Parva Torontonensia: A Public Reading of Homer’s Iliad

NOTES PARVA TORONTONENSIA: A Public Reading of Homer's Iliad 387 The University of Toronto, like many other such places, regularly holds public poetry-readings. Generally the programme consists of short modern poems, but occasionally something more ambitious is attempted. About a decade ago, for example, some professors of English presented Milton's Paradise Lost, at the leisurely pace of one book a week. Last year or the year before a battery of students went non-stop through Dante's Divine Comedy in translation. This year a group of students decided to read Homer's ~ in Greek. Those who are tempted to follow this path might welcome further details. After several trial-runs, the organizers decided that the poem would want about twenty-four hours. Eventually they settled on two twelve-hour days rather than three eight-hour days, to run consecutively rather than a week apart. A public room was reserved in a students' union building. Notices were placed in the student newspapers, and several hundred small posters were distributed to various parts of the campus. The original intent was to enlist twelve students, to read one book each per day. In the event, only ten persons took part, and over half the poem was read by three of them. For a month beforehand, they met weekly for rehearsal. After trying various styles of reading they compromised on a stress metre. They marked the quantities in their first book, and looked over the remainder to check for possible difficulties. The great days were Friday and Saturday, 4 and 5 February, 1983. Each session began at 9:00 a.m. A naive checklist of the equipment used may protect others from some of the more horrific buffetings of chance: a lectern, with a bright light; a pitcher of water and glasses; a blackboard, on which to report the progress; a number of printed texts for the audience; a tape-recorder, to play an overture and to fill up the entr' actes whilst the notice was being put on the blackboard; also a few tapes to provide a more or less appropriate atmosphere (in this instance, Theodorakis's Epitaphios, Fanshawe's African Sanctus, Purcell's Suite for Strings, Joshua Rifkin playing Scott Joplm); assorted electrical extensions; comfortable lounge chairs. An announcer introduced each book, giving the ancient title and naming the reader. The audience was small, with the largest number (about a dozen) in attendance on Friday morning, Saturday mid-day, and in the evenings. On both days about sundown, and early on Saturday morning, there were only two listeners. Perhaps fifty different individuals attended at one time or another, including the readers, thei r friends and fami Iies and former teachers other students of the Classics, Modern Greek, and Literary Studi~s, and members of the teaching staff. 388 NOTES In each book the quality and rate of performance deteriorated after about twenty minutes; the reader obviously grew tired and stumbled more often. Anything longer than an hour taxed the performer 's strength and the Iisteners' patience. Those who read the most improved in fluency, though not in speed, over the two days. They came to rely on the caesura as a structural pause which indicated that the metrical form of the line was unfolding as it should. The elapsed time for the whole performance was five minutes short of twenty-four hours. The interval between books averaged three minutes. The time actually taken in reading was 22 hours 53 minutes. For the total of 15,693 lines, this works out to 686 lines an hour, or 11.43 lines per minute. The rates of individual readers varied greatly. The slowest was the reader of Book 22, who took 63 minutes for the 515 lines (8.17 lines per minute). The highest rate was attained by the reader of Books 8 and 18: a total of 1182 lines in 74 minutes, or 15.97 lines per minute. The experiment made the students more aware of what is involved in the oral presentation of a long work, and thereby put them into closer touch with the tradition. It famil iarized them with parts of the poem, and improved their facility with...