>When Emily Wilson published her translation of The Odyssey, it quietly but decisively shifted how many readers understood one of the foundations of Western literature. For centuries, English versions of the poem had been shaped by male translators who often filtered Homer’s Greek through Victorian, Edwardian, or mid-20th Century assumptions about gender, class, and morality. Wilson approached the text with a different aim: fidelity not to tradition, but to the language itself.>Her translation pays close attention to what the Greek actually says, rather than what earlier translators assumed it meant. Where previous versions softened Odysseus into a noble hero or exaggerated the moral failings of female characters, Wilson strips away editorial judgment. Words that had long been rendered with moralizing or misogynistic overtones—especially when applied to women, servants, or the enslaved—are reexamined and translated with consistency and precision. A term describing women as sexually suspect, for example, is no longer quietly upgraded to “faithful” or “pure” when it suits male sympathy.>Equally important is what Wilson avoids. She resists anachronistic language that romanticizes violence, hierarchy, or domination. Her Odysseus is clever and ruthless, not automatically admirable; Penelope is intelligent and strategic, not merely patient and chaste. Enslaved women are named as enslaved, not euphemized into “maids,” forcing modern readers to confront the social realities the poem assumes rather than smoothing them away for comfort.>Wilson’s choices don’t modernize Homer—they clarify him. By refusing to insert gendered judgment or inherited bias, her translation reveals how much earlier versions reflected the values of their translators rather than the ancient text. The result is an Odyssey that feels sharper, more unsettling, and more honest: a poem about power, survival, and storytelling itself, finally allowed to speak without centuries of moral varnish.>© Reddit>#archaeohistorieshttps://x.com/archeohistories/status/2008632100296290695
This author is claiming that earlier translators had biases that distorted their work but fails to demonstrate that Emily Wilson's work is not distorted by Wilson's own biases. The author doesn't even seem to realize this as a possibility and instead only reinforces Wilson's perspective under the delusion that it is wholly objective.
>>25004971>it quietly but decisively shifted how many readers understood one of the foundations of Western literatureFirst, there wasn't anything quiet about the marketing push. Second, she bastardized a text by injecting fashionable ideology into it and forcing conversation about the work according to said fashionable ideology. Don't need to read the rest. Thesis statement was bullshit.
So her claim is that the misogynistic overtones were added by the translators and isn't inherent to ancient Greek? But ancient Greek culture was starkly more misogynistic than the culture of the translators. >By refusing to insert gendered judgment or inherited bias, her translation reveals how much earlier versions reflected the values of their translators rather than the ancient textIsn't this exactly what she's doing? Are these people complete NPCs that weren't coded for self-criticism?
>>25004981can you point to where exactly it enforces objectivity? think it just presents her bias (any translator will naturally have one) against 2500 years of an opposite bias.
>>25004971Good!>NOOO YOU HAVE TO TWIST EVERYTHING TO FIT CHRISTIAN SLAVE MORALITYNo.
>>25004971>Her translation pays close attention to what the Greek actually says, rather than what earlier translators assumed it meant.More like it's what she assumes it meant.
>>25005016what like every other translator who ever lived?
its not a bad translation, /lit/ just wants to complain about women and modernity
Thread should have ended at pointing out the stupidity of this statement >By refusing to insert gendered judgment or inherited bias, her translation reveals how much earlier versions reflected the values of their translators rather than the ancient text. And moving on.
>>25005018Yeah, so they shouldn't act like she's more accurate.
>>25005052every translator (naturally) does that
>>25004971>woman>not met with immediate misogynyStopped reading right there.
>>25004971Sure.- Post reads like it's written by AI.- The X user is an Indian account.- Wilson explicitly rejects fidelity as a standard in her introduction in her Odyssey translation, because it's "gendered." - She plainly editorializes in a vice-versa way, a character in the Odyssey is described as "telling lies" instead of the literal "swearing oaths" and Odyssey becomes the "lord of lies" instead of translating polymetis as "cunning."- She has a character in the Iliad say "so rude" to an enemy, which makes her vulgar diction somehow worse than that of Rupi Kauer.
>>25004971The fact that this translation is being shilled so hard by a morally and intellectually bankrupt academia and the specific examples of changes made to be "more accurate" tells me that it's a big fat gay pile of shit.
>>25004992>...fidelity not to tradition, but to the language itself.>Her translation pays close attention to what the Greek actually says, rather than what earlier translators assumed it meant. >...Wilson strips away editorial judgment.>Wilson’s choices don’t modernize Homer—they clarify him. By refusing to insert gendered judgment or inherited bias...These lines all proclaim that Wilson is not not only taking out the alleged biases of earlier translators but is also giving a direct, unbiased, and pure, unmediated expression of the original Greek. I don't think there's any more charitable way to read that. It is a delusion.
