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Updated June 2012
T. E. Lawrence to Bruce Rogers
16/IV/31
Dear B. R.
I am in Hythe for perhaps a fortnight wore, watching the assembly (and soon performing the trials) of a new R.A.F. motor boat.
This business has held me up for weeks, and goes on.
Meanwhile your letter finds me. I shall try and polish off XXI to Miss Saunders in a week, but I cannot promise. Often in the evenings I am too tired to read. Here are my notes on translating the Odyssey, copied from the back of the book, over the fly-leaves of which I scribbled my comments as I worked at it. I wonder if you will find them mean anything? Use anything you like, and extract anything there is in former letters - though I should like to see such items before they gain the dignity of print. One writes freely, sometimes!
I am sorry to be so slow. Your letter had to come on, and my notes had to be fair-copied and arranged.
Yours
T E Shaw.
Alas, I've corrected my draft twice over, so that it is now a dirty text.
Perhaps Miss S. will be able to read it, yet! Please beg her to accept the dirty
sheets as an autograph. Mine was once worth half-a-crown, before I signed it too
often!
| Source: | BR1 [78] |
| Checked: | jw/ |
| Last revised: | 15 July 2006 |
T. E. Lawrence chronology
1888 16 August: born at Tremadoc, Wales
1896-1907: City of Oxford High School for Boys
1907-9: Jesus College, Oxford, B.A., 1st Class Hons, 1909
1910-14: Magdalen College, Oxford (Senior Demy), while working at the British Museum's excavations at Carchemish
1915-16: Military Intelligence Dept, Cairo
1916-18: Liaison Officer with the Arab Revolt
1919: Attended the Paris Peace Conference
1919-22: wrote Seven Pillars of Wisdom
1921-2: Adviser on Arab Affairs to Winston Churchill at the Colonial Office
1922 August: Enlisted in the Ranks of the RAF
1923 January: discharged from the RAF
1923 March: enlisted in the Tank Corps
1923: translated a French novel, The Forest Giant
1924-6: prepared the subscribers' abridgement of Seven Pillars of Wisdom
1927-8: stationed at Karachi, then Miranshah
1927 March: Revolt in the Desert, an abridgement of Seven Pillars, published
1928: completed The Mint, began translating Homer's Odyssey
1929-33: stationed at Plymouth
1931: started working on RAF boats
1932: his translation of the Odyssey published
1933-5: attached to MAEE, Felixstowe
1935 February: retired from the RAF
1935 19 May: died from injuries received in a motor-cycle crash on 13 May
1935 21 May: buried at Moreton, Dorset