Back in 2017 I posted about Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey, and now her version of the Iliad has come out, to mixed reviews. Conveniently, I have been sent links to one rave (thanks, Songdog!) and one pan (thanks, Eduardo!), so I will present bits from both. First, Naoíse Mac Sweeney’s praise in the Washington Post (archived):
Wilson has forged a poetic style in English that captures the essence of Homeric Greek, a style that she explains in her helpful “Translator’s Note.” Eschewing rhyme, she has arranged her verse into a loose iambic pentameter, allowing it to spill over to occupy some 4,000 more lines than the original poem. On the page the metricality of Wilson’s verse is lost — the rhythm comes alive only when you read aloud, the words whistling up the windpipe, animating the tongue and striking the ear. No other translation communicates the oral nature of the poem so brilliantly.
Another key element in Wilson’s style is the register, poised between the high epic and the everyday. Her tone manages a sweeping grandeur without pomposity, and is both refreshingly modern and largely free of the jarring chattiness of contemporary colloquialisms. (There are a few exceptions where Wilson’s choice of vocabulary is somewhat incongruous: Achilles leaves his guests “flabbergasted,” for example; Paris is labeled a “sleazy flirt”; and Odysseus threatens to expose another man’s “private parts” when he is angry with him.) The resulting text is — and I mean this in the best possible way — highly readable. Wilson’s “Iliad” is a genuine page-turner, and it is all too easy to gallop through it as one would a beach read.
Wilson’s style is like the proverbial mountain stream — clean and clear, and bubbling along at pace. Reading hundreds of lines listing one violent death after another can, in some translations of the epic, feel somewhat tiresome, but in Wilson’s hands it is more like watching a tightly edited movie, the scenes slick and bloodily compelling. In her “Odyssey,” Wilson restricted herself to the same number of lines as the original poem, meaning that some sections came across as somewhat abrupt in English. In her “Iliad,” she has set herself free from this constraint, with some of the poem’s 24 books running hundreds of lines longer than in the original, and the verse breathes more easily as a result.
As counterpoint, Valerie Stivers bashes it for Compact. After calling it “the most readable Iliad I’ve encountered” and saying “many of her turns of phrase are direct and beautiful,” she goes on the attack:
Despite the readability of the text, there are legitimate questions to be raised about Wilson’s approach. The Iliad wasn’t composed and performed in the plain, contemporary Greek of its time. Even Wilson says so in her introduction […]. By making the text plain-spoken and accessible for contemporary readers, Wilson has departed from the style and spirit of the original. Her easy, colloquial language also results in some obvious distortions: for instance, her deployment of modern pop-psychology concepts for the heroes’ states of mind—“delusional behavior,” “egotistical” and “yield[ing] to a destructive impulse.”
Wilson believes she has identified and brought out themes in Homer’s epic that other translators have missed. She writes in her translator’s note that the Iliad is “a poem about death” […]. Some of the limitations of this viewpoint should already be apparent. As a unifying concept, it’s a string of generalities, from which it is difficult to imagine narrative tension arising. We begin the poem not realizing that humans die and finish with a vivid understanding that this is the case? […]
Wilson’s emphasis on death informs her understanding of character development. In her view, the Greek warriors are initially moved by a desire for selfish personal gain. The gain comes either as plunder in warfare, or as the honor and glory they will have earned from the fighting. She sees these desires as fundamentally misguided and writes that Achilles, traditionally considered the book’s tragic hero, needs to recognize that bargaining his life for this form of immortality “was never worth it in the first place.” His story, Wilson writes, begins with a selfish, childish, and irrational insistence on having what he wants, which is resolved only when he accepts that he, like everyone else, won’t live forever and can’t always get his way. This is a “cognitive and emotional journey, from courageous confidence to a final realization of his own mortality.”
Wilson is able to choose words that bolster her reading of the work, not least by making the heroes sound comical, unreasonable, or absurd where previous translators have chosen to valorize them. For instance, in her version Achilles, “sobbing hard,” complains to his mother, the nymph Thetis, that Agamemnon “disrespected me! He took my trophy! He seized it and now keeps it for himself!” A scholar of Homeric Greek might quibble with these choices on semantic grounds, but the deeper issue is that it doesn’t make sense on the story-level to suggest that men who risk death every day and see their fellow warriors dying all around them need help recognizing their own mortality, or to portray men seeking to immortalize their names as big babies terrified of death.
