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A Translator’s Reckoning with the Women of the Odyssey

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Re: A Translator’s Reckoning with the Women of the Odyssey

#41

Post by trgv »

jimmywanger wrote: post #16
pvg wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a story about a man trying to get home, and a woman staying faithful in the face of uncertainty. Anything else is reading too much into it. That's the story as summarized in a potential entry for a 'most trite message board comment' competition of some sort. The actual story is another story. Either that or people have been doing it wrong and reading too much into it for a couple of thousand years.

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/57886-all-great-literature-... You wanna argue with Tolstoy? I might refer you to TVtropes. All stories are the same eventually.

I agree with you, more or less. I don't think the Odyssey is a complicated story.

But that doesn't have anything to do with this article though, which I rather liked.

> You wanna argue with Tolstoy?

Tolstoy famously described Shakespeare as "insignificant" and didn't understand what all the fuss was about:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lear,_Tolstoy_and_the_Fool

Re: A Translator’s Reckoning with the Women of the Odyssey

#42

Post by pvg »

trgv wrote: post #41
jimmywanger wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/57886-all-great-literature-... You wanna argue with Tolstoy? I might refer you to TVtropes. All stories are the same eventually.

I agree with you, more or less. I don't think the Odyssey is a complicated story. But that doesn't have anything to do with this article though, which I rather liked. > You wanna argue with Tolstoy? Tolstoy famously described Shakespeare as "insignificant" and didn't understand what all the fuss was about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lear,_Tolstoy_and_the_Fool

Tolstoy also never said the thing quoted in that goodreads page. So it's not an argument with Tolstoy to begin with.

Re: A Translator’s Reckoning with the Women of the Odyssey

#43

Post by DoreenMichele »

I wonder if Ms. Emily Wilson has ever spent time as a full-time wife and homemaker. It does not sound to me like she has.

I have. I spent two decades at it. I often find the way modern working women portray the traditional female role completely dismissive and scathing, like it is all downside. I did not experience it as all down side.

I spent a lot of years trying to comprehend how to play the feminine role in an empowered way, to stop seeing myself as simply a victim. The gist of what I came to understand can be summed up in the negotiating trope "The first person to name a number loses."

Emotional labor is a hot buzz word currently that seems to be the fashionable new way to say that doing women's work makes you a chump, a victim. But I think it is more complicated than that.

I don't like this trend that I see where modern women translate the stories of traditional women and are as derisive of the woman's role as men are, if not more so. The female slaves were executed, but so we're many men. This write up implies that the death of women has a unique horror to it that we need not feel over the more prosaic deaths of men.

At the time The Odyssey was written, life was generally harder than it is now. This was true for both men and women, rich and poor. Death was pretty common. It was not inherently more wonderful to be an executed male than an executed female.

Re: A Translator’s Reckoning with the Women of the Odyssey

#44

Post by aestetix »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #43

I wonder if Ms. Emily Wilson has ever spent time as a full-time wife and homemaker. It does not sound to me like she has. I have. I spent two decades at it. I often find the way modern working women portray the traditional female role completely dismissive and scathing, like it is all downside. I did not experience it as all down side. I spent a lot of years trying to comprehend how to play the feminine role in an em…

I think this is spot on.

I probably won't read Wilson's translation -- I recently read Fagles', and am not keen to re-read for sake of a new translation, although might be interested in a comparison of translation differences. But you are correct that Greek society was very, very different from "modern" society in many ways.

I was debating going into the ways it is different, but it seems that the political climate is too toxic, so I will instead link to a fantastic lecture series on the Odyssey that I personally found enlightening: https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/odyssey-of-homer.htm...

Re: A Translator’s Reckoning with the Women of the Odyssey

#45

Post by greglindahl »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #43

I wonder if Ms. Emily Wilson has ever spent time as a full-time wife and homemaker. It does not sound to me like she has. I have. I spent two decades at it. I often find the way modern working women portray the traditional female role completely dismissive and scathing, like it is all downside. I did not experience it as all down side. I spent a lot of years trying to comprehend how to play the feminine role in an em…

Huh. I have never seen anyone use "emotional labor" to mean what you say it means. I agree that it's a lot more complicated than what you say it means.