>>25005112>...fidelity not to tradition, but to the language itself.i’ll include the full sentence:>Wilson approached the text with a different aim: fidelity not to tradition, but to the language itself.samuel butler made the same statement in his prologue. none of it claims objectivity (obviously), it’s just doing what every other translation has done.
>>25005128Well Butler was right about the Odyssey being written by a woman
>>25005080It's obvious written by AI, there are actually a ton of AI dashes in it. This thread getting turnt over chatgpt smdh
>>25005226the ai dash is —there are actually just anons who could’ve learnt homeric greek in the time they’ve been posting their outcry about wilson translating homer in these threads.
>>25005231>>25005226Thanks for stopping by to waste your time posting in the thread to say that posting in the thread is a waste of time
>>25005249did anyone say that? odd angle of attack against two more-or-less innocuous posts.
>>25005018Yeah but she's a retarded liberal woman so it's a lot worse.
>>25005262yeah thanks the point i was making is your(their) issue is with (liberal?) women, not a translation of homer. and the /pol/ influx outnumber the genuine humanities population of this board ten to one.
>>25004971
My modern, unbiased translation of the Argonautica emphasizes transcending biased, archaic value judgements:Complicated men went around on their boat, met people and did complicated stuff. This caused complicated emotions until they overcame the complications they faced.
>>25004993Feminism is Nietzschean now? Okay I guess I'm team Kant again.
>>25005035>>25004993Women shouldn’t be allowed on the internet.
>>25005309it’s tough fighting girls online. what are you gonna say? suck a dick? they’d probably like that
I'm no ancient greek scholar but I can't imagine her first few lines are an accurate translation. Her work is a LOCALIZATION.
https://www.compactmag.com/article/emily-wilson-s-sack-of-homer/And it's trash>Art reveals all, and we can tell Wilson’s approach isn’t faithful to the original because it makes the story fall apart. Her Achilles is a man deluded by his privilege, and his journey is to learn just how misguided he is; his tragedy, to the extent that there is one, is that he does a lot of damage along the way. By way of contrast, consider what the poem looks like if his rage is justified and his actions are meaningful. In Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character, first published in 1994, the psychiatrist Johnathan Shay recounted his work with a group of American combat veterans in the Boston area suffering from “severe, chronic” PTSD. Shay discovered that the Iliad “gives center stage to bitter experiences that actually do arise in war,” specifically the way that the experience of “heavy, continuous combat” can sever a person’s social ties and induce profound, lasting psychological damage.
>>25005306Feminism is definitionally Nietzschian. What do you think transvaluation of values meant?
>>25004971absolute cancer
>>25005339but /lit/ told me psychiatry is a form of pseudoscientific control
>>25005356So true my fellow kekistani. Feminism = le cancer.
>>25005358>Feminism = le cancerI'm not saying that but applying modern sensibilities to a 2500 years old work, is retarded as fuck
Vomit inducing ideologue.
>>25005363No it's not it's an expression of the will you cuck.
>>25005363do you realise ever age through history has done that? ‘older sensibilities’ aren’t homeric either. the stuffy, dry, noble, ‘monument’ homer is largely a schoolroom invention, not an ancient one. reflects academic institutions more than a poet.
>>25005865You just can't help pushing the most evil, subversive perspective possible about every subject.
>>25005926who me?
>>25005357Psychoanalysis anon
>>25005366>me when a man tries to hang out with my gf in proximity to her pussy
>>25004971Americans are so boring. A woman translated this in Italy like 70 years ago and was more feminist, well read and informed than any of you monkey humans.From the eyes of the European, your ideas are never progressive - they are half a century behind and struggling to catch up.
>>25005865That's true however Homer wasn't read primarily in translation until Lattimore and after that I don't think most translations were ideological. When we wanted to give a bend more friendly to our values we made Troy.
>>25005954This translation is for the working class, not fart sniffing "progressive" bourgeoisie who sip their wine and eat their freshly cooked bread and have a garden
>>25004971γύναι, γυναιξὶ κόσμον ἡ σιγὴ φέρει
>>25005954>be the country that invents fascism >becomes primary allies of Hitler with dreams of rebuilding the Roman empire >gets their shit absolutely pushed in by burgers who occupy the country and proscribe the entire right >shit maybe that wasn't such a good idea, let's not do that anymore, let's take American and communist money so we can still have running water>decades later >Vgh why can't America just be super progressive like us? I guess we're just smarter and more exciting
>>25005955homer was already being bent by scholarship, commentary, grammarians, priests, and virgil.