The effects of Wilson’s interpretation on the reading experience are subtle, but they cumulatively drain the narrative of tension. […] Homer may, of course, have intended Agamemnon to be the buffoon Wilson makes him out to be, but this reading isn’t supported by events in the text. After all, Agamemnon has been laying siege to Troy for nine years, and in the epic’s inciting incident, he brazenly steals some property from his star fighter just to assert his dominance. He’s an antagonist, dim, powerful, destructive, and frightening—not hasty or cowardly. The inconsistencies in Wilson’s forced characterizations create cognitive dissonance. […]
Art reveals all, and we can tell Wilson’s approach isn’t faithful to the original because it makes the story fall apart. Her Achilles is a man deluded by his privilege, and his journey is to learn just how misguided he is; his tragedy, to the extent that there is one, is that he does a lot of damage along the way. By way of contrast, consider what the poem looks like if his rage is justified and his actions are meaningful. In Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character, first published in 1994, the psychiatrist Johnathan Shay recounted his work with a group of American combat veterans in the Boston area suffering from “severe, chronic” PTSD. Shay discovered that the Iliad “gives center stage to bitter experiences that actually do arise in war,” specifically the way that the experience of “heavy, continuous combat” can sever a person’s social ties and induce profound, lasting psychological damage. […]
To blame the tragedy on Achilles’s character flaws, the way Wilson’s translation choices tend to—or to claim that its heroes were all wrong, while we who sit in judgment of them in the present are all right—occludes the poem’s humanity and moral greatness. And it is especially frustrating to see the epic poem receive such treatment because of the essential lessons it has to offer us about the dangers and tragedies of war, and the value and fragility of communities. The victorious translator, lauded everywhere, drags the book behind her chariot.
Ouch! Me, I can’t get too exercised about the merits and demerits of any particular version of Homer any more; I’ve seen too many come and go, and none of them is “the Homer for our time.” I think people should read whichever translation appeals to them and makes them want to read more, and if they get hooked, they can and should read another. (Of course, if they really get hooked, they can and should learn enough Greek to at least try it in the original…) But it’s fun to watch the inevitable arguments play out before everyone forgets about it and moves on to the next thing.
I am struck by “some of the poem’s 24 books running hundreds of lines longer than in the original.” The mean length of a book of the Iliad is a bit over 650 lines of Greek hexameter, so that seems quite a lot over in percentage terms. I certainly understand the arguments against a pure one-to-one correspondence but that much additional length (unless her lines are systematically shorter in semantic content?) suggests she’s maybe just making up stuff and adding it — at a minimum sort of putting what should be explanatory footnotes right into the flow of the text when the original is cryptic or spare or assumes background cultural knowledge a modern reader will likely lack? But someone would need to take one of the seemingly-longer books and go through it carefully to figure out what’s really going on.
I was struck by that too, and I’d like to see a review that addressed it in some detail.
To supplement that, the positive review suggests (w/ the 4000 line number) that the total product has about 25% more lines than the original. Of course, if it’s in loose iambic pentameter, a line of non-loose IP has ten syllables of English while a line of Homeric hexameter typically has 15+ syllables of Greek. I rather suspect English has more information-density-per-syllable, but I’m not sure if there’s a good quantification of that out there.
EDITED TO ADD: Chapman’s Iliad maintains a line-to-line correspondence (approximately) by putting the English in iambic heptameter. Which sounds exotic but it’s just like ballad meter with half as many line breaks.
EDITED TO ADD TO THE EDITED TO ADD: Actually I just noticed (because Chapman’s lines come in rhymed couplets) that he squeezes the first seven lines of the Greek into six lines of his English heptameter. (The rhymes are imposd/losd, cave/gave, and begunne/Sonne.)
Stivers’ review is well argued; not least because of its sensitive appreciation of the original. She’s not bashing the translation just for the sake of it.