Re: A Translator’s Reckoning with the Women of the Odyssey

#46

Post by jimmywanger »

pvg wrote: post #39
tzs wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Upon further investigation, it looks like Woodford repeated it rather than originated it. Also, he was applying it to Hollywood movie plots, and later TV plots. In Woodford's autobiography he attributes it to H. Allen Smith: https://books.google.com/books?id=AckQU9DPMnwC&pg=PT299&dq=J...

I think that entire category of quotes is handily won by Pat Conroy: "My mother, southern to the bone, once told me, "All southern literature can be summed up in these words: 'On the night the hogs ate Willie, Mama died when she heard what Daddy did to Sister.'" And it's easy to attribute! http://www.patconroy.com/articles_aba-85.php

The best canonical song (at least about country music). This is David Allan Coe.

Well, I was drunk the day my mom got out of prison And I went to pick her up in the rain But before I could get to the station in my pickup truck She got runned over by a damned old train

Re: A Translator’s Reckoning with the Women of the Odyssey

#47

Post by pvg »

jimmywanger wrote: post #46
pvg wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that entire category of quotes is handily won by Pat Conroy: "My mother, southern to the bone, once told me, "All southern literature can be summed up in these words: 'On the night the hogs ate Willie, Mama died when she heard what Daddy did to Sister.'" And it's easy to attribute! http://www.patconroy.com/articles_aba-85.php

The best canonical song (at least about country music). This is David Allan Coe. Well, I was drunk the day my mom got out of prison And I went to pick her up in the rain But before I could get to the station in my pickup truck She got runned over by a damned old train

I'm guessing this is far as you're going to acknowledge 'Tolstoy never said a thing Tolstoy would have never said but I claimed he did and thought was a decisive forum killshot'. :)

Re: A Translator’s Reckoning with the Women of the Odyssey

#48

Post by jimmywanger »

pvg wrote: post #47
jimmywanger wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best canonical song (at least about country music). This is David Allan Coe. Well, I was drunk the day my mom got out of prison And I went to pick her up in the rain But before I could get to the station in my pickup truck She got runned over by a damned old train

I'm guessing this is far as you're going to acknowledge 'Tolstoy never said a thing Tolstoy would have never said but I claimed he did and thought was a decisive forum killshot'. :)

No, I'm just saying (back to the original point) you should castigate somebody by misinterpreting the words.

That is sloppy reasoning, and it bothers me. (As it should you)

Re: A Translator’s Reckoning with the Women of the Odyssey

#49

Post by pvg »

jimmywanger wrote: post #48
pvg wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing this is far as you're going to acknowledge 'Tolstoy never said a thing Tolstoy would have never said but I claimed he did and thought was a decisive forum killshot'. :)

No, I'm just saying (back to the original point) you should castigate somebody by misinterpreting the words. That is sloppy reasoning, and it bothers me. (As it should you)

I don't know what that means. You based some argument on a made-up quote. That argument can't be right, can it?

Edit: I'll summarize the arguments you've made so far and the obvious objections.

- The Odyssey is a trivial story of a dude returning to his wife [Not true, 20-odd centuries of scholarship saying otherwise]

- There is a tiny number of stories all stories reduce to (possibly two), a Major Writer of a World Literature Said So [not true, and, obviously, he did not say that]

- The above idea is somehow supported by tvtropes [tvtropes is wonderful but also full of thousands of tropes rather than two]

Every single one of these things is just deeply and demonstrably wrong. The totality of your evidence is... a made-up Tolstoy quote and a country song? It's hard to tell how to even argue with this.

Re: A Translator’s Reckoning with the Women of the Odyssey

#50

Post by djroomba »

danharaj wrote: post #21
_red wrote: post #3

> But many students, scholars, and general readers want even more from this literary character: they want her to fit the ideal of an empowered woman. It is comforting to subscribe to the notion—as Daniel Mendelsohn does in his recently published memoir, “An Odyssey,” and as Robert Fagles does, in his translation of the poem—that the marriage between Odysseus and Penelope is a partnership of intellectual equals, based…

Shocking. People exist in dialogue with the past.

Why so flippant ? The op explained his position pretty well.
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