A sample of some, uh, politically incorrect stuff Musk said recently:
* "Anyone who opposes remigration is a traitor"
* "She is a traitor to the West, plain and simple" (in reference to his recent interviewer)
* "Deal with traitors before invaders. They are committing high treason."
* "First the traitors, then the invaders" (screenshot from Citizen Vigilante pointing gun at camera)
We’re at the point where Musk (and others) are regurgitating literal Klansman rhetoric, in addition to the usual anti-democratic stuff. This is extremely far from normal.
“a movie series that's as good as the source material”
Is it? I loved LOTR during my first watch, then many years later actually read the books and tried watching it again. Many of the changes that Jackson made in service of commercial, mass-market appeal were downright silly, if not cringe-worthy, to the point where I actually had to stop my rewatch after the first film.
The films don’t hold a candle to the books, though I appreciate that they got me into LOTR in the first place.
I definitely don't think the movies are as good as the book. They are quite good movies on their own merits, but they aren't the foundation of an entire genre the way the book is. The movies also have some really bizarre departures from the book which seriously undermine their quality as an adaptation, though that doesn't detract from their quality as movies unto themselves.
Do you have an opinion yourself? Because "anyone worth listening to" is not a comment with content.
Furthermore, it's simply not true. Lattimore is generally considered to be the most authentic translation. There are plenty of criticisms of the Wilson translation that aren't culture war complaints. You seem to have the impression that they are, which is factually wrong.
If you don't care about authenticity, well, the Wilson one doesn't win any aesthetic awards either. It translates polytropos, a notoriously complex and multi-faceted word, as complicated.
There are hundreds of such examples. Lattimore translates one line as "Troy's sacred citadel," whereas Wilson chooses "Holy town of Troy." It's dumbed down and artless.
And we haven't even gotten to the ideological choices of certain word translations, but I won't get to that here.
Wilson wrote in great and excruciating detail about why she chose “complicated” as the translation, yet you dismiss it as if if was some sort of casual, thoughtless decision: https://emily613.substack.com/p/on-complicated
Rest assured that she’s given more thought to every single word in that poem than almost anyone else alive.
Wilson’s translation is in my reading queue before I see the film, but whether I like it or not is completely irrelevant to the quality of the work, which is best assessed by the folks who actually study this stuff for a living.
I see nothing tangible in your comment other than “I think it’s artless and dumb,” which is not as convincing as you seem to think.
Translating the Odyssey is not some new thing. There are dozens of other translations in English, and yet pretty much all of them have put just as much or more effort into questions like these...and yet few are as artless and bland as "complicated."
If you actually spend some time looking into scholarly discussion of the translation... it's seen as quite deficient and indeed cuts out a lot of meaning in the original Greek.
But you don't even need to do that. Just get a PDF of Fagles or Lattimore and compare lines word for word to Wilson.
And if you don't have an opinion yourself, and I'm guessing you haven't read any other translation, or perhaps even Wilsons? Which means you're just arguing with me because what... some culture war thing? There is such a weird obsession with defending this translation, ostensibly from people that haven't even read it or other translations. So absurd.
I have to steal part of the discussion at the Guardian for this - I have read neither translation but this is illuminating and unhelpfully makes me want to read both:
Compare the opening lines:
Fagles:
Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns
driven time and again off course, once he had plundered
the hallowed heights of Troy.
Wilson:
Tell me about a complicated man.
Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost
when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy,
The Wilson translation is TOO distilled/simplified for me. It reads something like Hemingway or a hard-boiled noir detective story.
The Fagles translation is much more lyrical without being overly pompous or florid, and the McKellen audio version (which is the way the story was first told, right?) is delightful. Reading along as McKellen tells the story is a joy.
However, Wilson made her translation using strict iambic pentameter and matching line count to retain the pace of the original poem. That brings something new to the table. And IIRC her simplified language is supposed to better match the nature of the poem as rooted in oral tradition. It was never meant to be complex and florid — regular folks were enjoying this story as much as anyone else.
If anything, this emphasizes that no single translation will be the definitive one. (And to call Wilson’s “artless” is quite a stretch.)
Just for fun, some recent Musk highlights from Twitter:
* "Anyone who opposes remigration is a traitor"
* "She is a traitor to the West, plain and simple" (in reference to his recent interviewer)
* "Deal with traitors before invaders. They are committing high treason."
* "First the traitors, then the invaders" (screenshot from Citizen Vigilante pointing gun at camera)
I don't know guys, I just find it weird that some of the biggest and most influential tech companies in the US are helmed by a lunatic spouting violent Klansman rhetoric, and that somehow this isn't in the foreword to every single article and discussion about his work. What the actual fuck?
based on how we've been behaving over the last 10 years, essentially yes. We are all just hoping to crawl up high enough that us and our offspring might survive while the world literally burns and billionaires and capitalism managed to destroy any movement to slow down our destruction of our environment and sustainable economies for faster short term extraction of profit and power for themselves.
* "Anyone who opposes remigration is a traitor"
* "She is a traitor to the West, plain and simple" (in reference to his recent interviewer)
* "Deal with traitors before invaders. They are committing high treason."
* "First the traitors, then the invaders" (screenshot from Citizen Vigilante pointing gun at camera)
We’re at the point where Musk (and others) are regurgitating literal Klansman rhetoric, in addition to the usual anti-democratic stuff. This is extremely far from normal.
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