If we must have renderings of the Iliad through modern sensibilities, Christopher Logue’s War Music is hard to beat. Not least because he doesn’t claim that it’s a translation: it’s a kind of response to Homer, and actually an illuminating one. (Like his rendering of Athene’s Homeric epithet as teenage Athene: it’s both horribly wrong and spot on in the way it confronts you with what a different world Homer’s is from ours.)
I was not previously familiar with Ms. Stivers’ byline, but just to give you some context, here’s how she describes her current metier(s) at her twitter feed: “Cooking column @parisreview; books column @compactmag_. Quick, someone give me a sex column and let’s make it x3.”
More substantively, this from some other person-on-the-internet-I’ve-never-heard-of responding to Stivers’ review: “Another way of putting it would be to say that latent tensions within Homer’s text should be left in their position of latency–i.e., not artificially promoted to prominence by a tendentious translation.”
The eyes of the crow and the eye of the camera open
On to Homer’s world, not ours.
…
Auden, too, knew that Homer’s world was not ours, and that the Iliad is about war, not anything so modish as checking your privilege. (It was Stiver’s discussion of Achilles in Vietnam that made me think of this great poem for a ruined city.)
If we must have renderings of the Iliad through modern sensibilities, Christopher Logue’s War Music is hard to beat. Not least because he doesn’t claim that it’s a translation: it’s a kind of response to Homer, and actually an illuminating one.
Yes, Logue is my go-to guy for that kind of thing. What an amazing poet he was!
I’m not opposed to this sort of thing in principle: for example. Maria Headley’s Beowulf is very good. I reckon. Amazon’s description of it a “a new feminist translation” is both lazy and patronising. It’a a good translation before anything else.
But Headley groks the original and is respectful of it; her “feminist” slant (so far as it’s not an invention of philistine marketing men in the service of a billionaire troll) is illuminating, and neither distracting nor inappropriate. Obviously all translation must involve interpretation and cultural transposition, but it’s possible to do that without travesty.
@DE, as for me, if some good things are called “feminist”, I’m only glad.
I’m struck by the use of readable in both reviews (I’ve read the reviews but not the translation, so I don’t feel qualified to comment on the latter. The positive reviewer excuses her use of the word; the negative reviewer plants it in the middle of her Praise Section, something that all negative reviews need in order to make them more negative (there is a similar Dispraise Section in positive reviews, I hasten to add).
How is it that readability comes to be considered a vice in a book? I fear I know all too well. The more unintelligible a work, the better it is considered. Sometimes I wish Joyce had written Finnegans Wake first and Ulysses afterwards.
Compact magazine was founded by a couple of “integrationalist” (read: theocratic) Catholics. Stivers also used to write for The eXile, which Rolling Stone described as “consisting of misogynist rants, dumb pranks, insulting club listings and photos of blood-soaked corpses” alongside some decent reportage. She’s just peeved that Wilson didn’t portray Achilles as a Manly Manly Man.
I confess to having enjoyed The eXile back in the day, but I take your point and appreciate the context.
Of course, the more positive review appeared in a publication owned and controlled by a controversial bajillionaire with an undisclosed (but presumably sinister!) agenda, who is either a Bond supervillain or a great benefactor of humanity, depending on who you ask.
“Stivers also used to write for The eXile, which Rolling Stone described”
Worse: she is Russian (or so she looks and it is consistent with “used to write for the eXile”).
And I would not trust someone whose name is “Naoíse Mac Sweeney” either.
she is Russian
That is a very serious allegation. I hope you can substantiate it.
And I would not trust someone whose name is “Naoíse Mac Sweeney”
No, no. The Irish are fine. It’s the Welsh you have to beware of.
Ms. Stivers is also the author of a 2007-published novel titled “Blood Is the New Black,” which apparently adapts the dysfunctional-fashion-magazine setting of “The Devil Wears Prada” by adding the twist that the magazine’s editorial staff seems to be dominated by vampires. Which I mention only because it has been translated into at least two other languages: French (“La mode est au rouge sang”) and Italian (“Il sangue nero del vampiro”). Perhaps someone with reading knowledge of those languages might wish to track down reviews and see what they say about the style and quality of the translation.