>>25005056Yeah, so they shouldn't act like she's more accurate.
>>25005979Fascism was a progressivist ideology until the g*rm menace subverted it.
>>25004971>Wilson approached the text with a different aim: fidelity not to tradition, but to the language itself.Then it's not really a faithful translation, but a partisan interpretation.Given Homer was a man, and man living in a deeply patriarchal culture at that which valourised heroic masculine archetypes, those 19th century bigoted men were in a better position to translate than she was.
>>25006026the poem starts off ‘sing to me, o goddess’.
>>25005954America literally invented this woke shit and exported it to the rest of the world. America is at the forefront of progressivism.
>>25004971Wilson's translation is fine. Homer's poetry isn't meant to be flowery, that was a choice of previous translators, and Odysseus is not meant to be a noble hero. The gods don't punish him because they're mean, but because he's a bastard trickster who dishonored them and destroyed a holy city. Previous Christian translators had no understanding of paganism and just portrayed the gods as mean and Odysseus as a suffering Jewish-type figure. Rightoids are being their typical dumb selves here.
>>25006030Patriarchy doesn't mean misogynistic hatred of everything female you silly child.
>>25006030and? Hesiod's poem describing the creation of human women as a punishment for men also has goddesses in it, Greek's perception of divine feminine entities did not inform their opinion on human females
>>25005988Without scholars and grammaries we wouldn't be able to read his language lil bro. Might as well say the Greek language itself distorts Priests didn't have any role in understanding the IliadVirgil didn't heroicize Achilles or Odysseus, he told the war from the opposite side and constructed the stories in reverse: a man trying to get away from his home and unwittingly toward a war and epic war (which he triggers by being a suitor a woman who belongs to another man) through a long voyage and beint held up by a Calypso he actually beseeches to let him stay
>>25006007Based progressive imperialism invading and massacring Ethiopia and promising a return to the glory of Rome through the Roman fasces and golden eagle and purging all the leftists in their land while strongly supporting Francisco Franco
>>25004971Actual dogshit translation
>>25004971surely a more accurate translation would be one that uses terms that we would react to in the same way that the greeks would-we have a different attitude towards the word slave than the greeks had to the word doulos
>>25006037he invokes a female muse at the start. so the poem’s perspective isn’t strictly ‘patriarchal male authority.’>Greek's perception of divine feminine entities did not inform their opinion on human femalesthat statement is extremely shaky.
>>25006034it’s matriarchal in origin.
>>25006030Every single poem begins with a dedication to the Muses, what's your point?
>>25006056the invocation the of the muse was a phrase borrowed from ancient religious rituals. the tradition itself is metaphysical and profoundly tied to the feminine principle of inspiration. and homer starts his poem that way, to keep people absolutely still.
>>25006050it is, because goddesses are not human, patriarchy belongs to the human plane, and in any case, although goddesses have power over humans who are inferior, in the divine plane they are also under the power of divine male figures>that statement is extremely shakyit's not read Hesiod's Theogony and Works and Days on the creation of human females and the adjectives used to describe females(i.e human)
>>25006060Oh shut up you retard, they dedicate to the muses because men wrote poetry to impress women.
>>25006060What is your point retard? That women and soibois like you can't relate to or understand anything written by men on any level?
>>25006063myths aren’t made from nothing. any ideas about divine femininity obviously came from women.in the earliest phases of greek thought though, there were no gods, only one mother goddess.
>>25004971>Wilson strips away editorial judgmentcover shows three women, it is clear that her editorial judgement is just worse
>>25006077i could batter you
>>25006046>surely a more accurate translation would be one that uses terms that we would react to in the same way that the greeks wouldExactly, that's why Achilles prize should in fact be called his partner
>>25006108i'm pretty sure it should be called his fuckmeat
>>25006090The picture is from the bronze age Minoans
>>25006088gods and goddesses already existed almost certainly in the indo-european pantheon albeit the consensus IIRC is that in their society female goddesses were mainly conceived as spouses of more prominent male deitiesGreek society of course was heavily shaped by local Minoan/Pelasgian society that's likely where a lot of the more prominent female deities come fromstill though, it's a society heavily based on hierarchical principles, that goes both ways, e.g a male slave had to listen to the matron ordering them around, she in turn obeying to the *demspots, the husband, in turn obeying to goddesses, in turn obeying to the highest male godsso if a foid like wilson turned up in that environment her being a "she" like the invoked goddesses would have little bearing, the first thing they'd ask would be who is her male social guardian and does she have permission to be outside
>>25006112Yeah no we definitely have a much more negative sense of that word. In the Iliad Achilles's prize is befriended by Patroclus who is keen to get her officially married to Achilles and she is filled with grief to be taken away from him and Patroclus is trying to console her when that happens
>>25006124speak for yourself, "fuckmeat" to me is a very positive term. -perhaps "courtesan", "mistress" or "lover" then?
