heatherbeck
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Effing Polytropos Buttons.
🕑 Added 2020-05-28 00:00:28 +0000 UTCWhen Donald Trump got elected, I was talking to some old friends of mine in Mexico. We talked about walls, and bloviation, and how Mexicans had already adopted the slang term trompear (which basically means to punch somebody in the face) and converted it into Trumpear (which colloquially means to be punched in the face by the President-elect’s words and character. Cute, huh? Isn’t etymology great?).
Disclaimer: I know I said only yesterday that I promise never to get political here. But... what better time in our history? For what it’s worth, I believe that government’s role should be to make beer colder, roads safer, kids smarter, and old people more comfortable. And, elephant in the corner, I think Donald Trump is The Most Cataclysmic of Goobers. If you disagree with me, that’s fine. Personally, I like to hold onto the memory of a world in which we didn’t hate each other based on who we prefer as a political candidate. My friends and I actually threw a pretty epic election party in 2008. Everybody, gun-toting hicks and libtard cuck-flakes alike (they were just called people back then, for my younger viewers), hugged and cheered after it was called, because we knew that two good men had debated what their personal perception of what a better America could be, and The People decided who they agreed with more, and that the transition of power would be a peaceful one. It was nice. I miss that.
Anyway. One of my friends lives in Merida, in the Yucatán Peninsula, and historically is a bit more exempt from all of that nasty hyper-political shit goes on elsewhere in that fine nation. Did you know that Mexico is one of the most dangerous countries in the world to be a journalist in?
Anyway, with Trump’s election confirmed, the Mexican media got around to figuring out certain translations to better inform their own electorate. Turns out, “Make America Great Again” is really difficult to translate into Spanish. First, you have to define exactly what you mean by the word “make.” Does it mean to create? Construct? Craft? And what about the end of the sentence, with the “again?” So is it re-create?
You can probably see the rabbit hole. “Hacer que Estados Unidos vuelva a ser grandioso” doesn’t exactly fit on a baseball cap, and it also doesn’t get the point across. Literally translated, that’s “Cause the United States to return to being great.” (I know some of you are Spanish speakers, and you know how frustratingly contextual your beautiful language is, so you know what I’m talking about. 💃🏻)
I’m not sure that the country of Mexico ever settled on a specific way to cite that catchphrase. (and for that matter, I’m not sure where Spain landed on it. Or Argentina, or El Salvador.) But it was a HUGE conversation that was taking place in journalistic circles at the time: How the fuck do we tell our readers what this guy is trying to say?
(Don’t worry. American journalists are trying to figure that out too... but in a far, far more depressing way.)
Which gets me around to book number 5 million of quarantine. Jesus, but my poor Kindle has been taxed. How much so you ask? I’m reading The Odyssey. The Odyssey. You know. That book we all read in high school, but we didn’t actually read it, because we only read the CliffsNotes, because it’s fucking boring as shit.
But, sometime last year, I downloaded it. There was a bit of a ruckus about how it had been translated into English, for the first time, by a chick. And since it’s such a manly tale, I thought… Well that seems kind of fun. I had just gotten off the tail end of a translation of Don Quijote into English by a woman, and as much as I never really cared for the book before, it was fucking great. I'm not saying that women are somehow, supernaturally, more gifted at translating ancient manly stories into something more relatable for the masses... but there's a freshness, you know?
Anyway, Emily Wilson was her name. First person with ovaries to translate The Odyssey into English. And the first line of the book, a pretty famous one, has traditionally gone (in Fitzgeralds 1961 version, a.k.a. the one none of us read in high school) "Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story / of that man skilled in all ways of blah blah blah..." This new version by Wilson, she starts with "Tell me about a complicated man." Huh. Changes the meaning.
See, she got hung up on this word, polytropos. The ancient world's "hacer." Poly, meaning many, tropos, meaning like a "turn." The olden-times' "again." So, a "many-turned" man. A confused one. a... complicated person. Something that (and I swear I'm not a feminazi), Fitzgerald ignored, and was just like, "Ah, a dude. Good @ making sourdough. Dudes B dudes, right?"
I don't know why I'm going on about this, but I hope that's part of the reason you lovely folks still like me.
So, today, when I put on real clothes for the first time in weeks, I saw how the seam cut right through the center of my boob-ridge, and how those three weird buttons just sort of stick out from my left tit. I think back, to when I ordered this dress online. What was I thinking? How did I think this would work?
"Sing to me, oh muse, of a complicated Heather, so skilled in blah blah blah."
Even with re-reading it, and even with the scant memories of CliffsNotes, that the only line I can paraphrase.
(I just ended up throwing on a tee shirt. It's not quite like slaying the Cyclops, but you take what you can get.)
Comments
Stephen Prandy
Wowwwwwww shit just got real.
Petrafied
I love this, its triggered a lot of thought on my end. Apologies in advance for a wall of text :P It really gets you thinking about the role of women and how their legacies are twisted, intentionally or not, and how women who kept records or made their own impact on culture (good ole' Mary Shelley) were doing an incredibly valuable service, again, intentionally or not. Take the common view that Cleopatra was promiscuous. The reason that came about was because of men, but more specifically, Roman men. They were the ones who were chiefly allowed to learn to read and write, therefore their records are far more likely to survive into the modern day, due to simple math. Many of these men were Roman propagandists, glorifying Augustus and his (adoptive) father Julius, and villiyfying the women who they saw as the catalyst for a period of strife before Rome's consolidation into an empire. They paint her as a skank, a debauchery loving seductress, but in all likelihood Cleopatra was monogamous and not particularly sexually adventurous. Then you have Aspasia, wife of the great Ancient Greek statesman Perikles: we know she was influential in politics...and that's it. Everyone who wrote about her was a product of a remarkably misogynist culture - they said she was a madame at a brothel, or she cheated on Perikles with 500 different men. None of this is likely true - a great quote about it this is on her wiki page, reading "to ask questions about Aspasia's life is to ask questions about half of humanity.' It demonstrates a recurring void of knowledge ever-present in human history. Imagine how the perspective of women and other oppressed peoples would further our understanding of history, of empires, of great cultural works? Its deeply saddening. Ugh...anyways, hope you enjoyed my feverish sinus infection writeup.