Honestly, I thouht “but Arab[ic speaker]s are worse!” and then I thought, am I not being disrespectful to the Irish? As for the Welsh, I’m afraid I group them (partly:) in langauage matters for example) with Bretons and Bretons treat you to crêpes / krampouezh /crempogau! There are many words for such people, bad is not one of them.
Sorry:(
The best known quote today about working in The eXile office:
Taibbi and Ames are utterly vile individuals, but the Russian women who worked for them generally deserve compassion, not opprobrium. For example, I don’t think any if the female writers were ever paid to review male prostitutes.
@drasvi:
Myself, I have never treated anyone to crêpes. I can only attribute such radically unBrythonic behaviour on the part of my cousins to the corrupting effect of living in the land of la belle cuisine.
(Here in Wales we only have leeks. But we are a proud and happy people.)
The eXile: I’m ashamed. They plaeyd chess with Russian prostitutes.
Back then I considered sex for money absolutely inacceptable, but still was curious about prostitutes. So I needed an excuse and considered chess for a while and decided that a guy calling a brothel and asking if any of the girls loves chess will look stupid (though likely some of the girls do).
Like strippers, prostitutes may have a wide variety of interests:
https://rodgersandhammerstein.com/song/pal-joey/zip/
Moreover, the Bodhisattva Samantabhadra has been known to appear as a prostitute:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/42597883
The moral is, you should never leap to conclusions about people.
Of course, not too many years after Rolling Stone published the characterization of the Exile quoted above, they hired Taibbi to write for them. Perhaps he was secretly a Catholic integralist throughout the period and engaged in such outwardly depraved and libertine conduct in order to maintain his cover?
it doesn’t make sense on the story-level to suggest that men who risk death every day and see their fellow warriors dying all around them need help recognizing their own mortality, or to portray men seeking to immortalize their names as big babies terrified of death.
this seems the core of the review to me – and probably the only thing actually going on in it. and it would be absolutely laughable if it weren’t a central part of the rhetoric used (by liberals and fascists alike) to portray genocidaires and massacre perpetrators as Fully Self-Actualized (TM) sources of moral guidance to be emulated in all areas of their lives. my experience of the people i’ve known who’ve had those experiences matches stivers’ hostile summary of wilson quite closely, leading me to believe that aside from anything else, i wouldn’t trust stivers to tell me it’s night without looking out the window to check.
i’m looking forward to reading all of wilson’s homer, but i’ll be surprised if i meet a rendering of the Illiad that i think is better than mark merlis’ An Arrow’s Flight.
Matt Taibbi?!?
Yeah. Definitely Opus Angelorum.
Naoise is an originally male name that in recent decades has been bestowed on more girls than boys. I have never before seen it spelt Naoíse. (Wikipedia informs me of a Naoisé O’Reilly, who perhaps coincidentally is dyslexic.)
Definitely Opus Angelorum
That’s what Opus Dei want you to think.
“want you to think.”
Aren’t they the kind of people who always get what they want?
I’m not a member of Opus Dei but I’ve used some of their resources. For example I own and use one of their prayer books which is great because it is mostly bilingual Latin-Spanish with the Latin prayers on one side and the Spanish translations on the facing page.
I actually once knew someone in Opus Dei. He was a bit intense, but showed no obvious signs of wanting to conquer the world, and hadn’t murdered any museum curators as far as I know. Or known anybody called Teabag.
(Of course, I would say that. The association of Calvinism with Geneva is well known. Verbum sapienti, as Opus Dei say. I gather.)
Aren’t they the kind of people who always get what they want?
Not while Hat still stands in their way.
“…and it is all too easy to gallop through it as one would a beach read.”
Is “gallop through” a transitive verb?
s. So I needed an excuse and considered chess for a while and decided that a guy calling a brothel and asking if any of the girls loves chess will look stupid (though likely some of the girls do).
You just needed to check out Flossie’s, per Woody Allen’s 1974 story “The Whore of Mensa (between Sleeper and Love and Death):
Is “gallop through” a transitive verb?
It’s not a verb at all. The verb is gallop, and it’s intransitive. There are lots of prepositional phrases you can attach to it: through, around, past, beyond, etc. etc.