>>25006118yes, it is feminist slop revisionism and why it is being pushedonly a retard would not instantly understand this trash agitation and propaganda
>>25006088book's name?
>>25006147We've had nothing but problematic interpretations until now, you really must be worried about her making them all irrelevant to get so upset
>>25006136In that case Patroclus would be his fuckmeat
Can anyone comment on the previous translations softening the text charge? Do pre-wilsons really translate "slaves" as "maids" to make the text conform to our moral intuitions more?
>>25006040the church had a lot to do with preserving the corpus of greek myth, and are responsible for establishing a continental university system based on greek & latin classics. & i wasn’t attacking scholars per se, but they’re quarrymen, not builders. virgil naturally shaped how romans understood homer by mirroring (and sometimes mistranslating) him in alignment with roman ideals (pietas). homer as we know him is already centuries of mediation in.
>>25006168no because modern people are more homophobic
>>25006149prolegomena to the study of greek religion
>>25006178Erm the Church didn't even use Greek, they used Latin translations. The push for making Greek a part of education was a humanist thing. That's why Rabelais, a priest, had to continually petition different friends to get his bishop to allow him to learn Greek and even after he started studying it his bishop later cancelled his permission so he transferred sees. Because the Bible and theology were all in Latin and the church saw no Christian benefit in learning Greek. Dante couldn't read Greek
>>25006177the thing is that it goes both ways, our word "slave" is also more loaded because of the social environment of the last centuries with people associating it both with the more brutal elements of the recent slave trade but also with taking for granted that slavery is something exceptional, whereas in Greek society it was really a staple and more like a broader element of the social hierarchyone term in the Odyssey is ἀμφίπολος, yeah, of course it's not a term you'd use for a free woman, but then again, who was "free" in that society to us would seem something quite restrictive"maid" at least carries the connotation insofar as their role and work i.e women that are in the house to do whatever the matron tells them to
>>25006190that’s true as a general rule in the latin west. but the church did directly preserve classical texts through scriptoria and studied greek classics.>Ermlol
>>25006088>any ideas about divine femininity obviously came from women.No. The muse is not the mother and both are presented from a masculine perspective even in the oldest 30k year old representations. Hera was given the garden and the wisdom of handed down norms when the gods of men overthrew the old gods, who were not feminine. Women weave using handed down formulas but they don't create anything new or explore new territories.At some point like in Africa the mothers had more power and the men were less organized but that has nothing to do with the explicitly masculine highly organized perspectives Homer presents.>>25006092We already fought and you lost every time, that's why you're a rapebaby today.
>>25006206ancient europe hadn’t yet introduced the concept fatherhood to religious thought, so early myth was matriarchal. >that has nothing to doexcept that homer borrows this pre-hellenic tradition of invoking divine possession which comes from matriarchal religious rituals. >but they don't create anything new calliope. it’s her voice that guides the storytelling.
>>25005128>>25004992sophist faggot, whatever they say it's a shit translation. cope
>>25006248this is someone who knows a thing or two about humanities.
>>25006243Just pure nonsense. Not a hint of thought, and what was the point this incoherent nonsense was supposed to support? That women understand ancient stories of war told by men better than men.. because the men uh mentioned possession?Why do retards like you make these braindead incoherent noises everywhere? Why not just shut the fuck up?
>>25006243>calliope. it’s her voice that guides the storytelling.Never creates anything. She sings and inspires the men to create. Male skateboarders take more risks when there's a woman watching, even if it's an old unattractive hag. Creativity is risk, it's exploration that may kill you, the opposite of everything women stand for and one of the main attractive masculine traits they look for instinctively, for at least as long as there have been mammals.
>>25006341where did i lose you?
>>25004971>man bias: bad, evil, wrong, misogynist, violent>woman bias: correct, truthful, honest, genuineIt's the same shit over and over again in nearly every media outlet.
>>25006353
>>25006353creativity is fundamentally feminine, as the greeks understood. as far as it being exploration - i think you’re wrong about that; it might be ‘finding’ but it’s rarely ‘exploring’ (if it’s any good). and most of it is taking in, which is feminine.
