"We are lucky to have these legs and this ground, and that our muscles work with speed and the blood surges and that we can see everything." --Dave Eggers, After I Was Thrown In The River And Before I Drowned
* walking round the supermarket muttering to myself* loneliness is still time spent with the world loneliness is still time spent with the world loneliness is still time spent with the world loneliness is still
okay absolutely obsessed with this part of emily wilson’s interview about her translation of the odyssey
[image description: screencap of a quote from Emily Wilson’s interview with the New York Times about her translation of the Odyssey.
“If I was really going to be radical,” Wilson told me, returning to the very first line of the poem, “I would’ve said, polytropos means ‘straying,’ and andra” — “man,” the poem’s first word — “means ‘husband,’ because in fact andra does also mean ‘husband,’ and I could’ve said, ‘Tell me about a straying husband.’ And that’s a viable translation. That’s one of the things it says. But it would give an entirely different perspective and an entirely different setup for the poem. The fact that it’s possible to translate the same lines a hundred different times and all of them are defensible in entirely different ways? That tells you something.”
/end id]
Here is part of ‘via: 48 Dante variations’ by Caroline Bergvall. It’s 48 different translations of the first stanza of Dante’s Inferno in alphabetical order. We looked at it in my poetry class, I think it’s really cool.
