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Cool About It, boygenius / Us Against You, Fredrick Backman / My Own Private Idaho (1991) / Jeanette Winterson / Oxygen, Mary Oliver / Garden Song, Phoebe Bridgers / I Know It's Over, The Smiths

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i can't casually listen to music. unfortunately everything i like makes me want to drop to my knees.

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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

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Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking.

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my hobbies? uhh.. peeling back the layers…. uncovering metaphors.. mirroring…..connecting dots…..stuff like that

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Poetry by Reva @/painonpapier from TikTok

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Sir please thats my emotional support stack of books that i havent read

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antinous (+ hadrian)

h of h, anne carson/ diaries, franz kafka/ a primer for the small weird loves, richard siken/ the death of antinoüs, mark doty/ antinous as a priest of the imperial cult/ no id/ war of the foxes, richard siken/ on earth we’re briefly gorgeous, ocean voung/ boot theory, richard siken/ antinous mondragone

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Love is stored in a crowded room

Nicole Eisenman, Another Green World; Salman Toor, Late Night Gathering; Salman Toor, Mehfil/Party; Peter Brown, Christmas at Combe Park 2018

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music is an old friend. sometimes you grow apart. sometimes you come back together, years later. they’ll still be in the same spot you left them, waiting patiently. they never ask where you’ve been or why you left. it’s not exactly the same but it’s not quite so different either, is it? and what can you possibly say to the friend that never left, never changed, never judged? carried you through things no one else will ever know about? luckily you don’t have to say anything. your friend knows.

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one thing about orpheus and eurydice is you guys are all like “i’m different i wouldnt turn to look at her” because you are all familiar with the story of orpheus and eurydice. but orpheus wasnt familiar with the story because he was in it lol.

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On spitting it out; On accepting it.

Richard Siken // Richard Siken // Safia Elhillo // F. Scott Fitzgerald // Carol Ann Duffy // CJ Hauser // Marya Hornbacher

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Sudden wave of an immense love for humanity has hit me once again…

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growing pains

1. Maya Hawke, Goodbye Rocketship

2. Greta Gerwig, Little Women

3. Louise Glück, Vita Nova

4. Amy Lowell, The Fruit Garden Path

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butterfly pages

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musings on november

― Donald Miller, Holly Warburton, L. M. Montgomery, E. M. Forster, Anne Sexton, Kaye Donachie, Anne Sexton, Emilio Hernandez Martin, Maggie Stiefvater, Nina MacLaughlin (The Paris Review)

˗ˏˋin case you’d like to buy me a☕ˎˊ˗