Why?
Occassionally in my rather peripatetic wanderings through literature I run across translations of ancient texts where the translator has translated some food item as corn. THe problem is that corn was unknown in the pre-Columbian except in the Americas. It is a native plant and was, at that time, no where else.
An example is this quote from Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things translated by William Ellery Leonard
Each birth goes forth upon the shores of light
From its own stuff, from its own primal bodies.
And all from all cannot become, because
In each resides a secret power its own.
Again, why see we lavished o’er the lands
At spring the rose, at summer heat the corn,
The vines that mellow when the autumn lures
It puzzles me why an educated person, as he so obviously was, would do that. Surely he would know that corn was something unknown in the 1st century BCE
Related posts
Comments
Comment from The Dynamic Driveler
Time: 9/19/2007, 10:11 pm
Thanks brainuser I guess the original text didn’t specify the type of grain.
Comment from brainuser
Time: 9/19/2007, 9:47 pm
Over here in England, ‘corn’ is the generic term for any grain that is usually fed to livestock. If you want the stuff with yellow kernals, you have to ask for ’sweet corn’ or ‘maize’.