/lit/ - Literature

>>22431308
Is she really a feminist or just a woman?

>>22431317
Is there any difference in this day and age?

good evening, behead all anglos

>>22431317
She’s an academic.
I’m sure we can trust her.

>>22431308
>Wilson
No thanks

>>22431308
Gross. Of course not.

>>22431350
lol

Tell me muse about a complicated man.

Sing me when you're angry, Muse

i hope it contains a lot of words as “slay” and loads of girlbosses

I’m sure there will be articles complaining that chuds are not kissing her arse properly for the latest feminist subversion of something men enjoy

hey emily
>hyp'andrasin

>>22431546
Way ahead of you. Some Dunning–Kruger case made a complete ass of himself on Twitter the other day while ragging on her Odyssey translation, which pretty much guarantees that any criticism from now on will be labeled as misogyny.

>>22431308
Still probably won't be as embarrassing as the Norton Critical Edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses. I have no idea why that one didn't get memed anywhere near as much as Emily Wilson.

>>22431661
Homer is The Beatles
Ovid is Aerosmith

>>22431328
This is honestly how I feel anymore.

>>22431328
grim

>>22431661
>Still probably won't be as embarrassing as the Norton Critical Edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses.
Never read that edition; what's wrong with it?

>>22431317
>some guy starts asking a question
>Emily interrupts him and raises her voice: pic related
>[laughter]: she's literally cackling and starts rocking back and forth like a retard
>"HUH HUH HUH SAWWIE HEHEHE"
>[the girl they find to ask the question is too retarded to speak into the microphone]
>Emily spergs explains the war was about Helen being "hot" and then mentions rape a couple times

(Timestamps don't work) 1:32:55 of https://youtu.be/TKTUIesfMh0

I'm not sure if it's before or after this but she also rants about how she intends to translate the Iliad by reading feminist talking points into certain scenes.

>>22431697
It was just a joke, snowflake, geez...

>>22431671
So you're saying Ovid mogs Homer?

>>22431774
Aerosmith is lame

>>22431783
They are now, but listen more to their old shit.
John Lennon is a proto-redditor.

>>22431692
Imagine turning the Metamorphoses into really cheesy family-friendly hip-hop from the 90s.

>>22431757
It wasn't a joke but it was her lecture to handle however she wanted. Do you think she'll buy more than one short for her publicity tours this time?

>>22431317
>Implying theres a difference
Ill let you decide based on her Odysee. Didnt she only get the position because shes related to some high up jews in the literary world?

>>22431308
Based on cringe?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3pQG9bKxUc

>>22431816
I want to smash her dumb anglo face with a rock

>>22431816
Literally one of the most evil-looking women I have ever seen. There's something about her face that is pure death.

>>22431840
Kek based. Homer would be proud

>>22431816
she looks like she's into hardcore bdsm and cracks a whip dressed in a leather SS uniform

>>22431860
>>22431876
>Bringing classical literature to new audiences in works that convey ancient texts’ relevance to our time and highlight the assumptions about social relations that underlie translation decisions.
She's a MacArthur Fellow (aka "genius"). Show some respect.

>>22431840
No comment section on the video?

>>22431818
Yeah, why the simplification of language? Isn't the top one very readable while still sounding like an epic poem?

>>22431911
Of course not.

>>22431840
>that hairline
Are we sure this is a woman?

>>22431949
Your notion of an epic poem comes from translations though. She explains her style choices in the note on translation. You can agree or disagree but you should at least engage with her arguments

>>22432063
Ask them.

>>22432096
These people want you dead, silenced and replaced.

>>22432121
In that order?

>>22432096
>engage with her arguments
I reject her hypothesis.

>>22431816
why does she like that owl tshirt so much?

>>22432096
Anyone who has studied a lick of Ancient Greek knows that the Homeric dialect has a very elevated style with lots of high vocabulary. The number of hapax legomena alone shows you this.

>>22432262
That's certainly more than a lick but seems like a much better argument than the post I responded to.

>>22431308
hmph. I published a translation of six books of martial and nobody cared. o wait i didn't publish anything, i never do. but nobody 'would' care if i had. (you) havent heard of it, i know.

the worst part of this, i think, is that society is currently rehashing the 1800's, having swapped out women to reaccomplish the flimsy 900 page shitty low energy works of tea-drinkers.

