Quote:
Originally Posted by Kumabjorn
In some Japanese poetry you find something called Hayashikotoba, these are completely meaningless words or phrases entered into a poem to modulate the cadence, yet most translators insist in including them even when they destroy the cadence in a translated poem. Go figure!
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In the same vein, in Latin and Greek epic poetry, such as Aeneid, or the Odyssey, people are given a whole range of different descriptive terms, called "epithets", which are there primarily to fill up the desired syllable pattern of the hexameter verse. Eg, in the Iliad, Zeus can be any of:
Zeus of the councils
Zeus of the wide brows
Zeus the cloud-gatherer
Zeus, the father of gods and men
These epithets have absolutely nothing to do with what Zeus is actually doing in the storyline at the time, they are there because the metre requires an epithet with a specific pattern of long and short syllables. If you only read the poem in translation, you'd never see that.