I have come to admire J. K. Rowling for her refusal to remain silent even as the public channels Barthes in so desperately wanting her to be dead. I have no opinion on the issues at hand in her discussion, but merely wanted to address some biases that are becoming increasingly prevalent among us which are highlighted by her current ‘cancellation.’
Please, make up your minds. Is the author dead, or does the author need to apologise for what they’ve done? You can’t have it both ways.
Is the author dead?
If the author is dead, it’s your fault, you’re the aggressor, and you’re projecting your own bias onto the work. Why don’t you apologise for seeing what you see in a mutable quantum canvas? Like any system, the Internet contains the totality of itself to the perceived exclusion of everything else. Real life is not the Internet. As loud as it may be, as useful, we have to remember that the far greater amount of human knowledge is not contained on the Internet, nor are the true opinions of most people. While a huge number have decided to reveal excessive amounts of personal detail, most people haven’t.
This feeds into a zoomer mindset that was most prominent during the Brexit protests and the more recent corona debates. I observed several hystericists, who dismissed their elders entirely for the sake of their political opinions, even, in the most recent case, at the risk of their deaths; the older generations, to the zoomers, are placed on an entirely different level of existence. To the Internet, they are distractions, because they’re not a part of it, they’re outside of that system, and so those who are closest to the system’s centre want them to be a non-issue.
A symbol on the internet only has as much meaning as you give it. If you say you’re personally being attacked by a picture on the Internet, then I guess you are. But you don’t have to be. You have the freedom to decide the image is meaningless because it’s not directed at you, and even if it was it’s not like it has any real effect unless you allow it to because the Internet is not real, I will not accept it as such and thus it won’t become such. It’s caused a mass-illusion about the true scope of the world, making us think we can have a chance at understanding what’s happening if only we subscribe to the right blogs, find the right Youtube channels, etc. But any system that’s possible for one person to understand is too simple to work in practice for an entire global society. The range of human deviation is too wide. You have to allow for multiple systems to govern everything because a single system will never get everybody’s attention; even if it conveys some perfect benefit there will be an obstinate tribe of contrarians who proclaim difference for its own sake.
The only physical effect that an Internet image can have if you ignore it is a couple of watts of computer power. If you pay attention to it, you’re allowing yourself to be affected. We seem to have largely forgotten that this is an option, not a necessity, because contrary to popular opinion the Internet has not allowed the world to grow, but made it shrink; the Pareto principle is in full effect here. Five websites get the vast majority of the traffic – Facebook, Youtube, Google, Tmail, and Baidu. Everywhere else is comparatively a desert. Rid yourself of the perception that you’re connecting with other countries when you use these platforms. You’re connecting with what they have chosen to show you, etc…and what the people in other places have chosen to tell you.
If you live in a major city with a fair bit of cultural import, or if you spend a lot of time on the Internet, you have something your ancestors didn’t – the ability to pick and choose symbols. In times gone by I wouldn’t have conceived of things in any majorly different way from my parents – but because I’m able to access books and websites of all kinds I’ve gone off in my own direction.
The same is true for university-age children who don’t engage with their own traditions and arbitrarily become Buddhists because of peace and love, man. But as long as you exist in a particular time and place that place is going to impart some kind of underlying meaning into you. It’s stupid to ignore the history of the place in which you live, and the one from where your family came, because both of those things indirectly define you. The ‘open-minded’ university students often have nothing to do with Buddhism, they saw a guy meditating on campus and wanted to be cool, and they project their own fear of death onto Christianity, the religion their ancestors kept for hundreds of years, and say it’s stupid and for fearful people.
Does the author need to apologise?
If the author needs to apologise, or be cancelled, then she or he has expended a great deal of energy and willpower in the making of a certain point, and you in all your wisdom, with the aid of your structuralist system of analysis, have seen fit to dismiss this point without understanding its underlying ideas. “I’ve studied X’s work plenty. I know all about what they meant to say. They are a [buzzword] and must be cancelled.”
A good example who has made a great many people very angry: Classicist Emily Wilson with her new Odyssey translation. Putting aside the fact that her translation reduces the poem’s length by about a third, and the translation of polutropon as ‘complicated’, which seems to be a particular bugbear among pseudo-classicists who memorised the manifold meanings of that one particular Attic word, it’s a translation whose author is openly critical of Homer’s original text, who openly states she emphasises aspects of the poem previously deemed even by Homer as unimportant.
Because I can’t be bothered linking to Twitter, and wouldn’t want to anyway, here are some of her comments regarding that work.
“Why and how is translation so hard? Here’s a little non-comparative case study to help make the process more visible. 9 words from the very start of the Odyssey, lines 1-2: ὃς μάλα πολλὰ / πλάγχθη, ἐπεὶ Τροίης ἱερὸν πτολίεθρον ἔπερσεν. Syntactically easy.
“Relative clause: the “man” is one who had/ did/ suffered a whole lot of going-astray/ bafflement/ wandering. Then temporal clause: when he’d sacked Troy. Why just him, singular? Scholiast claims, b/c he thought of the Wooden Horse. Maybe!
“How much of Troy did he sack? ptoliethron is the lengthened form of polis, “city” (later, city-state). Sometimes =central part of city. But sacking just part of Troy isn’t really enough… Shd. the translator make it non-dumb if possible, or not worry about that?
“There’s alliteration (polla/ plangthe … ptolietron epersen, notice the “p” sounds). What, if anything, should or can a translator do, when the sound of every word in her language is different from the words of the original? And, what to do about meter? Genre? Tone?