>>22431885
>new audiences
i never understood the impetus behind this notion; if you cared for a subject you'd already have studied it, you wouldn't be 'tricked' into studying it if it was presented to you in ... your meme lingo or pants outfits, to make you 'identify' with the 'character', you know what i mean, and if you were being 'tricked' into it you wouldn't have the slightest fuck of an interest in the subject; you would be interested in the pants outfits only.

ha i just realized: this is the maximal extent of what academic literary grants are producing.

>>22431796
>I'm Ovid and I'm here to say
>Literature is cool in a classic way!

>>22431796
this was the reason why octavian exiled ovid in the first place.

"Come, my father, we must go,
out though the city in the beautiful snow,"

"That's not snow that's flaming corpses,"
"SERVANT. BRING. FRESH. HORSES."

"Aeneas, my son,
my time is done,
my old way of life....
FETCH ME A KNIFE
I MUST END MY LIFE
I DON'T HAVE THE STRENGTH TO GO ON...
LIKE I DID *sob* when I was young...."

*lightning bolt*
AENEAS GRIM EXPRESSION

"These fucking oily Greek they come to my city
which only yesterday was o' so pretty,
they come to my planet with chaos and strife**
as Mars is my witness I will SEND. THEM. TO. THE. AFTER. LIFE.
come fetch my wine, my amiable Wife,
there's work to be done and many a life
TO SEND ......... DOWN TO HAIDES
WITH BLOOD AND GUTS FOR GRAVY

HARK CAN YOU HEAR THE SLAVERING SOUND
OF THE LOLLING TONGUES OF CERBERUS ROLLING AROUND

THEY'RE EAGER FOR THE DISH
I'M EAGER TO SERVE,"

AENEAS KICKS OPEN HIS FRONT DOOR TO FACE THE BURNING STREETS

"DO YOU HEAR ME, GREEKS, DO YOU HEAR MY WORDS?"

>>22431308
the fuck are you talking about? This book came out years ago, and it's utter shit. You get the sense that the translator actually hates Odysseus, and goes out of her way to make him seem un-heroic, and tries to humanize the cyclops. Are these choices you think Homer would agree with?

>>22432398
>the fuck are you talking about?
that was Odyssey lol she now tried Iliad

>>22432295
It's very simple. If you want to simplify translations that serves, a purpose--hell, I probably never would've gotten into literature if I hadn't read abridged illustrated classics when I was younger, but for a translation that's being hailed as 'masterful' you'd really expect something better. It's the quality of work that any third-year Greek undergraduate would be expected to produce given a dictionary and a couple hours for an exam.

All of that is besides the point, obviously. Her translation is only being published because it serves the purposes of the dominant strain in academia--it's 'feminist', 'challenges white supremacist myths' and other retarded drivel like that. It will be promoted and pushed by the usual organs, like Donna Zuckerface's political machine that has a stranglehold over the classics, and will probably end up being the most common translation of the Iliad assigned to undergraduates and sold in bookstores. When we have translations of the Iliad produced by genuine geniuses like Lattimore and Pope, you have to ask yourself why Wilson's middling work is needed at all. The answer is that it's needed to push a vision of Homer that's divorced from Homeric virtues, neuters the language, frames heroics and vitality as evil and patriarchal, and makes everything seem gray, lame, and uninteresting, with the end goal of ensuring that no young person will read Homer and get any dangerous ideas from him.

>>22432380
>i never understood the impetus behind this notion; if you cared for a subject you'd already have studied it, you wouldn't be 'tricked' into studying it if it was presented to you in ... your meme lingo or pants outfits, to make you 'identify' with the 'character', you know what i mean, and if you were being 'tricked' into it you wouldn't have the slightest fuck of an interest in the subject; you would be interested in the pants outfits only.
>ha i just realized: this is the maximal extent of what academic literary grants are producing.
Yes. The academics are trying to trick new people into it by making them like the aesthetic of being in it. This gives the academics more power to push out the evil fascist white-men who enjoy Ancient History

which is counter-productive, since generations reading homer is what got us to this point.

>>22431816
>>22431840
>>22431885
>>22431996
Remember Schopenhauer on women being fundamentally children?

Women have a singular knack for turning things men enjoy into things men do not enjoy.

>>22431818
What about Pope and Fagles?

>>22432419
Poop and Faggot? No need, we have Wilson now.

>>22432428
lol

>>22432428
Kys

>>22432453
Keep crying.

