The print edition of our sequel will be released on January 9th, 2019 (1/9/19).
Tag: Circo del Herrero
ARC Giveaways for Vol. 2 Coming Soon
GABBLER RECOMMENDS: The First Woman to Translate the âOdysseyâ Into English The classicist Emily Wilson has given Homerâs epic a radically contemporary voice. By WYATT MASON
âIf youâre going to admit that stories matter,â Wilson told me, âthen it matters how we tell them, and that exists on the level of microscopic word choice, as well as on the level of which story are you going to pick to start off with, and then, what exactly is that story? The whole question of âWhat is that story?â is going to depend on the language, the words that you use.â
Throughout her translation of the âOdyssey,â Wilson has made small but, it turns out, radical changes to the way many key scenes of the epic are presented â âradicalâ 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 Wilsonâs 60 some predecessors, living and dead, is to find that consensus has been hard to come by. Chapman starts things off, in his version, with âmany a way/Wound with his wisdomâ; John Ogilby counters with the terser âprudentâ; Thomas Hobbes evades the word, just calling Odysseus âthe man.â Quite a range, and weâve barely started. Thereâs Alexander Popeâs âfor wisdomâs various arts renownâdâ; William Cowperâs âFor shrewdness famed/And genius versatileâ; H.F. Caryâs âcraftyâ; William Sothebyâs âby long experience triedâ; Theodore Buckleyâs âfull of resourcesâ; Henry Alfordâs âmuch-versedâ; Philip Worsleyâs âthat heroâ; the Rev. John Gilesâs âof many fortunesâ; T.S. Norgateâs âof many a turnâ; George Musgraveâs âtost to and fro by fateâ; the Rev. Lovelace Bigge-Witherâs âmany-sided-manâ; George Edgingtonâs âdeepâ; William Cullen Bryantâs âsagaciousâ; Roscoe Monganâs âskilled in expedientsâ; Samuel Henry Butcher and Andrew Langâs âso ready at needâ; Arthur Wayâs âof craft-renownâ; George Palmerâs âadventurousâ; William Morrisâs âshiftyâ; Samuel Butlerâs âingeniousâ; Henry Cotterillâs âso wary and wiseâ; Augustus Murrayâs âof many devicesâ; Francis Caulfeildâs ârestlessâ; Robert Hillerâs âcleverâ; Herbert Batesâs âof many changesâ; T.E. Lawrenceâs âvarious-mindedâ; William Henry Denham Rouseâs ânever at a lossâ; Richmond Lattimoreâs âof many waysâ; Robert Fitzgeraldâs âskilled in all ways of contendingâ; Albert Cookâs âof many turnsâ; Walter Shewringâs âof wide-ranging spiritâ; Allen Mandelbaumâs âof many wilesâ; Robert Faglesâs âof twists and turnsâ; all the way to Stanley Lombardoâs âcunning.â
…
One way of talking about Wilsonâs translation of the âOdysseyâ is to say that it makes a sustained campaign against that species of scholarly shortsightedness: finding equivalents in English that allow the terms she is choosing to do the same work as the original words, even if the English words are not, according to a Greek lexicon, âcorrect.â
âWhat gets us to âcomplicated,âââ Wilson said, returning to her translation of polytropos, âis both that I think it has some hint of the original ambivalence and ambiguity, such that itâs both âWhy is he complicated?â âWhat experiences have formed him?â which is a very modern kind of question â and hints at âThere might be a problem with him.â I wanted to make it a markedly modern term in a way that âmuch turningâ obviously doesnât feel modern or like English. I wanted it to feel like an idiomatic thing that you might say about somebody: that he is complicated.â
I asked: âWhat about the commentator who says, âIt does something that more than modernizes â it subverts the fundamental strangeness of the way Odysseus is characterized.â Iâm sure some classicists are going to say itâs flat out wrong, âInteresting, but wrong.âââ
âYouâre quite right,â she replied. âReviewers will say that.â
How, I asked, would she address such a complaint from someone in her field?
