saw a screenshot of a tweet purporting to have evidence of cuneiform coffee discourse this morning and like. extremely fake but did make me think: what if roman sbux

also el the ever-wise had the appropriate take on this concept:

like. cicero would.

also like. after that last reblog i thought to myself belatedly, okay, but given that i'm always saying it's more responsible to examine a snippet in context i should probably practice at least a little bit of what i preach, so i went and looked up what wilson had done with the rest of that sentence and uh—

εἰ δέ τις ἀθανάτων γε κατ᾿ οὐρανοῦ εἰλήλουθας, οὐκ ἂν ἐγώγε θεοῖσιν ἐπουρανίοισι μαχοίμην.

in her rendering apparently becomes

If you are one of the immortal gods descended from the sky, I come in peace— I am not one to fight the heavenly gods.

'i come in peace'???? not only is that made up out of whole fucking cloth, it's giving jarringly incongruous first-encounter-with-aliens vibes. 'take me to your leader (priam).'

and then there's that 'descended,' which first of all is, imo, a pretty heinously baroque way to render what's ultimately a form of the language's most straightforward word for 'come'? but it also, even less forgivably, introduces a new and confusing ambiguity to the sentence, such that it's now unknowable whether the descent in question is literal or lineal unless you refer back to the original greek—like, hello, it's entirely possible for a god to be descended from ouranos in the genealogical sense! that's a perfectly plausible interpretation of wilson's english! but it's absolutely not a possible interpretation of homer's εἰλήλουθας.

obviously you can't judge a whole translation on the basis of one sentence, but. can't say i'm too impressed with what happened to this one. :/

i'm.

thinking vaguely, having fallen down an extremely adhd rabbithole to get there, that a thing i did not get from my very expensive classics degree, both because of my own anxieties and because there just fundamentally wasn't time at the university level to prioritize it (the point generally being to extract meaning from one's reading and then build an argument out of it, rather than, like, reading for reading's sake), was real immersive fluidity with either latin or greek—like, i've been acquainted with both of these languages for a long time now, but if i'm very honest, i've historically prioritized double-checking myself at every turn, in order to be impeccably correct, over the kind of fluency you only really get from spending some time engaging with a language directly, without turning immediately away to a dictionary. (embarrassing to admit, really, and i'm sure some people will read this and feel privately a little superior, which is pretty agonizing to contemplate, lol, but—if you can't face up to these things you can't fix them.)

and—i don't know, i was looking at a bit of the iliad just now, for aforementioned rabbithole reasons, and it's just like. my greek is rusty but i was on track for an A in my thucydides class that one semester before i pulled out, i do have it in me to make sense of complexities greater than these, and if i actually just sit with the text for a bit, long enough for all the immediate distracting anxiety noise abt falling short of my own linguistic potential to subside a little, i can see how the syntax fits together and taste the poetry in my mouth and realize that a lot of these words i do recognize, and like. yeah, then maybe i go look them up and double-check a weird homeric form while i'm at it but like. overall: look the text in the face directly, not the interpreter.

i don't know. just like. definitely true that part of why my brain chews on itself so much is that it hasn't got enough real external material to chew on? and like. taking time to practice slower reading and form real relationships with some of these languages i've loved but fracked (in the mining sense of the word), and get back to the original unselfconscious enchantment that sent me down that path in the first place... that feels like it might be healing on a few levels, really.

so i was doing a little weeding-out of my queue, right, because it's, uh, literally full at this point and i'd sort of like to be able to add things to it again? and in so doing i re-encountered a bit of Quintilian On Education i'd saved which features some ~relatable observations~ but also a prominent typo, and which i'd hung onto with some vague idea of reposting an edited version; and when i went to do a bit of googling to that end just now, i discovered that the translation it cites—which was published in 2018—actually renders the text more overtly male-exclusive than either the original latin or the translation from 19-fucking-20 that's on perseus???