>>25006243You're regurgitating Gimbautas feminist alt-history nonsense from the 70s. This has been conclusively debunked.
>>25006194>more brutal elements of the recent slave tradeAncient Greek slaves actually had it much worse. But by the time of English translations of Homer there's a bunch of anti-slavery books and anti-slavery sentiment, especially from priests.
>>25006429never heard of her. it’s more frazer.
>>25006445You're a century behind.
>>25006446i’m thirty centuries behind
>>25006374>thinking outside the box is feminine
>>25006448I don't think you're that dumb. You should have more confidence in yourself.
>>25006465not thinking outside the box. creativity is about finding, ordering, giving form. if women can’t create, someone should explain who created you and me.
>>25006474This is the female equivalent of black people saying we wuz kangs and invented everything.
>>25006485just stating the facts here
>>25006474I mean by this logic creativity is just reproduction, in which case livestock are far more creative than humans
>>25006501very literal-minded response for someone in a conversation about creativity.
>>25004971>Wilson approached the text with a different aim: fidelity not to tradition, but to the language itself>uses "complicated" to translate a word that means "wandering"
the zoomer's Homer with an 8th grade level vocab fr fr on my momma
>>25004971Sensationalist, written to get clicks. I doubt Wilson herself would agree with all that.Her translation is very accessible though, if it gets people to read it, why not.
>>25006644It literally means "of many turns"
>>25006644polutropos => many-turned => duplicitous, shrewdcomplicated => folded => layered => duplicitous, shrewd
>>25006669traveler
>>25006507But that's your literal argument. That creativity has nothing to with being ingenious and that it has to do with reproduction. Women as inspiring muses to antiquity came from the idea of them being transmitters if hidden truths the way angels are in Christianity, bringing this revelation was the divine inspiration. Later on muses were women who inspired by filling a man with intense feelings that, if you will excuse the expression, fertilized his imagination. In neither case are women supposed to be the ingenious sex
>>25006678museman horny = much writings
>>25006669As in clever deceptive, wily, quick thinking. Not as in complicated the English idiom for someone with emotional baggage or as a euphemism for someone who is repulsive
>>25006684If only it were that simple but prostitutes were generally not the best muses, although they did play an extremely crucial role as models before it became considered classy for women to pose in the nude.
>>25006685complicated is feminine, pure bowlderizationif the cover doesn't get it away that it is a feminist reimagination I don't get how more they have to scream itthis feminist revisionism
I asked ChatGPT, didn't bring up Wilson, just asked if complicated was a good translation for πολύτροπος. It said it etymologically fits but...
>>25006700mercurial
>>25006691She is trying to express that maybe we shouldn't lionize Odysseus so much but you're too dense to get it
>>25006700>A computer doesn't know that the term protean comes from an actual character in the Odysseus, Proteus.AI is not beating the retard charges. At least it didn't say "a man of odyssey"
>>25005291I dunno; if I "had" to read this book, I might find the Wilson rendition an easier slog than the others.
>>25006716AI is bad at specifics, but it's good at broad things because it collates so much info.
>>25004971Absolutely no reason to refute some shill gabble ABOUT the translation when you can just crack open a copy and the translation refutes itself.That this is slop in no way helps things, of course, but even if it had been written by a human, you can just say shit. No natural law forces you to actually say *true* shit about a book, and that's starkly evident here.
>>25004971>often filtered Homer’s Greek through Victorian, Edwardian, or mid-20th Century assumptions about gender, class, and morality.>now replaced with early 21st assumptions about the sameA thing which always bothers me now about modern depictions of slavery, ancient slavery specifically, is that these people weren't just owned people, they were being provided for at someone else's expense. And somehow, seemingly, because of historical accounts, had more upward mobility than we do today.
>>25006007Gurm did that?! That fucker! As if ASOIAF wasn't bad enough!
>>25006734>they were being provided for at someone else's expenseA lot of slaves in ancient Greece had worse lives than the ones on American plantations. Just look at the ones in the Mines of Laurion in Athens.>Shafts were driven down into the ground and galleries opened where slaves, chained, naked, and branded, worked the seams illuminated only by guttering oil lamps. An unrecorded number were children. It was a miserable, dangerous, and brief life.>had more upward mobility than we do todayNo? Freed slaves could never become citizens.
>>25006757And many american slaves had it just as bad or worse than many ancient Greek slaves, what is your point? That using the word "maid" to describe a house slave is more specific than just calling her a slave? That I would agree with.
>>25006675Cope.
>>25004971Any translator who thinks the cyclops is the victim and Odysseus is the monster is mistranslating on purpose.
