>tfw Emily Wilson has replaced Albert Cook for the translation Norton Critical Edition uses for the Odyssey
It's amazing how transparently she's being astroturfed. Just a fucking psyop against Homer and male translators.
Emily "Catgirl" Wilson.
>>24943507Caroline Alexander was the first woman to translate Homer but her translation was never astroturfed like this.
>>24943512>NOO, YOU'RE NOT ALLOWED TO HAVE FUN!!!
>>24943512..moar.
>>24943507Everything since 1987 has been 100% astroturf. Not one organic thing has happened.
>>24943604I was born in 1987.
Can someone give me concrete examples of why her translation is bad? I want to be able to explain why she sucks to my normie friends who read, without coming across like a misogynist (I am).
>>24943517Why might that have been?
>>24943622
>>24943694Oh..its over.
>zoomers don't know about the Norton Critical Edition of Ovid's MetamorphosesEmily has nothing on that edition that turns Ovid into hundreds of pages of cheesy family friendly 90s hip hop.
>>24943694Christ... Im depressed
>>24943694Thank you for sharing, I've long heard it said that Wilson is bad, but also seen her promoted a TON irl. This really confirms to me that the haters are absolutely correct because that's atrocious.
>>24943694This picture is a great argument for the possibility of judging the quality of translations by comparing them to each other despite not knowing the original language. This is objectively ugly in comparison.
>>24943694Based. You WILL be using the Emily Wilson New Testament for liturgical purposes by 2030. You WILL replace the Nicene Creed with the new and improved Sparkle Creed. The future will not be stopped, Chuds.Just wait until Wilson does the Aeneid, Commedia, Beowulf, only after the Scriptures of course though.
>>24943694which one is closer to the og greek tho? and god t.e. lawrence is ass, "divine poesy"? c'mon man! lmao also why are these guys translating "polis" as "citadel" and "stronghold" that's editorializing a lot more than wilson.
>>24943604also tell us how there haven't been any good new bands since u were in high school
>>24943504I like prose translations better
>>24944148ngl i got a prose translation of dante i just can't read like 300 pages of shit that iswritten out like thison every page i meanit doesn't even rhymeso why bother?
>Playtime's over
>>24944159considering they were just doing the contest to see who could shoot through the axe heads that makes perfect sense, damn wilson translation is kinda fire ngl
>>24944149Dante does rhyme though, always.
>>24944132>lmao also why are these guys translating "polis" as "citadel" and "stronghold" that's editorializing a lot more than wilson.The word is πτολίεθρον, which means "citadel".
>>24944149line breaks are meaningful parts of the text, though. they're not just there to mark where the rhymes go. i think of them as like panels in a comic. maybe one line introduces an idea, and the next reverses it, or maybe in some places each line is a neat self-contained sentence, while in others the sentences sprawl across lines. you miss out on those effects and artistic choices if you read the poem as straight run-on prose.
>>24943694This image spawned some deeply retarded arguments on twitter when it spread out of its containment zone.
>>24944103Translation doesn't matter and only artists care about it
>>24943694her translation misunderstands the text on a fundamental level by reducing the religious aspect of the work to its barest references. not only did the Greeks literally believe that they required divine assistance to tell and retell these poems, the poems themselves contained moral lessons that the listeners were supposed to apply to their own lives. compare the three male translations on the evils of Odysseus and his crew: while the men blame the crew's "recklessness" and "witlessness" for their blasphemy against the Sun God, Wilson frames it in a passive way in that Odysseus "failed to keep them safe; poor fools." to anyone who's read the poem before, this is clearly not the case: Odysseus warns them not to slaughter the cattle and they do it anyway. while Odysseus does catch plenty of blame for endangering his crew, ultimately their downfall was their own doing because they failed to respect Helios' laws. this served as a cautionary tale to the Ancient Greek listener, who was supposed to understand the consequences that ensue when one disrespects the gods. her writing is awful as well, and she can't even defend her translation by appealing to some notion that she is being more faithful to the text. note how she is the only one of the three translators not to mention the poem being a song in its first lines. it's telling of her approach that she doesn't think of the poem as being vocally performed (as it was for hundreds of years in Ancient Greece), but instead treats it as a story that should be "told." her verse is unsurprisingly dull as a result. Wilson doesn't understand Greek culture, she doesn't understand aesthetics, and she can't even write well. her main talent is having a pussy and going, "bet you thought a woman couldn't do THIS!!!"
>>24944216I love McCarter's translation of Ovid and Alexander's translation of Homer, both women. But Wilson is still garbage
>>24944216filename betrays your ignorance of etymology and the original text. translating πολύτροπον (many turned, manifold) to complicated makes perfect sense, especially seeing as she stayed in meter.
>>24944456Does it make perfect sense with how that term is applied to men in Greek, and how complicated is applied to men in English? In Greek it means having an intricate way of thinking and doing. In English it's applied to feelings
>>24944456Why did you take it as a reflection of my opinion rather than a reference to an overall sense of malaise towards the line in board culture
>>24944472every heard of complications on a watch? well of course u can't afford watches with mechanical complications, but for those who can, that's a well known term for turning gears.>>24944207post a source that isn't retarded ai slop circularly referencing bad english translations. go ahead. if they mean citadel why did the not use ἀκρόπολις huh?