like, don't get me wrong, i do think quintilian was talking abt Boys and had Boys in mind really, because like. gestures at the realities of historical schooling. but as far as what's actually on the page goes, puer esp. in the plural can in fact technically be gender-neutral?? and then there's stuff where like. the original audeat haec aetas plura et inveniat et inventis gaudeat gets rendered in 1920 as 'The young should be more daring and inventive and should rejoice in their inventions,' and then fucking habinek turns it into 'Let the young child takes [sic] risks and exercise his imagination, and enjoy doing so.' like. haec aetas is not in fact masculine: it's grammatically feminine and semantically gender-neutral. we have a semantically gender-neutral third person pronoun in english. it's right there. a british classicist who died before habinek was born managed to lay his hands on it just fine. and yet this nominally-modern rendition reaches instead for 'he.' flames on the side of my face.

to be clear, i'm not saying classic(al) texts should be bowdlerized to suit my personal agender sensibilities! just that imo, when you manage to render a latin text more sexist in translation than it technically was in the original, you've betrayed both your author and the readers to whom you've accepted the solemn responsibility of introducing him; which i'll take the liberty of rendering into a more contemporary idiom as: you suck. lol, lmao, &c.

@elucubrare was squawking indignantly abt burton raffel horace 1.11 this morning and like. she was extremely right to be, for approximately one million reasons i may or may not get into at some point if she doesn't, but it did lead me to go look at the latin and get fascinated by the debilitat pumicibus mare metaphor—like, the winter is weakening the sea on the pumice stone of the rocks???? what???

like. idk how you put that into english really—'that even now sands down the sea'? but of course you lose a lot of the literal image (the sea crashing against the rocky coastline) in reaching for that sense—but it's so inverted and interesting. not a huge horace fan generally but he does get up to some neat tricks sometimes!

just a weird meaningless echo, really, but the most recent installment of my lotr relisten got me and frodo as far as imladris, and specifically elrond’s little history lesson, and—while i would never have had this thought if i’d been looking at the text, something abt the way the narrator of the audiobook pronounced annúminas, divorced from its actual orthography, made me think immediately of ἀρνύμενος (ἥν τε ψυχὴν καὶ νόστον ἑταίρων*)? and like, i’m absolutely not seriously claiming that’s a real intertext, the sindarin is a wholly throwaway placename and not spelt the same besides, but. a startlingly thematically appropriate line to be hearing echoes of, if ever i heard one!

⸻ * something like ‘striving to secure both his own life and his comrades’ return home,’ conventionally, although i can’t help wondering if one could read into ψυχὴν there some fainter sense of, like, spirit as essential self, shaped by the events of the story and shaping them in turn, anima-ting them if you will… anyway i’m not a homeric specialist or even a hellenist, and i suspect that probably at most the reading i’ve just spitballed would be a later metaphorical palimpsest over what in homer iirc is usually literal, but. the story makes the man makes the story, you know? rings and rings.

Harold and the Purple Crayon Vinyl Stickers

genuinely don't even know what tone i want to say this in, but:

in the course of attempting to better inform myself about ancient greek vocabulary for genitals (as one does), have made the discovery that perseus' english-to-greek word search turns up 0 results for 'vagina'—because relevant terms are listed instead under pudenda muliebria.

[cw for mention of pedophilia, CSAM]

i don’t actually personally think the best way for classicists to approach the problem of holt parker is necessarily to pretend he never existed or contributed any influential theoretical work to the field, but i will say, it’s extremely disconcerting to go check out a mutual-in-law’s blog after seeing an (unrelated) good post by them, and to get literally one page back and find they’ve reblogged a post ft. parker’s well-known ‘teratogenic grid’ framing of roman sexual roles (with a, shall we say, disingenuous citation, which names the editors of the anthology but not the author of the actual essay...) as a tag yourself meme of all things????

not to be like ‘that one course on, like, josephus and other jewish topics in the ancient mediterranean being consistently taught at literally 8 AM was marginalization and inaccessibility in action’ but