>>25006784My point is that it's not that Greek slaves were treated better. Greeks just didn't really care about the lives of slaves.
>>25006678creativity isn’t ingenuity - it’s creation. a mystical, life-giving force. the elemental power of creation is of course feminine in essence. and genius is a latin (not greek) word and implied the primitive creative power which you’re born with and accompanies you throughout life. your sense of love and power of instinctive thought.
>>25006700> I asked ChatGPTGenuinely kill yourself
> A term describing women as sexually suspect, for example, is no longer quietly upgraded to “faithful” or “pure” when it suits male sympathy.This doesn't even make any sense. You bozos are losing your minds over an AI hallucination.
>>25006974cuz it depicts strong ass woman queen type shit fr fr
>>25004988>But ancient Greek culture was starkly more misogynistic than the culture of the translators.Yes, this is the funniest thing. Does she not realize that ultimately all she's claiming is that Homer and by extention Greek culture was akshually not as misogynistic as generations of feminists have claimed? The great irony of this lazy, neoliberal contemporary feminism is that it takes its basic tenants as so universal that a definite origin for them need to longer be established or pinpointed. Any given set of men (in this case Victorian, Edwardian translators of Homer) can simply be be faulted for their misogyny to benefit an isolated current cause. The possibly explanatory potential of a worldview, right or wrong, whereby the misogyny of these men can at least to some degree be traced back to an inherent prior misogyny in the Homeric source material is unnecessary or even unwanted in light of the ulterior motive: proving to all fellow liberals that obviously a woman translates Homer better than those old chauvinist pigs, amiright girls?
>>25006474I addressed this you mindless fucking retard. They weave systematically, they use the same formulas passed down over generations. They don't fucking create.
She is her father's daughter, judge them by their fruits and all that.
>>25006031Go back further. That's a child's take.
>the Odyssey as reimagined through the lens of a 21st century feministWhy are we so allergic to honesty? Just be honest.I would honestly buy a biased version that appeals to my senses. What's the issue?
She's promoted by glowies to subvert the greatest and most foundational work of western civilization. It really is evil what these people and their useful idiots are doing
>>25006032>Homer's poetry isn't meant to be flowery, that was a choice of previous translators,Not since Pope or thereabouts. 20th century translators inclined toward the terse and primal quality in Homer‘s content and verse. Wilson honest to god sounds like an ESL who is picking words from an elementary dictionary and learning what iambic pentameter is as she goes.
>>25008003in that case you also addressed all great art, including the iliad (who drew on heroic legends of an earlier day), as well as the odyssey (who drew on the iliad).
wonder where monolingual un-classically-educated posters get the idea that they’re an authority to talk about how close a translation is?
>>25009603Out of all the anons who can read Greek and Latin (they can frequently be found in the classical languages general), many of them classical majors, I have yet to find one who didn't think her translation is wretched
>>25006032The gods all loved Odysseus, Poseidon was the one who hates him because he blinded his son who after all was eating Odysseus's men. The other gods refused to let Poseidon kill him but as a compromise they let him delay Odysseus and face many hardships. But they ensured he came back with even more wealth than he lost and helped him defeat the suitors. Homer depicts Odysseus's enemies with very little sympathy compared to his the Trojans are depicted in the IliadNow it is true that Odysseus is frequently depicted as an asshole, except for Homer and the play Ajax, every classical depiction of him, at least that we have, is a sort of Iago. However within the context of Homer, Odysseus is an anti hero. He defies heroic conventions and values and he is repeatedly described as short in stature, but the people he is going up against are such vicious assholes that we can't possibly regard them as anything else, they literally shit on a beggar and mock him for being poor and throw shit at him even when he is humble and speaks highly of them
>>25009609i’m sure they can be found there. i wonder what they’re doing sincerely (in good faith!) reading a translation rather than a crib
>>25004971>retarded translations are based because retarded zoomers can understand themnope
>>25004971I hate that cunt much more than her translation, it's that simple
>>25009625yes actuallyTranslations are made for the general, non-Classical public. The main consideration had to b what will be immediately intelligible, and therefore readable, and what will not.
>>25009639think that’s the point every opposing argument is making
>>25009639Why?
>>25009623If by a crib you mean the Loeb, plenty of classical students and scholars read translations since we're talking about a dead language and seeing another scholar's interpretation of it can improve one's own or allow one to notice connections one did not before. Her translation just isn't very good though. It could have been, because unlike the Iliad, the Odyssey actually sometimes fluctuates into colloquial and informal speech, and being able to reflect those fluctuations is almost never done in translations of the Odyssey. Unfortunately she opted to make it colloquial and informal throughout which flattened it in order to appeal to readers who aren't as intelligent
>>25004971Is there any subscript word to word translation of Homer's works?
