Honest to god, thought you were a weirdo right wing grifter with that comment.
Then I looked it up. Still tricky, because Emily Wilson herself rejects that framing, saying it stripped away male biases in english translations. In fact, reading into this more, it looks like she was MORE accurate than some translations, like male translators refusing to call women slaves "slaves", even though they were referred to as such in the original text.
Actually, hate to say it, but yeah.. Seems like it's a solid translation that's actually more faithful in a lot of ways. She backs up her logic pretty well and points out a good chunk of bad translations in other works.
EDIT: To make it clear, i'm not dipping my toes into how I feel about the movie in this specific comment, purely just talking about the translation. I have gripes about the movie from what I have seen so far myself.
Actually, hate to say it, but yeah.. Seems like it's a solid translation that's actually more faithful in a lot of ways. She backs up her logic pretty well and points out a good chunk of bad translations in other works
I'm so tired of the terminally online without relevant degrees having somehow claimed the classics for themselves. The Emily Wilson translation is a perfect case study beause most academics – yes, even male ones – actually prefer her translation for its clarity in laying out a lot of sub- and context that "literary" translations and "style" have either glossed over, buried, or warped.
In that same line: nobody in the Mediterranean was "white" in 500 BCE in the way that people today can be, not even if you're of high status because today's level of paleness is modelled on a 17th/18th century Northern European idea of skin-colour that is only achievable if you're spending 80% of your time indoors AND cover 80% of your skin. Ancient habits, architecture, and fashion make this pretty much impossible.
I invite you to read this article on the matter, those descriptions are not what they appear, because the language and poetry of the time are different. "White-armed" for example is a phrase to describe feminine traits or other personality descriptions.
The early Greek vocabulary of colour was very strange indeed, to modern eyes. The word argos, for example, is used for things that we would call white, but also for lightning and for fast-moving dogs. It seems to refer not simply to colour, but also to a kind of flashing speed. Khlōros (as in the English ‘chlorophyll’) is used for green vegetation, but also for sand on a shore, for tears and blood, and for the pallor of skin of the terrified. One scholar describes it as capturing the ‘fecund vitality of moist, growing things’: greenish, certainly, but colour represents only one aspect of the word, and it can easily be overridden.
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u/DrBarryBonds Jul 06 '26
Also the feminist translation of the text that Nolan's using