Leonid TARUASHVILI TECTONICS OF DIVINE BODY IN THE ILIAD AND ITS EARLY MODERN TRANSLATIONS: DREAM AND ATHENA PREFACE
When I was about to write a study on how the plastic images of Homer's epics were perceived and rendered in early modern time, I had a mind to concentrate first and foremost on book illustration. What is quite understandable, since pictorial interpretation more than any other one must have to do or so it seems at least with the plastic values of verbal interpretandum. Furthermore, the material of Homer illustration in itself (it's sufficient to recall the famous engravings after John Flaxman, decorating numerous editions of the Iliad and Odyssey) is rich and appealing enough to constitute a subject of special study. However on mature reflection I have rejected the first idea and chosen the translations of Homer's epics as a material of paramount importance for the conceived study. The point is that exactly such translations constitute primary stage of image interpretation, for if not exclusively, then at least mainly from them illustrators drew stuff and inspiration for their figurative versions of Homeric poems; those translations and not original epics were for illustrators the real interpretandum. So the adequate analysis of illustrations to Homer cannot manage without taking into account the character and structure of visual images contained in translations, as well as without meticulous collation of these images with their correspondences in Homer text. But the both require a separate study. I don't dare to affirm that visual side of Homeric figurativeness were disregarded by researchers. However, I am inclined to think that their attention to such a matter was to a certain degree one sided, being concentrated chiefly on optical effects. In a general way, it was spoken sometimes of plastics, whereas the basis of Homer's plastic figurativeness, his classical (or positive as I shall call it here) tectonics, moreover in the aspect of its reflection in translations, became the subject of analytical treatment extremely seldom. Now let us determine more precisely the subject matter of the prospective study. This subject matter has two sides material and theoretical. What concerns the first, all is intelligible without any special elucidations; nevertheless I should repeat that concrete historical stuff of the study is texts of early modern translations of Homer's poems. However, in this texts we shall examine not everything that they contain, but only one certain facet. In its turn, this facet possesses two sides, one of which is the outer, looking at us, readers and representing the verbal significant, or else the plan of wordy expression of text. As to the other side, it is turned inside, to figurative contents of text and constitutes its plastic tectonic significate, or else the plan of content. Just that very double sidedness determines methodological double sidedness (or interdisciplinarity) of this study, which in its operating with verbal significants acts as philological, whereas in its turning to the plastic tectonic content, as art critical one.