hm

The Electric Literature blog has a post by Nora Fussner on a new iPad app of The Waste Land, which includes the poem read by Eliot, Ted Hughes, Fiona Shaw and others, a facsimile of the typescript edited by Pound, and much more.  Toward the end Fussner comments that it would be nice if other books had the benefit of such an app; she mentions The Last Samurai, which could have clips from the Kurosawa film and translation of the lines in Greek.

I am all for an iPad app with clips from the film (always supposing Toho could be persuaded to cooperate).  In fact, I love the idea of an app that offers more help with Greek than was included in the book. But, um, to the best of my knowledge all lines in Greek within the text ARE translated, and with one exception (a brief quotation from the Odyssey) they are also transliterated. 

(I am only too conscious of the fact that pages offering this help are not especially well designed - when cobbling them together in, if memory serves, WordPerfect 7, I imagined, in my innocence, that they would be handed over to a professional designer who would produce something handsome on the page.  As it happens, the designer and typesetter seem to have seen the Greek, Old Norse and Japanese as tricky stuff they could not reasonably be expected to tackle, so those bits of the text were left pretty much the way they were in the wordprocessed submission.  (The Japanese looked better in the original document, having been typed in using software suitable for Japanese, rather than plonked in as graphics objects in a vanilla Quark file.)  But enough of King Charles' Head.)

Joel Spolsky & T S Eliot

Came across an interview of Joel Spolsky on Scoble about a month after the event. Spolsky runs Fog Creek Software, which produces Fogbugz, a program for debugging software, and Copilot, a program that allows you to give tech support by taking over someone's computer and working on it from a remote location.

Copilot works even if both parties are behind firewalls, and it allows for Mac-Windows remote assistance as well as Mac-Mac and Windows-Windows. This means, I think, that it could save publishers from problems like this:

Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service, 2nd stanza, first from Bartleby's with some Greek in the Greek alphabet--

In the beginning was the Word.	5
Superfetation of τὸ ἒν,
And at the mensual turn of time
Produced enervate Origen.

then with the Greek transliterated, from Representative Poetry Online, a poetry site run by the University of Toronto--

5 In the beginning was the Word.
6 Superfetation of to en,
7 And at the mensual turn of time
8 Produced enervate Origen.

The Toronto site adds the helpful comment: Eliot's Greek letters are transliterated and italicized in this edition. The Greek words mean: "the One."

We-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-l-l-l-l-l. Up to a point.

The sound that in English is normally represented by h does not have a letter in ancient Greek. It's written as a fiddly little inward-curving hook above the vowel. Any word that begins with an aspirated vowel (a rough breathing) will have this fiddly hook above the letter. Sadly for the modern typesetter, any word that begins with an unaspirated vowel also has a fiddly little hook -- a fiddly little hook facing the other way.

So if we were writing English words in the Greek alphabet, they'd look like this:


You'll notice just how big the Greek has to be for the direction of the hook to be clear. (Note also that the breathing goes over the second vowel of a two-vowel syllable.) And a syllable may also bear an accent:


The feminine singular of 'one' is μία, and the neuter singular is either

before another word, or

at the end of a sense unit, usually indicated by a punctuation mark.

Long story short, the Greek for 'the One' is either τὸ ἕν or τὸ ἓν, which should be transliterated as, yes, you guessed it, to hen. If the comma at the end of the line is correct, both the accent and the breathing are wrong. And, to get back to extremely fabulous Mr Spolsky, if the typesetter had had a Hellenist with Copilot at the other end of the line, the word could have been printed right for the princely sum of $4.95, and we would not have had misinformation disseminated to millions of Internet users, to the effect that 'to en' is Greek for 'the One'.

It would be silly for a production manager to trawl the pool of typesetters for one who happened to know Greek because a text happened to include a couple of words in Greek. It would not be silly to lay out $4.95 to get someone competent in the language to input the couple of words. The alternative is for the hapless typesetter to have a bash and then fax the page through to the author for proofreading. The fiddly bits that are hardest to get right are precisely the bits that will be illegible in a fax. Copilot, thou shouldst have been living at that hour.

Information on Copilot is available at www.copilot.com.