TruthMaxxer

In the 1997 Armand Assante version of The Odyssey the great Vanessa Williams (left) was cast as Calypso in the Greek epic and no one was outraged because she was unbelievably hot.

I want to see a celebrity roast of Barack Obama just to prove how utterly terrified every edgy counter cultural offensive comic is when it comes time to actually criticizing a sacred cow

ICED OUT.

Emily Wilson’s mistranslation of polytropos has already been beaten to death but I think there is an important piece of commentary missing. Homer’s usage of polytropos — many-sided, of many turns — as the first epithet describing Odysseus is inseparable from the story in the same way that it’s vital to Père Goriot for Goriot to actually be old. Odysseus’s first singular opponent in the Odyssey is the cyclops: literally one-sided with one eye, who cannot comprehend Odysseus’s trick, who is defeated by being blinded. His one tool is neutralized and he is done, whereas Odysseus ends up, both here and ultimately, victorious. Additionally, an accurate translation is needed because it makes sense of the entire narrative. Each obstacle in the Odyssey tests a different side of Odysseus. Using “complicated” instead of “man of many devices” or even something like “devious” is an egregious inaccuracy. It takes the broad and layered “skilled in all ways of contending,” a description of Odysseus’s nature, and collapses it into a simple psychological diagnosis, both patronizing Odysseus and injuring the artistry behind the myth. Part of what makes Homer the bedrock of Western Civilization and not just a few accidentally received and easily dismissible scrolls is that the stories are coherent at the structural level — meaning narrative, allusions, symbolism, and, notably, word choice. This level of architecture is what we typically expect from more modern authors, meaning that we should treat it as something closer to translating Dante or Don Quixote, rather than as something closer to Livy or Tacitus, where the information takes precedence over the structure. Massacring the classics for a gold star in a university department or for an Oscar should be expected behavior from our intellectual and artistic betters by now. However, expectation should not permit us to condone or accept this sort of dismemberment, where Homer is treated as mere novelty, rather than as the literary and artistic giant that Western Civilization has always known him to be.

Starving your husband biochemically while expecting him to stay monogamous is a form of abuse in a marriage. Agree or disagree?