Full disclosure. This is to make the brains of British classicists explode. Its not a metrical problem, but a rhetorical challenge. I have a very tight word cap in an abstract for a paper I might present, and I suppose a blandly pedestrian rendering would go over best, all things considered, given their inexorable drive toward unarguable fact (bless them).
But I want more than the impressive actual truth of it all. I hope for a topnote of sheer truthiness. The extraordinary amalgam of reality with the realistic.
It's got to be a totally literalist reading, with a whiff of enchantment that lets one see the actual event unfolding in living shock.
I think of Odysseus in front of Nausicaa, but happening under the Eros in Piccadilly Circus with navvies alongside.
Your image of Crusoe is very, very good, and provocative. Thank you!
|