Abstract
This chapter considers the translating of Milton’s written texts into spoken words in Milton marathons, the communal reading-aloud ‘from morn to dewy eve’ of Paradise Lost by scholars, students, and enthusiasts who distantly echo Homer and his rhapsodes. Hale shares some of the discoveries he experienced and witnessed from such Milton marathons at Otago University from about 1990 to 2015, with variations and experiments that built up a culture of performance and discovery. By putting Milton’s words through into their own voices and ears, through body and mind together, participants find meaning and pleasure, the meanings of a pleasure both collective and personal. At its simplest, reading aloud compels attention to changes in word-pronunciation, signalled by line-rhythm. More fundamentally, every reader must feel Milton’s syntax and, especially for beginners, his enjambment, ‘the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another’, to echo Milton’s note added to the epic in 1668, ‘The Verse’. In larger ways too, readers enter into Milton’s conviction; otherwise, they feel themselves become unconvincing, while listeners hear what jars and think of better ways. This is thinking Milton’s thought after him, submitting to be guided by him. It is intersemiotics interinanimated.