Bare “to gallop” has at least one transitive sense, viz. “to cause to gallop” (said e.g. of the rider), whether literally or metaphorically. Indeed, if you poke around corpora you can find instances of “gallop it through,”* but I don’t think these evidence an actual phrasal verb “gallop through” but are just nonce combinations of transitive-verb/direct-object/adverb.
In the particular passage drasvi was asking about, though, the reader is being analogized to the horse rather than to the rider.
*E.g., this excerpt from the proceedings of the House of Commons in 1888, in which an MP (not entirely sure who because of the confusing way the online version of Hansard is formatted) appears to be criticizing how the Government is handling the Land Purchase (Ireland) Bill: “Not only were they [i.e. the Hon. Members] to give this Bill precedence, but they were called upon to gallop it through without a halt or breathing time.”
Leek.
But you have crempogs.
Re drasvi’s suggestion of Ms. Stivers’ potential Russianness, the N.Y. Times reported in 2005 (you can make your own judgment about how credible this is) that her full name is/was Valerie Campbell Stivers and that she is the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Stivers of Southborough, Mass. OTOH, the news in the story was that she was marrying a fellow named Ivan Yuriyevich Isakov, the son of Mr. & Mrs. Isakov of Moscow. There are a handful of references out there referring to her as “Valerie Stivers Isakov” or “Valerie Stivers-Isakov,” giving rise to the inference that like a non-trivial number of American women she uses her maiden name in professional contexts but her married name in certain other contexts. One of those is an obituary for her grandfather (1920-2015), indicating she has a son named Timur Ivanovitch.
i am rarely hesitant to ascribe parental politics based on children’s names (having known a sac[co-]van[zetti], a stalina, a che, and an amilcar in my time), so i will just say that that kid’s name tells me everything i need to know about which specific strand of the far right stivers is part of. and that it confirms my earlier opinion about the point of her review [sic].
Does the choice of transliteration inform your opinion? What English speaker writes “Ivanovitch” nowadays?
I haven’t encountered it that I recall in the U.S. either among immigrants or their children, but wikipedia advises me that “Timur (Russian: Тиму́р) is also a popular name for boys in post-Soviet states, due in part to its usage in the novel Timur and His Squad by Arkady Gaidar.” That book is a piece of Soviet agitprop from the 1940’s and the so-called Timurite (тимуровское) movement it inspired would generally not be considered “far right.” Although a far-right faction celebrating Tamerlane as a role model for emulation would be kinda fascinating in its own way?
That said, once a name has been popular for a few generations, the political context of its original popularity may have faded away. You think of it as a potential name for your own kid not because of the original vector of popularization but because you have an uncle or a school classmate with that name. And we have in this forum both residents of and emigrants from former Soviet territory, who perhaps can tell us whether they either do or don’t read any political coding into the use of Тиму́р as the name of someone’s child. Back in college I knew a guy with the given name “Attila,” which would seem at first glance to signal “really weird parents” but turned out in practice just to signal “immigrant ethnic-Magyar parents X generations removed from the original (re)popularization of the name by possibly unsavory nationalists.”
Ms. Stivers also has another child with a less exotic-sounding (in the American context) first name and a middle name that is not a Slavic patronymic so one can imagine a scenario in which each spouse got to pick a name.
@KI:
naah.* just the namesakes / historical references, really.
but you do make a good point! i think the spelling could be seen as part of the specific kind of conscious archaism in the russia-obsessed u.s. far right, in line with visual symbology like the romanizing V in “retvrn [to an essentially fictional fantasized ‘tradition’]”.
[edited to add]
@JWB:
i think “timur” is signaling very precisely the overlay that defines a lot of the u.s. russia-obsessed far right: stalinostalgia (centered partly on the Strong Leader image and partly on the populist stateolatry that those kinds of storybooks were written to feed) and embrace of the ‘eastern** warrior’ fantasy that links parts of the contemporary and pre-1917 russian (and russia-centered pan-slavist) far right.
and the pointed use of “ivanovitch” in a u.s. anglophone context also invokes tsars with specific importance to the u.s. far right fantasies about russia.
.
* nā? n2? nahh?
** i.e. free from european decadence (read, among other things: jews).
тихо шифером шурша
едет крыша не спеша
(as kids used to say when I was a school boy).
not about rozele, but about this whole culture of trying-to-guess-one’s-political-alignment. People, you’re crazy. Just saying.
all’s i’m saying is: when people tell you who they are, believe them!