Bronze horse, Greece, Geometric period Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (link)

my secret guess-it's-a-good-thing-my-reactive-sloppy-self-didn't-go-into-academia! opinion abt Applying Modern Identity Labels to Historical Figures is like. do we really honestly think general audiences aren't plowing ahead & blithely comfortably assuming all these figures we so carefully ~decline 2 label bc it would be reductive/misleading/etc~ were cishet in a more or less modern sense. do we really honestly think general audiences pause for a second in analogously conscientious worry abt whether reducing/erasing complexity into straightness is reductive/misleading at all.

like. i'm not actually saying i would personally make unqualifiedly Definitive Statements abt things or that i think it's actually good practice to! just like. i do always privately bristle a little at these convos bc it's like. why do queer/trans ppl have to bend over backwards to be perfectly careful always when you KNOW most ppl are out there assuming cishetness left right and center. why can ambiguity never get reduced 2 queer/transness even though ppl are CONSTANTLY willing to handwave it into cishetness. if you think i’m still mad abt the way eg catullus 50 got discussed in latin survey vs the lesbia poems... you might be right.

anyway. not a hill i want 2 die on or an Official Stance or anything. (also NOT intended 2 align me with the most obvious recent instance of this lmao.) just. a cranky little moue.

(like ig i just feel as though oxford-to-ivy voices like gilbert highet need a touch more unpacking if we’re serious abt not just continuing to hand down all the traditional -isms of classics?

dgmw he’s not even particularly egregious afaik but that one paragraph alone was like. why would you [highet] automatically regurgitate catullus’ sneeringly vitriolic write-off of his ex [simul complexa tenet trecentos, &c] as if it were for sure objectively correct. why a frenchman. [like best case scenario it’s the so-called gender-neutral masculine but i tend to suspect it’s a case of ‘male narrator can only imagine male narrators.’ men kiss women. men write about women. women make for variably-deserving foci of this male subjectivity. this cishet binarism is boring as an analytical framework and i want out.]

and then of course you go to wikipedia and it’s all

“History is a strange experience,” [Highet] wrote in the introduction to an essay on Byzantium. “The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles. When you go to Mexico City through space, you find it a sort of cross between modern Madrid and modern Chicago, with additions of its own; but if you go to Mexico City through history, back only 500 years, you will find it as distant as though it were on another planet: inhabited by cultivated barbarians, sensitive and cruel, highly organized and still in the Copper Age, a collection of startling, of unbelievable contrasts.”

as if “inhabited by cultivated barbarians, sensitive and cruel,” weren’t an equally good description of highet’s own world, or of ours! not to mention: why copper age. why this narrative of like. european-defined Escalator of Progress. why is he pontificating way beyond his wheelhouse abt 15th-c. mexico—ex cathedra vniversitatis colvmbiae—as a preface to talking abt a totally unrelated place and time. [like i get why but i always feel dubious abt the writing approach that does this, like, opening quick-dip for Flavor into some ~interestingly exotic milieu~ that gets summarized briefly and reductively if not incorrectly.] anyway i just think like. worth squinting at a lil more visibly, maybe?)

half the posts abt hector on here are like. you can smell the desire to scoop him out of his Problematic setting into a cottagecore fantasy just, like, wafting off of them

like i just. i know we all love ursula le guin (i do too!) and that leads many of us to uncritically regurgitate her every utterance but like. how do you read homer and come away with the idea that he ‘seems to enjoy’ war when he's literally constantly underscoring the brutality of it and the grief it brings to the families left behind. i just took a quick scan thru lattimore's rendition of book 5 and it's a steady stream of, like,

‘the hateful darkness took hold of him’ (47);

‘this man meriones pursued and overtaking him / struck in the right buttock, and the spearhead drove straight / on and passing under the bone went into the bladder. / he dropped, screaming, to his knees, and death was a mist about him’ (65-8);

‘he killed these two and took away the dear life from them / both, leaving to their father lamentation and sorrowful / affliction, since he was not to welcome them home from the fighting’ (155-7)—

honestly, if your only emotional reaction to descriptions like that is ‘whoopee!’ i don't know what the fuck to say to you. just absolutely genuinely boggled by that take and by people's uncritical embrace of it.