>>25009584Being influenced is not the same as following a formula. Every fucking post you make is like you're trying to be as dishonest and retarded as possible.
>>25009640If we feed the masses retard slop, we can‘t act surprised when it fails to make an impression and they all turn out to be retards who would rather watch whatever slop their contemporary Iliad tried to imitate in watered-down form.
>>25009656not what i meant, but fair enough, you’ve somehow spent some time in the /clg/ without learning a word of greek(?).the odyssey was never written for ‘intelligent’ people. it was written for you, for the groundlings, for the unscholarly panionia patrons who walked in from the cockfight on the street. only those whose blood courses hot through their veins can understand these lines.
>>25009656finding it hard to keep replying to you if you keep drawing the like somewhere else (also if you keep lowering the tone by being embarrassingly annoyed by straightforward conversation).the iliad was never meant for ‘intelligent readers’. it was made as good popular entertainment.
>>25009706the reason ‘art’ has fallen more and more out of the public conscious is because the ordinary person has been shown in harsh terms it is no longer made for him.once you train audiences to expect nothing from high art except difficulty, obscurity or ideological homework, they’ll naturally turn elsewhere. mass culture didn’t shift downward spontaneously; the upward pull disappeared.
>>25009678not sure how to say this… every tradition follows a formula. america has no real literary tradition but british novelists still follow english tradition, novels still represent fielding.
>>25009732Not only is this a wildly optimistic take for its disregard of the multiple consumerist drives to feed people garbage and the according rise of technology‘s capacity to provide said garbage—optimistic in fact to the point of lunacy in supposing this could be coincidence; but more importantly there is no "upward pull" in a writing which exists on the level of the mass already with no poetic quality to inspire them. Its only purpose can be to obfuscate what rightly exists for them to reach toward.
>>25009712I'm currently learning Greek through the JATC curriculum, not through 4chan, although tbf I prefer Latin as a language of poetry despite Homer being a better poetIt wasn't written for intelligent people but generally stupid people can't find interest in books let alone books written in a very different culture 2800 years ago"Stupid people" could and did read the King James Bible but most cannot and will not today
>>25009603*farts*This is my translation of Homer and if you don't know Greek you can't say it stinks
>>25009775they also didn’t ‘read’ in homer’s day
>>25009803They just wrote?The same would apply to audiobooks
>>25009764in the 19th century the ordinary reader was happy because the great writers such as dickens, trollope and george eliot wrote for him. in the 20th (/21st) century what he reads is arid, unenjoyable, and not infrequently incomprehensible.better off leaving the word ‘poet’ out your mouth. poets are born not made and quite unrelated to the prose-reading public.
>>25009809obviously they didn’t write either
>>25009812Very wrong. Read Spinoza.
>>25009822i’ll make sure to get around to that. in the meantime the same would apply to >>25009732 >>25009721
>>25009810Readers read what they choose to read. Today they have nearly unlimited options. Slop always dominated because tastes are shit and anything that requires thought is anathema to most people. More working class people thought back when higher education was difficult to access. Herman Melville never even finished primary school. He was self-educated. Today however the sort of men with such drive almost always get through college and the blue collar residue largely have no interest in entertainment except sports and netflix
>>25009841it’s not as though the english novel tradition suddenly died with austen. there were still post-war writers like evelyn waugh, kingsley amis and angus wilson who kept the line alive. and they were commercial successes. the victorian reader had a larger cultural frame of reference, but they also had writers who addressed them directly and assumed their intelligence and wanted their attention. dickens and eliot didn’t write in some private language and wait for the masses to catch up; they raised people upward by giving them something to hold on to. once you train audiences to expect nothing from high art except difficulty, obscurity or ideological homework, they’ll naturally turn elsewhere. mass culture didn’t shift downward spontaneously; the upward pull disappeared.
>>25009745>america has no real literary traditionShiggy diggy do!
>>25009859People back then read the King James Bible. They just had a higher verbal intelligence because much much more was communicated in words and if you wanted to listen to music it would be live or you would sing or play it yourself. The fact is entertainment that took far far less effort and was even shoved down throats through rampant marketing was more attractive to most people. People do not like to think. Most people can't even fucking remember long division, and let alone graphing functions
>>25009866>he think Arthur Miller and Willa Cather are literature Oh, Anon... dear, American anon....
>>25009745You're an idiot who can't grasp a word of anything I say or actively try not to. There is in fact a difference between following a step by step formula and actually creating something new within an established tradition.