As in CASAPOVND?
Anyway, “Attila” remains popular in Hungary, or at least did 30 years ago, without any connotations that I can see; it has passed into the general pool. Of course it started with nationalists who tried to “re”claim the Huns, but such things do fade over 150 years.
The moral is, you should never leap to conclusions about people.
I’m not convinced that slow-walking is preferable to leaping. The mosca in the sopa here is the search for final, reliable conclusions.
Of course it’s impractical to hesitate all down the line. Current conclusions must be acted on. Remorse is always hiding round the corner.
The mosca in the meta-sopa is laziness. Die Gewohnheit, bei jeder halbwegs passenden Gelegenheit den Griffel fallen zu lassen.
all’s i’m saying is: when people tell you who they are, believe them!
Doesn’t work unless you want it to.
Doesn’t work unless you want it to.
I have no idea what that is intended to mean. (Of course you’ll tell me that “intent” is a useless category and I should simply let the words wash over me.)
I’m not convinced that slow-walking is preferable to leaping
A: “Why does everyone take an instant dislike to me?”
B: “Saves time.”
Leeks
Those are Finnish leeks. Quite a different thing. (Historically, Greater Wales extended only as far as the Baltic.)
“Saves time.”
Yes indeedy. I’m all for timesaving measures. I myself do a lot of leaping to conclusions. Im Dreieck springen. [The derivation sounds too neat to be true, but it’s a nice try.]
The thing is, you have to leap until you drop. No pauses allowed for patting yourself on the back.
“all’s i’m saying is: when people tell you who they are, believe them!”
rozele, I joked about Russians (I would joke about describing Rolling Stone if I did not think – mistakenly – she’s Russian) because when people need to know where a girl worked years ago to evaluate her opinion, I can’t take it seriously.
If the left operates so (whe wrote for the eXile, then she must think that…) and especially if the right operates so (I wrote for the eXile, then I Must think that…)… I won’t continue.
Those are Finnish leeks.
What do Welsh leeks look like ? Are they unsuitable for cheerleader practice ?
Hard (meaning I can’t really do it in two minutes with my limited skills …) to get good corpus data on the relative prevalence of -vich versus vitch in U.S. spellings over time, and of course the spellings preferred by actual immigrants (including as given to their US-born children) might deviate from “regular” use by L1 Anglophone writers.
It’s also possible in principle that an obit written by funeral home staff for a non-Slavic guy (the great-grandfather of the Timur in question) who lived in a part of the U.S. with minimal Slavic ethnic presence might have misspelled the patronymic based on vague and unreliable memories about how you deal with that sort of furrin name. You would think rule one for obituaries is to at least get the names right, but when you’ve moved past the decedent to a fairly large number of specifically named descendants-plus-descendants-in-law, errors are possible.
Now, if the surname (in the case of a recent immigrant, not a family where romanization had been fixed a century ago) had come out romanized as Isakoff, that would seem like a consciously archaizing decision and a signal of something, although what that something might be (probably a range of possibilities) might take a while to figure out.
the specific kind of conscious archaism in the russia-obsessed u.s. far right
They could have gone with “Isakoff” too, though maybe there are too many modern people who’ve inherited “-off” names for it to work as a signifier.
As in CASAPOVND?
And Identity Evropa.
Those are Finnish leeks
The Authority:
Once the emergency tribunal has been convened and has ruled, one way or the other, we’ll all sleep easier.
“Those are Finnish leeks.” – yes, but still you do have a word for crempogs.
It is even similar to the breton one (first attested 15th century).
Someone MUST do it in Wales: bake them and treat people to them.
I knew a Bela in college who had a daughter named Irene. When I asked him what was up with his parents (neither Hungarian nor Greek) naming one child ‘war[rior]'[*] and the other ‘peace’, he replied in effect: ‘My parents had no clue what the names meant, they just liked the sound of them.
[*] This etymology is totally wrong, but I didn’t know that then.
People, you’re crazy.