>>24944879Applying complicated to an analogue computer signifies something quite different from applying it to a man
>>24944437This Anon is actually right. She omits the part where his crewmen are doomed by their own excessive pride (αὐτῶν γὰρ σφετέρῃσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν ὄλοντο).ἀλλ᾽ οὐδ᾽ ὣς ἑτάρους ἐρρύσατο, ἱέμενός περ:αὐτῶν γὰρ σφετέρῃσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν ὄλοντο,νήπιοι, οἳ κατὰ βοῦς Ὑπερίονος Ἠελίοιοἤσθιον: αὐτὰρ ὁ τοῖσιν ἀφείλετο νόστιμον ἦμαρ
>>24944437>>24944911Also adding on to this, Wilson is translating in a more recent current in classics which sees Odysseus as the bad guy in the Odyssey. She's supporting this position by omitting whole lines in her translation.
>>24944918She is shedding a new light on it and making it relevant instead of a mere artifact. That is an important achievement and why universities are all embracing hers as the standard text
>>24944879>post a source that isn't retarded ai slop circularly referencing bad english translations. go ahead. if they mean citadel why did the not use ἀκρόπολις huh?That's the sense given in Slater and Autenrieth. πτολίεθρον is derived from πόλις, but citadel is also derived from civitas. Citadel is a perfectly fine rendering of a city that's described throughout the Iliad as being a walled fortress.
>>24943512wtf this is worse than the william vollman transvestite pictures
>>24944925That's not an achievement. That's just a different text altogether. Might as well call it a retelling.
>>24944911>>24944918Nice, I appreciate the textual support. I don't read Archaic Greek myself, so I'm just going on what I've gleaned from comparing translations and reading secondary lit, which clearly Emily Wilson has done little if any of.>>24944925This is the issue: she's not. Even leaving aside the textual and political disagreements I have with her approach, she does not engage with the prior scholarship in any meaningful way beyond strawmanning their positions. Homer outright blames Odysseus for needlessly endangering his men and being a bad leader, hence him calling Odysseus "polytropos" to begin with. From the outset he is portrayed as a clever yet conniving hero who gets into trouble because of his schemes. You can draw a parallel between Odysseus' hubris in boasting over his defeat of Polyphemus and angering Poseidon (which blows them off course and causes the entire Odyssey) to the crew's later disrespect of Helios being their downfall. I am sure there is tons of scholarship arguing that the crew does not respect the gods because that's the example Odysseus sets for them, and given that the Ancient Greeks tended to regard the conduct of a leader's subjects as a reflection of the leader's character, it wouldn't be a stretch to argue that Homer intended for this to be a lesson to take away from his poem. You don't need to change or elide the text to communicate this meaning, and it's certainly a lot more interesting to put both Odysseus and his crew at fault instead of rewriting the text to be, "they good boys, they ain't do nothing."That's the distasteful thing about the recent astroturfing of women into Classics. They show up with these bombastic claims about how the male-dominated field has missed essential viewpoints that they are finally bringing to light after 2,000 years, and then they spout interpretations that were well-known 200 years ago. See also the rash of recent Greek myth retellings from women's points of view that the authors claim are revolutionary, when the Greeks themselves were already writing these sorts of reinterpretations since ancient times.
>>24944925>a mere artifactYour praise means nothing.
>>24945219Universities across the English-speaking world agree with it
>>24943504Greek literature is 6/10 anyway. Augustine was right.>>24943512She looks raped.
>>24943665One, because Caroline Alexander actually respects her reader enough that she doesn't dumb the language down to "tote bags" and "complicated man." Wilson on the other hand wanted to capture the TikTok crowd whose only experience with the classics is Percy Jackson fanfics. Two, Caroline Alexander never needed to market her translation using her gender because her translation stands on its own merits. It's beautiful and poetic despite being done in prose, and you can feel her love for the poem throughout. Emily Wilson's translation on the other hand sucks even though it's in verse and at times she actively seems to dislike Homer, but because it's marketed using her gender nobody is allowed to criticize it. She hides behind the argument that she's just corrected the mistakes of past male translators, and yes she's right about some of those mistakes but then she swings hard in the opposite direction. "Complicated man" to describe Odysseus. Was "problematic man" too on the nose? Like seriously pick out any section of the book and compare the two translations side by side and tell me with a straight face Wilson's is better. If a man had published the exact same translation these same people wouldn't give a damn about it, because it was never about the translation in the first place, it's about virtue signaling. I just wish they would stop being disingenuous and admit the real reason they shill Wilson.
>>24943694Of course she gets rid of the part talking about the pain Odysseus suffered in his heart, simply reducing it to physical pain suffered in storms. Also make sure to get rid of the part talking about how he strive hard to save his men. Can't have modern readers empathize with a problematic man, no way.
