Translating Iliad, 21, lines 34-138, 2d part, belatedness, modernism, and post-modernism

Finished the second group of 5 lines, 40-44. It is slow going, and I am dependent on the cribs I make of the other translators. My present sense of the Greek syntax is too poor to diagram the relationships within a sentence. Well, I can find the subject and the verb. I am at the start of a long recovery and a long path for growth.

Still, it is fascinating, fun, and absorbing. I have to work so hard to think in Greek explicitly of the diction, the syntax, the story. Compared to this, I am on automatic pilot when I write English. I am beginning 40 years late. Yet I don't feel any sense of belatedness. I can not change the past and I will not let a notion about it stop me from doing what I want.

I had an idea today about modernism and post-modernism. It sort of applies here because my thought relates to distinguishing between modern and post-modern by means of each era's primary sense of time, or of our relation to time. The connection is belatedness. Belatedness is a concern of modernists and not of post-modernists. For the modernist, time is an arrow. It has one direction only. There is a point of the arrow and then there is all the rest of behind the point. Thus for the modernist, the importance of the avant-garde--those who are at the point of the arrow. Modernism is a corollary of the idea of progress. For the modernist, the new must be better than the old. Else why be in the forefront of art or ideas?

For the post-modernist, time is a river, an old river that winds its way to the sea, a growing river that gathers other rivers into it, and streams, and creeks, and run-off, too, a river that spills itself into the sea in a massive chaotic delta made of its water and the earth it has carried from everywhere it has been. There is a mouth, there is a head, there is the ribbon-like body of the river itself, but the river has no beginning or end. It empties itself into the sea. And the sea evaporates and replenishes the air with moisture that falls again as rain that refills the river again and again and again. The post-modernist lives in the spreading delta and uses any of the water and any of the mud it carries and any of the fish and birds as needed or wanted.