Charles Davis Feb 1, 2015:

@Donal What better way to spend a weekend than discussing Homeric epithets? :) More fun that the translation I'm doing at the moment, I can tell you.

DLyons Feb 1, 2015:

@Charles Yes, I came to much the same conclusions as you eventually. Not for the first time, my preconceived ideas were imprecise :-)

From, where I have no idea, I had a notion that people had moved on from Pausanias once "modern" scholarship kicked in. But it's a lot more nuanced than that.

I suppose it's the grind of uninteresting translations that allows us the luxury of discussing the Classics. It's a pity that the intersection set of paying and fun is close to null.

Charles Davis Feb 1, 2015:

Why do so few translators seem to use "bright-eyed", which is the meaning according to LSJ? One who does is Robert Fagle in his Odyssey (1996). Here's a note by A. M. Bowie in his recent Greek edition of Odyssey XIII-XIV (CUP, 2014):

"γλαυκῶπις: a regular epithet of Athena, but of uncertain meaning. It may mean 'with eyes that are grey/blue/clear' or 'of bright appearance'."
https://books.google.es/books?id=5XwLAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA137&lpg=P...

Charles Davis Feb 1, 2015:

Pope (1715) is all blue-eyed, no grey.

It is worth noting, perhaps, that the earliest English versions of Homer were not done directly from Greek. Arthur Hall, the earliest of all (1581) worked from a French version, Chapman from Latin.

Charles Davis Feb 1, 2015:

@Donal I read that too. By "English literary tradition" I meant how the Homeric epithet is traditionally rendered in English (which is the point of this question), not blue (or grey) eyes in English poetry in general. It is quite true, as I noted afterwards, that Chapman uses both blue and grey, apparently interchangeably (and actually more grey than blue). But "blue-eyed was the standard seventeenth-century rendering" (see Dryden, ed. cit., note 310). Eighteenth-century too: Macpherson (1773) and Cowper (1791) always use blue-eyed, never grey-eyed. Even as late as 1851 Theodore Buckley, of Oxford, was still calling her "blue-eyed": 34 instances, and not one of "grey-eyed". By then translators were beginning to use "grey-eyed", and this seems to be practically universal in modern versions.

In view of Chapman's practice, I would say that for these purposes "grey-eyed" could also be regarded as faithful to English (Homeric) literary tradition. But it seems to be the exception before the mid-nineteenth century, and on balance I would recommend "blue-eyed" here, because it is faithful both to the Spanish expression and to the specific tradition I was referring to.

DLyons Feb 1, 2015:

Leah Marcus, Unediting the Renaissance In Renaissance culture, 'blue eyes' sometimes suggested black-and-blue eyes, or eyes rimmed with black as a result of pregnancy or fatigue, but, pace the OED, 'blue eyes' sometimes meant what we mean by blue eyes today. ... We can speculate that 'blue eyes' in the twentieth-century sense may have been a recent import in early modern England, associated with foreign models and with elite culture rather than with the native English tradition of gray-eyed beauty. ... A little after Shakespeare, blue eyes become more common in poetry, but may still have been regarded as exotic. Charles Cotton wrote a blazon of his sister’s beauty in which he praised her black eyes above 'English grey, or French blue eyes,' seeming to suggest an equivalence between the two colors: what the French (and Italians?) conventionally termed blue or sapphire eyes the English traditionally called gray.

DLyons Jan 31, 2015:

Ellipsis e.g. "Ojos garzos ha la niña"

sparkling-eyed (I.53)
Eyes flashing bright (I.96)
Athena’s sparkling eyes (I.182)
Eyes-glinting (I.206)
Clear-eyed goddess (I.255)
Bright-eyed (I.367)
Watchful (I.419)
Flashing eyed (II.442)
Flashing sea-gray eyes (II.476)
Eyes Afire (III.261)
Glistening Goddess (IV.428)
Bright-eyed Goddess Pallas (V.471)
Bright-eyed one (V.481)
Gleaming-eyed (XI.719)

http://www.studymode.com/essays/Epithet-Chart-For-Homers-Ody...

It seems to me (and I could be wrong) that "blue" mainly comes from Pausanias (which doesn't make it wrong, but doesn't make it right either.

https://books.google.ie/books?id=3XGQNMC-2qUC&pg=PA128
https://books.google.ie/books?id=Sve3fLUG3bEC&pg=RA7-PT97

And one needs to remember that colours in Classical Greece don't map neatly into modern European ones. For Homer, the sky is "bronze", chloros (green) is the colour of honey, kyanos (cyan/blue) is the colour of Hector's hair.

Puts rather a different complexion on Hector, doesn't it, blue-rinse hair and wearing Ajax's girdle.