew. I was afraid that this was going to be some attempt to be
| not about Milton.
|
| My best friend gave me this book a few decades ago. I hadn't read
| it during my literature course years. I read it and we discussed
| it for months. A worthwhile effort.
| sb057 wrote:
| (1667) :o)
| fipar wrote:
| Among the many works influenced by this, I love this one:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Right_Hand
|
| It's also mentioned in Cave's Song of Joy.
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