Translating Pericles' Funeral Oration

[st.cronin]

A colleauge and I are working on an extra-curricular project: Our own translation of Pericles' Funeral Oration from Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War. Neither one of us is very strong in Greek, and we don't really know what we're doing or what we hope to accomplish, other than greater understanding of Greek and English. The passage in question has 11 paragraphs, starting at Book 2, Chapter 35 (XXXV).

This dynasty is not to show off; it's meant to inspire.

My colleague (Jesse) and myself had our first sit-down today; we worked on the first sentence. The first sentence is broken up by a comma. We were fairly happy with what we came up with for the second part of the sentence, but the first part of the sentence had difficulties. This is our English so far:

" ... , that this is good for those buried from the war to be spoken over."

Our understanding of the first part is more or less this: " Indeed the many here then having said these things praise the maker of the custom of this speech,"

This clause has lots of challenges - we understand roughly what is meant, but how to put it in literal English is incredibly hard.

What we have planned for now is to meet every friday afternoon, having worked on a particular paragraph seperately, and compare notes and questions and issues, and attempt to come up with a rendering of that paragraph that we are both happy with.

Here's an online resource if you want to follow along:

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin...ut=;loc=2.34.1

You can expect weekly updates at a minimum.