>>22432460
b8

>>22431308
It’s okay. /lit/s beloved Samuel Butler told me Homer was a woman. ;)

>>22431308
This man mogs every single Anglo translator and he barely even knew Greek.

«Cantami o Diva, del Pelide Achille,
l'ira funesta, che infiniti addusse
lutti agli Achei, molte anzi tempo all'Orco
generose travolse alme d'eroi,
e di cani e d'augelli orrido pasto
lor salme abbandonò (così di Giove
l’alto consiglio s'adempia), da quando
primamente disgiunse aspra contesa
il re de' prodi Atrìde e il divo Achille.»

>>22431566
Kek'd and checked.

>>22432510
gran traduttor dei traduttor

>>22431308
>Written in iambic pentameter so it has to be incredibly condensed
Just use a six-beat line for fuck's sake, at least then you're slightly imitating the original's hexameter and you can fit more information in a line, English needs more words anyway due to being uninflected.

Frederick Ahl's Aeneid translation does it and it's fantastic.

>>22431996
Are these from her only fans?

>>22431818
Is she fucking writing fanfiction here? It's so different from the lattimore translation that someone has to be outright wrong. I lean more towards the woman being wrong.

>>22432105
Wew lad

Opening lines of her Iliad.

>>22432096
>arguments
There is no argument. A translation is a work and like all other works, it either has merit in and of itself or it does not. If someone does not like the translation in the sense that it's poorly written, unartistic, or otherwise sloppy, then it does not have merit to them. It's either good or it isn't and if it's not good then no amount of academic or feminist mental gymnastics is going to change that.

>>22431881
So not all bad.

>>22434329
The first word is "Goddess". In the original Greek, the first word is the equivalent of anger/wrath. In most English translations is "Sing". But Little Emily, being a feminist, chose "Goddess". It's not entirely new but I get it.

if youre going to try and modernize the iliad might as well go all the way

>>22431885

>>22434329
Not that bad. At least she calls him great Achilles and not toxic Achilles or some shit.

I think when you’re allowed to be a victim and have a victim complex that’s all you will choose to do. For some reason there’s something deeply ingrained in us to act like victims that probably has an evolutionary basis (we lived in tribes most of our time so acting like a victim got you out of work with higher mortality likely (me too sick to go hunt big mammoth yadda yadda *click* *click* dirk) the only reason white men are seen as the people in todays culture as writing neutral stories is because they aren’t allowed to be victims. Same with the old writers who were aristocrats back when pure capital was honestly more important for most people that could even participate in society relevantly than race was

>random /pol/ commentary #9854896546

>>22434752
Genuinely curious, how do you react to misandry?

>>random /pol/ commentary #9854896546

>>22431308
It is a non-event. Lattimore is simply the best English translation of the Iliad period, and I've read fucking Chapman and Pope, in addition to Fitzgerald. Fagles is trash. But Wilson is probably worse than even him.

>>22434840
Fagles is kino, especially the action scenes.

>>22434747
Victimhood narratives are a great cope. Make your failures the fault of others while characterizing your problems as a heroic struggle for justice. Mix that with inherent tribalism and you get an automatic sense of community to go along with it.

The problem is that you need a bad guy to pin everything on and it's natural to personify it in some way (e.g. "old white men" or "feminists"). Manufacture enemies and the lowest common denominator will turn everything into a mudslinging contest.

>>22432406
>genuine geniuses like Lattimore
Could not agree more. I encountered his Iliad when I was 18 (my undergrad mailed copies to all incoming freshmen to prepare for the first seminar) and I was spell bound from start to finish.

>>22434845
Fagles might read fairly well, but it's loose as hell. It's unusable as a guide for close study.

Another based Christian.
>For many years Lattimore accompanied his wife Alice to services at the Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd, Rosemont, near Bryn Mawr College, a church with an Anglo-Catholic worship tradition. He chose to be baptized on Easter Eve 1983 and confirmed as a communicant there, due in part to his work translating the Gospel of St. Luke.

>>22431860
My reaction everytime I see an Anglo lady. Seriously, the lads in the Isles must have conquered the entire world just to get away from English women

>>22431949
>Isn't the top one very readable
modern dimwits think Tolkien is too difficult to read
there's a reason YA is so popular

>>22432419
Pope is a crap translation because it's aggressively skewed towards having coherent verse rather than accurate translation. Fagles is a good translation.