âI struggle with this all the time,â Wilson said. âI struggled with this because there are those classicists. I partly just want to shake them and make them see that all translations are interpretations.â Most of the criticism Wilson expects, she says, will come from âa digging in of the heels: âThatâs not what it says in the dictionary, and therefore it canât be right!â And if you put down anything other than whatâs said in the dictionary, then, of course, you have to add a footnote explaining why, which means that pretty much every line has to have a footnote. …â Wilson paused. âThat goes to what this translation is aiming to do in terms of an immersive reading experience and conveying a whole narrative. I donât know what to say to those people, honestly.â Wilson laughed her buoyant laugh. âI need to have a better answer to them, because they will certainly review it, and they will certainly have a loud voice. They just seem to be coming from such a simple and fundamental misunderstanding.â
âOf what?â
âOf what any translation is doing.â
What a translation is doing â and what it should do â has been a source of vigorous debate since there were texts to translate. âIâm not a believer,â Wilson told me, âbut I find that there is a sort of religious practice that goes along with translation. Iâm trying to serve something.â
[Via]
GABBLER RECOMMENDS: B.L.A.’s Twitter Rant About Vulcan’s Representation in American Gods
So BLA recently went on a tangent about how Vulcan is (seemingly going to be) represented in the new American Gods Starz adaptation:
[“BLA and GB Gabbler” (really just a pen name – singular) are the Editor and Narrator behind THE AUTOMATION, vol. 1 of the Circo del Herrero series. They are on facebook, twitter, tumblr, goodreads, and Vulcan’s shit list.]
Elizabeth King on Automata
‘An automaton is defined as a machine that contains its own principle of motion. Strictly speaking, a clock is an automaton. The notion of an artificial human figureâan “android” as it has come to be calledâderives in part from the tradition of the striking jack in the great medieval town clocks, in which the hour would be sounded by a mechanical figure springing into motion with a hammer and gong. That this employment once fell to a living person, the town watchman suggests that here were our first labor-saving robots. But the animated figure, or moving sculpture, can be traced back to ancient Egypt. “At Thebes accordingly, there were statues that spoke and made gestures. The priests made the heads and arms move by devices not as yet clearly explained” we are told by Egyptologist Alexandre Moret, invoking the same combination of mystery, divine intervention, human ingenuity, and mechanics of deception our own monk exhibits. Theater has always been the partner of religion.
The sixteenth century was a period of tremendous mechanical sophistication: the dawning of the scientific revolution. Clockmaking was to become a profession in its own right, separate from its origin in the blacksmith’s art, and its former association with gun- and locksmithing. Precision timekeeping in centuries to come would become crucial to the world shipping trade for its use in determining navigational longitude. [50] But in its early form, clockmaking was driven less by the problem of measuring time, and more by the astronomer’s efforts to model the locations and motions of “the fixed and moving stars,” that is, to capture the animating principle of the universe.
A significant developmentâperhaps the significant developmentâfrom the medieval town clock, driven by enormous systems of weights, was the emergence of the spiral spring combined with the fusee. A fusee is an ingenious device for making the driving force of a spring constant. Once attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, earlier examples of the fusee have now been found. When wound, a mainspring could now deliver a steady application of tension, rather than a stronger and then progressively weaker force as it ran down. Â An early fusee, made of wood, is found in the mechanism of the monk .
The other important development in the mechanical arts was the cam. An ancient device attributed to Archimedes, Â the cam reached broad use in the fifteenth century in the striking trains of clocks. A cam is simply a barrel or disk of metal rotated by the gear train. Its outer edge is either studded with short pins, or cut to a calculated profile, and as it turns, one end of a lever, riding against that uneven edge, is set in motion. Called a following arm, the lever translates the cam’s calculated profile into reciprocating movements that can be highly precise and carefully timed. Numbers of such levers can operate for example the spring-tensioned linkages to the monk’s arms, legs, head, eyes. The cam is thus the memory of the machine, and its profile is the analog information base for generating the exact movements of a given part.”
-Elizabeth King, Â “A Short History of the Relations Between Machines and Divinity (Deus ex Machina).”