Joseph Perna

teaching and writing about modern italy

[Joseph Perna @JosephPerna]

@Tyler_A_Harper "culture" isn't a movie or a novel it's human rights, and it is psychotic and infuriating that pundits are still WORRIED about the potential cost. surprise, zohran refused this nonsense and is far more popular than the atlantic

[Joseph Perna @JosephPerna]

@Variety adults is the definition of gen Z illiteracy

[Joseph Perna @JosephPerna]

@nxd1979 wanted to say hi but elon's nonsense makes a dm v v annoying: @josephperna on ig

[Wyoming Iliad @wyomingiliad]

Here is the actual Greek — Odyssey 8.514–520, the close of Demodocus's song:

ἤειδεν δ᾽ ὡς ἄστυ διέπραθον υἷες Ἀχαιῶν
ἱππόθεν ἐκχύμενοι, κοῖλον λόχον ἐκπρολιπόντες.
ἄλλον δ᾽ ἄλλῃ ἄειδε πόλιν κεραϊζέμεν αἰπήν,
αὐτὰρ Ὀδυσσῆα προτὶ δώματα Δηϊφόβοιο
βήμεναι, ἠΰτ᾽ Ἄρηα, σὺν ἀντιθέῳ Μενελάῳ.
κεῖθι δὴ αἰνότατον πόλεμον φάτο τολμήσαντα
νικῆσαι καὶ ἔπειτα διὰ μεγάθυμον Ἀθήνην.
No bullshit, so here's the verdict the tweet won't like: its central philological claim is false. αἰνός does not mean "awe-inspiring." LSJ glosses it dread, dire, grim, terrible; the adverb αἰνῶς means "terribly"; αἰνότατον is the superlative — "most dreadful." It is the word Achilles uses of his grief and Zeus of his dread. There is no positive-glory sense of αἰνός anywhere in Homer. So Wilson's "dreadful" is not a political intervention — it is close to a dictionary gloss of the superlative. The tweeter's "awe-inspiring" is the invented translation in this exchange, not hers. And note Fagles, whom the tweet holds up as the faithful one, renders the same word "grimmest fight" — grim, dread, dreadful: Fagles and Wilson agree on the semantics of αἰνότατον against the tweeter.
Where Wilson is legitimately vulnerable, on the evidence of these lines:
πόλεμον → "violence." This is her one real liberty in the passage. πόλεμος is war, battle — a term with standing in the heroic code. "Violence" strips the martial frame and imports a modern moralized register. "Dreadful war" or Fagles's "grimmest fight" keeps the category; "dreadful violence" changes it. If the tweeter had aimed here, he'd have a case.
τολμήσαντα dropped. "Having dared/endured" — the verb of heroic daring. Fagles catches it ("he had ever braved"); Wilson's compression loses it. That's a genuine subtraction of heroic coloring.
Epithets flattened. ἀντιθέῳ Μενελάῳ is "godlike Menelaus" — Fagles gives the loose but vigorous "diehard Menelaus"; Wilson drops the epithet entirely. μεγάθυμον Ἀθήνην is "great-hearted Athena" — Wilson: bare "Athena"; Fagles inflates to "Athena's superhuman power," which is more than the Greek says. So the honest scorecard on epithets: Wilson subtracts, Fagles adds, and the Greek sits between them.
The cause is mechanical before it is ideological: Wilson translates line-for-line in iambic pentameter — fewer syllables per line than the hexameter — so compression is forced on every verse, and epithets are the first cargo overboard. Fagles's loose six-beat line lets him expand. You can fault her choice of form as guaranteeing a thinner Homer; that's a fair fight. But on the specific charge the tweet makes — that she perverted a glory-word into a shame-word — the Greek convicts the tweeter, not the translator. αἰνότατον πόλεμον is a dark phrase in the original: Demodocus, singing to please, still calls the fight at Deiphobus's door most dreadful, and Homer's very next move is Odysseus dissolving in tears likened to a widow being dragged into slavery. The darkness at Troy's fall is not Wilson's insertion. It is Homer's design — the poet of the Iliad never once lets a sack be clean.

[Joseph Perna @JosephPerna]

always _always_ in the mood @FilmLinc @Posteritati @janusfilms #WONGFLC