“What’s the judgment, if any? Or narrative perspective? Do we feel OK about Odysseus being defined, instantly, as a city-sacker (ptoliporthos, one of his standard epithets)? Is the narrative voice invested in one side or another? It’s very hard to say. A judgment call. hieros suggests “holy”, “sacred”, divine, set apart. Is Troy holy bc gods built walls, or bc inhabitants respect gods, or other reason? Does the holiness make its sack impious? Plus: all English words for religion risk connoting the wrong religion. No way round this.
“Dictionaries give English words like waste, ravage, sack, take, plunder for pertho. Some of these sound archaic and/or romanticizing. But there’s no reason to think the Greek verb sounds that way. It’s describing a definitely violent action; the verb can also mean kill.
“We don’t like to talk about war so modern Anglo war vocab is thin. Verbs like “ravage” or “plunder” create distance, b/c dated. Newspapers use the neutral, maybe euphemistic verb, “take”. But the Gk verb has a far narrower range than “take” & is far more definitely violent.
“The Greek verb plangthe has no exact English equivalent. It’s passive in form. The active verb can connote “to turn aside/ balk/ baffle” (LSJ); in the passive, it’s used for going astray, wandering. Is O. is passive, or actively roving, or both? Can he be both, in Eng?
“Some of O’s time, since Troy, is spent at sea; but 8 years is cohabiting with goddesses. “Wandered” suggests movement. Plus, English “wandering” happens on land. Or maybe the clause just refers to shipwrecks; but are there enough of those to count as mala polla?
“Clause cd be a gloss on polytropon: it means he’s on a complicated journey. Proposed in antiquity, but other ancient readers clearly thought it meant something more internal, to do with O’s cleverness, sneakiness etc. Hard to keep both options live in English. Must we? Can we?
“There’s a v.g. book on “wandering” in ancient Greek thought by Silvia Montiglio, which teases out the complex and changing cultural attitudes to the range of activities evoked by this verb. A translator who has read this book is likely to be even more stuck than she was before.
“The verb is intensified by an adverb (mala) and an adverbial accusative (polla). It’s common in Greek and doesn’t exist in English. You could render “with respect to very muches”, except that’s nonsense, and the Gk isn’t.
“It’s vague. It could suggest that O. wanders/ is lost many times, or in many ways, or frequently, or intensely, or very much, on many occasions, or in respect to many different [obstacles/implied nouns].
“Can/ should a translator can keep the full range of possibilities? I know there’s no right answer. This is what I did. Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy. I alliterated, not with “p” but other sounds (M..m, w…w… w, t… T).
“I couldn’t manage plangthe with just one English verb, & hoped I could convey the vague intensity of mala polla with two almost redundant verbs. Hence, “wandered and was lost”: both sea and land, both passive and active, rest and movement.
“Is that a legitimate solution? I don’t know. I don’t think there’s a rule. I wanted to use a strong clear non-archaic verb for eperse, for reasons as above. I didn’t think it was appropriate to suggest that only part of Troy was damaged, as above.
“I used indirect question instead of relative clause (“how”). Relatives are used in Gk often when Eng. uses other types of clause (Smyth s.v.). I couldn’t make it feel punchy and alive the other way. I tried for days. I liked that the i. question suggests a shared quest.
“I don’t think of my choices as the only possible ones. Many valid others are possible. I tried many others myself. I tried rewriting the proem again for a good 2 weeks for the paperback, before un-rewriting it again.
“You labor and labor and labor, and there’s something that wasn’t before, with a voice not your voice, and you didn’t make it, it’s half you, it’s half someone else, it is all someone else, and you pray it will live, whatever, whoever it turns out to be.
“Here are a couple of other versions, also by women. I’m bored of the pretence that I’m the only female classicist translator, or that every element of my choices is because I’m a woman. So: Rosa Onesti: che molto errò, poi ch’ebbe a terra gittate d’Ilïòn le sacre torri.
“Errò connotes error as well as wandering; different judgment. Onesti introduces a concrete image: O. throws the towers of Troy “to the ground”. There’s no “ground” in the Greek, and no throwing, but it’s a possible way to convey some of the energy and violence of the verb.
“’More recent Italian translator, Dora Marinari, free verse: che molto dovetto andar vagando, dopo aver distrutto la sacra città di Troia’ Presents O. much more as a passive victim, who “had to” go wandering (dovetto), although she also makes O. destroy the whole holy city, not just towers of it. La sacra città is a v. interesting choice, since of course the phrase usually means a quite different city: Rome.”
Do these comments excuse ‘sausages’, ‘scallywag’, ‘Mr Foreigner’, etc? Perhaps. Perhaps not. It hardly matters because if you’re going to use the Odyssey to actually make any kind of point, political or cultural, you’re going to consult the original text anyway. Anyone who just reads Wilson’s text and moves on to another book, who treats the Odyssey as ‘just another book’ isn’t going to have an opinion on it that could add anything to over two thousand years of scholarship. This makes the crying reactionary LARPing traditionalists seethe, because they want to delegitimise Wilson’s work on the basis of inaccuracy. Perhaps it’s inaccurate, but it doesn’t matter.
What the author does ninety percent of the time doesn’t matter
Millions of people constantly produce art. Patience, careful attention, investigation outside of the acceptable framework of investigation is rare. Attention is so valuable as to be nearly priceless.
The author shouldn’t need to apologise but for the legions of people who are incapable of separating the Internet from reality and who insist on being offended when the issue at hand is purely digital. Someone making an offensive joke on Twitter ceases to exist for 99% of the world when the computer is off. Emily Wilson translating polutropon as complicated is only an attack on Western civilisation if you somehow manage to forget the billions of copies of the Odyssey in print and digital, translation and original. Embrace the Artpocalypse. Everything legal you can conceive of has a right to exist here.
verso folio 