Alis in Waunderland

 I’ve been reading Pindar’s Olympian Ode 1. Every ode has a victor which it celebrates and almost every ode has a mythological antecedent. The Olympic victor here is Hieron, tyrant of Syracuse, while the mythological antecedent is Pelops, son of Tantalus. The story which Pindar tells about Pelops is different from the usual tale; but Pelops returns to the mortal realm either way. Once Pelops is growing into a young man, he needs to find a bride, so he decides to enter the contest for the hand of Hippodamia, daughter of Oenomaus of Pisa, a city near Olympia. The successful suitor receives Hippodamia as a bride; the unsuccessful suitors receive death, because myth never does anything halfway. Pisa and Olympia are in the land of Elis, or at least that is how the Attic Greek of Athens would render it. In the Ode, which is written in the Doric Greek of Thebes, the land is Alis, showing the long alpha for eta correspondence used (and sometimes abused) in certain parts of Greek poetry. In the land of Elis (or Alis) itself, the Doric Greek dialect is yet more archaic: it retains the digamma or wau lost in more rapidly developing dialects, and therefore Elis in Elean Greek is Walis or Valis (the digamma is sometimes rendered as beta in Greek which lacks it). This name, as speakers of Latin might notice, means ‘valley’ or ‘hollow’, which makes the subdistrict of Hollow Elis a Torpenhow Hill or Caermarthen Castle. The land, therefore, in which the Olympics occurred shares a name with a Swiss canton because humans are not very imaginative when it comes to naming things – the name Pisa is basically Las Vegas.

The Words We Leave Behind

 A feature of the Pindaric realm, the epinician genre, is the double use of grammatical components and its corollary, the absence of words that would not have been absent in a prosaic work. The complex meter demands such compromises. This absence works best when the audience is so familiar with the story presented that it perceives the new text as an alternate presentation rather than a novelty. A problem, arises, therefore, when the audience receiving is no longer the audience originally intended to receive; and even more so when the primary language of that audience is not the language of the work.

This phenomenon, however, is not unfamiliar to contemporary consumers of media. Movie adaptations of popular franchises often depend on the audience's knowledge of the book series and therefore feel at liberty to discard scenes that convey critical information to those who have not read the books and are merely accompanying their progeny or sweetheart to the cinema. The consumer intimately familiar with the work may not realize how deficient these lacunae can be to their companion, and perhaps even become angry when they fail to appreciate the genius of their literary god. From the perspective of the companion, however, this low esteem for the film is appropriate; the cinematographers have failed to create a coherent narrative in service of spectacle.