Academiquette

this started out as a place to make polite jokes about academic etiquette, and it still mostly is. / rip to socrates but i'm different

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I'm going to experiment with making a thread. The following is what the most common change that editors make to your writing says about your personality.

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@fstflofscholars @PhilWMagness It's definitely a whimsical idea. I had a student tell me once that he hated some professor's book and was going to write to the prof's department chair and demand that the chair fire the professor, which is similarly whimsical. Sometimes people get ideas about how things work.

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@fstflofscholars @PhilWMagness We had a period in our department, which is a good one, when the same search failed a few times. It was never because a candidate was so amazing but politically whatever this guy is that we had to cancel the search. It was always just about spousal hires &c. after we made offers.

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@bodenlosig As far as I can tell, there is one (1) course on what you could call screen studies. It's 300-level, and it looks like it tackles page-to-screen issues broadly; it's not television studies. It has a few film screenings.

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@bodenlosig You could just look at the course catalog if you want to see whether this is true. (It isn't, obviously.)

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@fstflofscholars @PhilWMagness To make it clearer, you don't actually go down the line until you find someone willing to be hired. You can usually make two offers (of three who visited campus, of 10 who did Zoom interviews, etc.), after which it's considered a failed search.

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@fstflofscholars @PhilWMagness From experience, I would guess that the most likely reason they would cancel the hire is they made offers to two qualified candidates, one after the other, who both turned them down. At that point it was a failed search.

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@notcalledjack Ah, it's a pleasure!

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@notcalledjack No, it's because Fagles is using the phrase to make a reference to Yeats's poem "Easter, 1916," which Homer had no knowledge of. I think it's an excellent phrase, but the point is that it's not strictly literal to the text, and that all translators have such moments.

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@PastPaulitics I feel sad that this guy didn't say "the Fall was pre-history," because then I could have said Book 11 consists of postlapsarian history that is ALSO not specified in terms of when the events occurred, but he hasn't read any epic poems, so.

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@PastPaulitics Shakespeare likewise often did not give a shit about time. There are clocks in "Macbeth." That play is talking about things that are larger than pointillistic historical specificity.

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@OrthodoxWario @romanhelmetguy I'm just noting that "complicated" isn't an insult and has the meaning he wants. But: oh yeah? The various-minded man? The restless man? The versatile man? That ingenious hero? The shifty? The man of resourceful spirit? The man of many wiles? Why do translators keep defying you?

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@romanhelmetguy She can't say "various-minded"; Fitzgerald does that. She can't say "much-turny"; that's stupid. She says "complicated," and etymologically, that has exactly the meaning you want. John Milton would approve; all of his poetry is like that. And he was what you'd call a great man.

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@romanhelmetguy What I'm saying is, poetry is a mode that makes the greatest possible use of the resources of language. Wilson's translation does that. You choose to misunderstand even plain English, not to speak of the additional meanings in poetic language, because she's a woman.

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@pingu_pinguping @likethemagician Does it have a value judgment? The word can mean shifty, but it can also mean ingenious, resourceful, and multifaceted. It can also mean "complicated." So, in short, we seem to agree, right, if you're so big on using the word shifty, that the word "complicated" is also fine.

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@pingu_pinguping @likethemagician They are professional translators. They translate professionally.

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@pingu_pinguping @likethemagician Now we go back, again, to: this is how poetry works. Alliteration, sound, etymology, the history of a word in other works of literature, are part of the meaning. You are being incredibly silly. And translators of literary works *do* work to preserve these things, when they can.

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@pingu_pinguping @likethemagician It's impossible to get all of it in the target language. The translator has to make a decision. The translators that have been discussed in this thread made intelligent, informed decisions. And what all of them did was translation, however much you may wail into the void.

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@pingu_pinguping @likethemagician Of course, translators know there are ways other than dictionary lines that words in poems mean. Is alliteration or the like going to be preserved? What about important puns? ("Die" and "still" are important puns in English poems that may be hard to capture in other languages.)