jason todd i might be in love with you a little bit
I see Hollywood is now very into the idea of buying something once and then owning it forever and being able to make infinite copies. Which. Isn’t quite the message they imparted upon me in my childhood. In the spirit of their own long-held stance:
Throughout her translation of the “Odyssey,” Wilson has made small but, it turns out, radical changes to the way many key scenes of the epic are presented — “radical” in that, in 400 years of versions of the poem, no translator has made the kinds of alterations Wilson has, changes that go to truing a text that, as she says, has through translation accumulated distortions that affect the way even scholars who read Greek discuss the original. These changes seem, at each turn, to ask us to appreciate the gravity of the events that are unfolding, the human cost of differences of mind.
The first of these changes is in the very first line. You might be inclined to suppose that, over the course of nearly half a millennium, we must have reached a consensus on the English equivalent for an old Greek word, polytropos. But to consult Wilson’s 60 some predecessors, living and dead, is to find that consensus has been hard to come by…
Of the 60 or so answers to the polytropos question to date, the 36 given above [which I cut because there were a lot] couldn’t be less uniform (the two dozen I omit repeat, with minor variations, earlier solutions); what unites them is that their translators largely ignore the ambiguity built into the word they’re translating. Most opt for straightforward assertions of Odysseus’s nature, descriptions running from the positive (crafty, sagacious, versatile) to the negative (shifty, restless, cunning). Only Norgate (“of many a turn”) and Cook (“of many turns”) preserve the Greek roots as Wilson describes them — poly(“many”), tropos (“turn”) — answers that, if you produced them as a student of classics, much of whose education is spent translating Greek and Latin and being marked correct or incorrect based on your knowledge of the dictionary definitions, would earn you an A. But to the modern English reader who does not know Greek, does “a man of many turns” suggest the doubleness of the original word — a man who is either supremely in control of his life or who has lost control of it? Of the existing translations, it seems to me that none get across to a reader without Greek the open question that, in fact, is the opening question of the “Odyssey,” one embedded in the fifth word in its first line: What sort of man is Odysseus?
“I wanted there to be a sense,” Wilson told me, that “maybe there is something wrong with this guy. You want to have a sense of anxiety about this character, and that there are going to be layers we see unfolded. We don’t quite know what the layers are yet. So I wanted the reader to be told: be on the lookout for a text that’s not going to be interpretively straightforward.”
Here is how Wilson’s “Odyssey” begins. Her fifth word is also her solution to the Greek poem’s fifth word — to polytropos:
Tell me about a complicated man.
Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost
when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy,
and where he went, and who he met, the pain
he suffered in the storms at sea, and how
he worked to save his life and bring his men
back home. He failed to keep them safe; poor fools,
they ate the Sun God’s cattle, and the god
kept them from home. Now goddess, child of Zeus,
tell the old story for our modern times.
Find the beginning.
When I first read these lines early this summer in The Paris Review, which published an excerpt, I was floored. I’d never read an “Odyssey” that sounded like this. It had such directness, the lines feeling not as if they were being fed into iambic pentameter because of some strategic decision but because the meter was a natural mode for its speaker. The subtle sewing through of the fittingly wavelike W-words in the first half (“wandered … wrecked … where … worked”) and the stormy S-words that knit together the second half, marrying the waves to the storm in which this man will suffer, made the terse injunctions to the muse that frame this prologue to the poem (“Tell me about …” and “Find the beginning”) seem as if they might actually answer the puzzle posed by Homer’s polytropos and Odysseus’s complicated nature.
Complicated: the brilliance of Wilson’s choice is, in part, its seeming straightforwardness. But no less than that of polytropos, the etymology of “complicated” is revealing. From the Latin verb complicare, it means “to fold together.” No, we don’t think of that root when we call someone complicated, but it’s what we mean: that they’re compound, several things folded into one, difficult to unravel, pull apart, understand.
“It feels,” I told Wilson, “with your choice of ‘complicated,’ that you planted a flag.”
“It is a flag,” she said.
“It says, ‘Guess what?’ — ”
“ ‘ — this is different.’ ”
The First Woman to Translate the Odyssey Into English, Wyatt Mason
This (and other things I’ve read about it) makes me want to read her translation
Oh.
Yes.
Yesssss
If I was really going to be radical,” Wilson told me, returning to the very first line of the poem, “I would’ve said, polytropos means ‘straying,’ and andra” — “man,” the poem’s first word — “means ‘husband,’ because in fact andra does also mean ‘husband,’ and I could’ve said, ‘Tell me about a straying husband.’ And that’s a viable translation. That’s one of the things it says. But it would give an entirely different perspective and an entirely different setup for the poem.
Oooooh my god yes.
This gave me chills and also it is so ridiculously vindicating to see my “Guy with something wrong with him” theory of ancient literature stated in words by a real academic
I feel like people who enjoy this would also enjoy Maria Dahvana Headley’s translation of Beowulf, which begins with “Bro! Tell me we still know how to talk about kings!”
yeah guys its looking like he got runned over and beated up and belly flopped in a pool and tore his acl his achilles tendons are gone anvil fell on his head air got sucked out of his lungs run over by a steamroller till he was flat dragged behind a horse piano crushed him set on fire bear mauled him for his picnic basket drank poison crashed a car into a wall that looked like a tunnel blowed up by tnt shot out of a cannon fell off a cliff for a long time and hit the ground with a big puff of dust and electrocuted and theres no remains
and his vitals? did you check your ABCs?
yeah detective no ass no Boobs no cock
...... NO SERVICE! Lol
ive got four bars sir
this guy's had four beers?
the bear brought backup?
I think that in real life…. Relationships r like . Your partner WILL ‘trauma dump’ on you. You will have to perform ‘emotional labor’ for your partner. Your partner will make mistakes. You will also do all of these things. The very nature of love is irrational and problematic and difficult …. To expect a relationship to be free of these things is strange to me…. The point is that your relationship to that person is ultimately worth it, and worth growing with them, helping each other, seeing the worst parts of another person and being able to love them anyway
i was surprised at how much nope 2022 resonated with my experiences working for a national park, in particular dealing with a certain subset of guests who approach nature as a sanitized commodity which they can consume. the scene at the commercial shoot where oj’s trying to tell everyone how to act safely around lucky and they ignore him, causing lucky to freak out. the tmz man on the motorcycle desperate to get a picture of jean jacket despite oj telling him again and again to run away. jupe’s belief that he understands and can control jean jacket while ultimately reducing it to another part of his spectacle. it all feels very familiar to the experience of telling off a group of tourists trying to take a selfie with a bear or feed the elk.
it’s like, our society is so divorced from nature that the only way a lot of people experience it is through this diluted lens of spectacle which ultimately warps it into something palatable for the viewer. which then, of course, convinces people that nature really is like that and exists solely for our entertainment. they can’t fathom that the elk or alien or whatever poses a threat to them because they’re the viewer, they’re above that. so when they encounter those things in the real world they’re unable to treat them with the respect they deserve, reduce them to spectacle, and end up getting eaten alive
Fun fact my grandparents’ first date was to the grocery store and the encounter that initiated my parents’ relationship was also a run-in at the grocery store so if you ask me, grocery store based relationships are rock solid
Why would you leave a story like this in the tags??
‘Cause I was too busy trying to manifest my grocery store boyfriend
Oh, oh I see! Completely fair