>>22432352
Contrarian bait (or just poor taste), it’s meant to be “flowery” because it’s in the Homeric vein, it’s meant to sound like a grand poem, an epic. It’s like if someone translated Hamlet’s soliloquy into something in another language like, “Should I kill myself, or should I not kill myself? ….”

“Tell me about a complicated man” is such a dud of a line, and it’s opening the translation! “Complicated” for the word “polytropos” is awful, and it’s already starting the poem off on such a prosaic, deflated, understated note. Polytropos, from its roots, can mean variously many forms, many faces, but also much-turned, much-traveled, turning (or turned) many ways. Wilson herself notes in an interview there’s an ambiguity of whether this is referring to Odysseus actively (that he’s the one who “turns” much or “goes many ways”), or passively (whether it’s other forces that “turn” him much), which in fact fits perfectly with the tale and already has Homer starting off with a perfectly multivalent term. Yet she translates it as “a complicated man.” Lattimore with “the man of many ways” is a very good translation because it captures these meanings and the ambiguity almost perfectly — Odysseus himself having “many ways” (being a crafty figure), as well as, literally, going through “many ways” in the course of his travels.

“Tell the old story for our modern times. / Find the beginning,” is likewise a massive dud. It feels too much like Wilson herself butting her head in, intruding and saying, “Teehee, look, see? The old story being told for OUR modern times … such as by an empowered feminist translator, like myself!” It feels too much like she’s privileging modern English in an extremely casual, simple, low-vocabulary register, as well as of HERSELF AS TRANSLATOR, butting her head in and making it a “hip simple modern version.” Other translators like Fagles, Fitzgerald and Lattimore at least go for a higher, more grand register and syntax, and feel more like they’re trying to do Homer and minimize their own translatorial presence as much as they can.

And sure, a poet like Pope can also be accused of butting into the translation too much, turning Homer into Pope’s own heroic couplets, but at least he’s doing it as a gifted poet who himself made a talented work of poetry, even if far from literal and much more “Pope” than “Homer.”

Don’t get me wrong, I (can) love women, I’m not just ranting out of misogyny. Some unlikely alternative-history where, say, Emily Dickinson gave a go at translating Homer would have been glorious. But Wilson grabs my goat because much of the outsized praise she got was precisely for “first major woman translator of the Odyssey!!! Yay!!!” plus the social-justice bent of her commentary (“All the old patriarchal kyriarchal biases from old dead white male translators that I, Emily Wilson, have overcome”.)

>>22435224
Great post.

>>22435224
Bad-faith disingenuous feminist academics absolutely btfo

why not do the opposite and write a feminist novel in Homeric Greek?

>>22432510
Italianchads can't stop winning

>>22431344
Not me though. I hate feminists

>>22432134
To make up for her lack of hooters

>>22434761
I bet they react like all leftists do, with deafening silence.

>>22431308
What the hell is a feminist translation? Is feminism a language? I'm not going to shit on before reading and far all I know there could be reason for it, but someone has a lot of explaining to do.

>>22435608
ZING!

>>22431308
>reading translations
If you can't read Ancient Greek you shouldn't be allowed to read Homer.

>>22435367
this would require the capacity to form original thought. Sounds like a funny satire though, challenge accepted.

I told chatGPT-4 I wrote a translation of the Odyssey geared towards ESL and children, then pasted in the Fitzgerald translation as the original and Emily's translation as my own, asking what the "new" one is appropriate for. Here is the response

>The rewritten version is targeted for a younger audience, likely around the 4th or 5th grade level (approximately ages 9 to 11). This is based on the simplified vocabulary and sentence structures used.

>For comparison, the original passage from the "Odyssey" by Homer is more complex, employing a higher level of vocabulary, phrasing, and poetic structure. It would be appropriate for high school level or higher. The simplified version removes that complexity to make it more accessible to younger readers or those new to the English language.

>>22435990
Kek. How long until they figure out how to make it recognize high social credit authors and word it so that their ideas never appear as ideological and embaressing as they actually are.

>>22435990
lol

>>22432096
My notion of an epic poem comes from that which sounds pleasing. This pleasing comes from being human and cannot be changed. Once more leftists destroy beauty in their quixotic war against nature.

>>22434329
>>22434700
One of my favorite parts of any book period, is the first line of the Greek Iliad. It's just "Rage". It is so powerful

>>22435224
Thank you for verbalizing this so clearly and level-headedly. Now, let me be a little less neutral. I fucking despise this shit. All of it.