OP, show what she really looks like, lolOld, ugly, childless, barren, a tatted up empty husk of a humanWhat were the sirens? Beautiful voices but the faces of monsters?She's a siren without the beautiful voice
>>25009879Victorian writers like Eliot assumed readers were capable of engagement, and they trained audiences to expect something substantial. That’s different from saying people were inherently ‘smarter.’ The shift in mass culture didn’t happen because audiences lost brainpower - the upward pull disappeared. I’ll refer to the pic in >>25009859 again since I assume you didn’t read it. Once high art stopped offering something that lifted people, people turned elsewhere.
>>25009907i’m being incredibly patient with you but at this point…
>>25006050Gods are not human and do not abide by the same rules or expectations as them. A goddess is superior to all humanity because they are a god, being a female is frankly irrelevant.
>>25009712As if you cannot be both well educated and down to earth at the same time. Do you actually know anything about Ancient Greek culture?
>>25004971>gender, class, and morality>gendered judgment>inherited biasI am sure this isn't propaganda, at all.
>>25009984my point is about literary perspective. by invoking a female muse, the poet frames the story through a female intelligence, which complicates the idea that the narrative is purely a patriarchal male voice. >>25006088
>>25009997>Do you actually know anything about Ancient Greek culture?lol no nothing i’m dying f for a mongolian basket-weaver to tell me a thing or two
>>25004971This is a good grift.At this point, I'm surprised rewriting classical stuff and publishing it as "unbiased" isn't more common.
>>25009914People are capable of doing work, engagement is doing work. People by and large try to do as little as necessary, the path of least resistance. Therefore even though it is easier today than over before for people to become athletes, a luxury only for the wealthy in ancient Greece, very few people have any interest in even staying in shape because it is not longer personally relevant. "High art" is a term for art which has no practical purpose. The Greeks believed all beauty was only beautiful insofar as it has a purpose, but it all had more a practical purpose then. Even wine was useful because there were no refrigerators then. Today the phrase high art innately means with no practical use. Books could be pleasurable in a time when the mind as a muscle was worked out a lot more from writing letters and reading the Bible. Today it is like asking people to benchpress 200lbs and they just lack the attention for it because the mental muscle requires for the task is undeveloped and they lack any material incentive to develop it. Even Christians who believe in the Bible just don't read it because they find it too arduous whereas any Christian of the path who was literate in the language of the Bible would read it, well, religiously. If people won't even read what they think was authored by God for them to read, it's obvious they are intellectually flabby
>>25009810>better off leaving the word ‘poet’ out your mouth. poets are born not made and quite unrelated to the prose-reading public.Are you aware of what format Wilson used for her translation?
>>25010044verse. unless you believe poetry can be translated?
>>25009919You are a fucking idiot. Absolutely fucking mindless. You should never post or open your retard mouth about any subject until you at least learn to think on a basic level. That I replied to any of your diseased incoherent shit is incredibly magnanimous of me.
>>25010094i’m sure this was very convincing to yourself but im not sure how to to respond to this one
>>25010109What do you think I'm trying to convince you of retard?
>>25010121honestly… beats me. but it’d probably work on me had i not taken a good classics course
>masculine>femininethe mad ramblings of a blind meat machine
>>25006843I know this sounded great in your head but I could just as easily make up a magical system where God the Father created everything. Women, let's face it, are the median sex.
>>25010145All saints revile her, and all sober men Ruled by the God Apollo's golden mean - In scorn of which we sailed to find her In distant regions likeliest to hold her Whom we desired above all things to know, Sister of the mirage and echo.
>>25010179Her being anyone with a pussy?
>>25010125So you have no clue what I'm saying but feel the need to reply to me with "corrections" as if you do?
>>25010219probably doing you a power of good
>>25010258How would that work retard?>i like turtles>ackshually dolphins rapeThis is our conversation in a nutshell.
>>25010263just realised i’m talking to an actual redditor
Are you people stupid? AI is going to translate everything anyway, who cares about personal lives of dumb translators anymore?
>>25010270Okay just please stop posting forever. You can't read and you can't think.
>>25010382>just please
>>25004988>>25007997The broader Greek culture was obviously misogynistic to a problematic degree, but Homer himself, as a creative disabled person of highly possibly diverse background with outstanding LGBT representation in his works could never be anything but a feminist ally, whose balanced and human perspectives had to be disguised and hidden both by his contemporaries as well as the later misogynistic tradition. Wilson's translation liberates Homer from the structures of oppression that were forced upon him by centuries of insecure colonizers, finally allowing his voice to transition into how it was truly meant to appear.
