JBaudhuin

It must have been twenty years ago when I started this first. My recollection is that the poetry of it gurgled mightily in my brain and in my prose for years afterwards, even though (I think) I only got so far as the tip of Eumaeus. At that point I stopped for no good reason.

The “poetry of it” had a certain feeling tone, and it amuses me now that I have (recently) restarted and completed it, that I had such a monochromatic view of it, given how kaleidoscopic it is.

Anyway, I picked it up again a couple of months ago, with a goal of completing it by my birthday, which is in the middle of June. (Alas, all is vanity.)

About halfway through I ordered a book from the UC Press that served as a gloss for many of the little references, which was helpful. Not that this is essential-which is to say that the minutiae are not essential in particular but do make sense to the general structure-, but it clarified various details that were a little confusing to me on the surface.

Vague spoilage:
Most difficult episode for me was probably Circe. I liked the penultimate chapter more than I would have thought, for its irony and distant pathos. I found Penelope more repulsive than I would have thought, for its infidelity (to the original ;->). Just didn’t seem like a likable character, really. But the episode has some humor as well.

I had wanted to read poetry in the original, inspired by some E. Pound translations. After a few years, was able to take a classical language (wen-yen) course. My favorite class of all time, I think.

More to the point of learning the basic written language, I inadvertently stumbled on a good technique that (I believe) made it somewhat easier to learn and remember the characters. A friend had given me a Chinese-English dictionary.

One of the index systems (i.e., way of looking up an entry) was by “radical”, and there is a list of the radicals (214?). I tried to memorize ten new ones each week and practiced writing out the ones I knew, in order, each day. I got about halfway through and somehow this was enough:

I believe this helped me get my brain around how the characters are designed, and made it easier to remember them because I could rationalize them by their components. It was rote memorization, deliberately without much reliance on knowing the “meaning” of the radicals (though that can help, too).

Only further caveat about this is that it is helpful to learn stroke order before you start doing this, to make sure you are on the right path. There is probably a simple guide to this somewhere online.

On the flip side, this was all twenty years ago, and I have forgotten lots and don’t get much chance to practice. I work for a company with lots of native speakers, but I work from home. (:-<) Perhaps my next “thing” will necessarily be to re-learn chinese.

Cheers!