I was going through a long list of fallacies to try to find the name for the fallacy of accepting false but plausible connections, but gave up. Due to the virtues of alphabetical order, I did find angelism, defined as ‘falsely claiming that one is capable of “objective” reasoning and judgment without emotion, claiming for oneself a viewpoint of Olympian “disinterested objectivity” or pretending to place oneself far above all personal feelings, temptations or bias.’ Great name.
I knew a Bela in college who had a daughter named Irene.
Did you mean to write “sister”?
That would actually explain a few things; see this paper and section 5 of this.
Last names like mine (frozen patronymics) were Frenchified for international use into the mid-20th century. Milanković comes to mind.
The quite new Tinkoff Bank comes to mind; I guess it’s going for “old money” (as opposed to “oligarch who got very rich very quickly in living memory”).
Oh yes.
BTW, that phenomenon is by no means limited to the Decadent West and its sphere of decadent influence. I’ve met Afghans who simply got the names of Bollywood actors and found out what they mean later.
Maybe those Frenchies are more tolerant of diacritical marks, but bearers of those South Slavic surnames ending in -vić who immigrate to the U.S. generally end up with surnames ending in -vic, often pronounced /vɪk/.
Re Tinkoff Bank, if you believe wikipedia the founder is surnamed Тиньков (or was – he’s now a Cypriot citizen surnamed Τινκοφ) but the bank is Тинькофф. I don’t know if that doubling of the final letter would seem as weird to an L1 Russophone as it seems to me.
I mean -vitch spellings.
Given without an accent in the English Wikipedia. There’s no article on him in Greek… and Google finds almost equal numbers for both options!
We discussed Tinkoff, the man, his bank, and their varying spellings, in 2016 starting here, and as I said in 2021 “Several years later I wound up editing a translation of a book by this guy!” (Yes, it’s as terrible a book as you would expect.)
What do Welsh leeks look like ? Are they unsuitable for cheerleader practice ?
Utterly unsuitable. I would say more, but that might cause you to go Mad from the Revelation.
Okay, hat is not an *L1* Russophone, but is far enough along the spectrum that his reaction that the doubling of the ф is weird is a lot more meaningful than mine.
hat: when you edited the English translation were you checking it against the Russian original or just dealing with the English the translator had generated and trying to clean it up at the margin? I could see having you do the former adding value but I could also see a publisher thinking that having you do that would cost them more than they had budgeted.
Of course I did the former (not consistently, just when I suspected there might be a problem). And no, I wasn’t paid extra (I wasn’t paid by the publisher but by the translator) — I just couldn’t ignore the original.
Separately, I am edified by David M’s explanation, although I will not endeavor to try to figure out the idiomatic FYLOSC for “lightbulb moment.” I had never previously noticed (although it’s quite obvious once noticed!) that ending a romanization with -tch is of course the same pattern as starting one with tch-, as in Tchaikovsky etc. Which is at least vaguely French or French-ish, since bare “ch” in French is just /ʃ/ rather than /tʃ/.
With that sort of attitude of insisting on doing a competent job regardless of whether you’re being paid to do so or not, it’s probably better for all concerned that you’ve retired so you don’t make your competitors look bad.
I’ve known a couple of Turkish-American Timurs. It’s a rare name that works in both cultures, as it can be shortened to “Tim”.
I always thought Tamerlane was a wonderful-sounding name, but it has a political valance (even if not previously, then because of Tamerlan Tsarnaev).
The general welcomes Tamburlaine receiv’d,
When he arrived last upon the stage,
Have made our poet pen his Second Part…
I think the percentage of Americans who will connect “Timur” with Tamerlan/Tamerlane/Tamburlaine is … pretty small? Not even sure if my daughters’ AP World History class covered him under any name, although they did cover his descendant Babur (conventionally said to have been the first Moghul Emperor).
Although now I’m curious as to what the prevalence and perceived ethnic valence of “Timur” was in Russophone society before the “plucky young lad whose tireless volunteer efforts support the Red Army in a Home Front kind of way” association arose in the 1940’s.
A nubile tram.
https://languagehat.com/curing-peevery/#comment-4485770
Although now I’m curious as to what the prevalence and perceived ethnic valence of “Timur” was in Russophone society before the “plucky young lad whose tireless volunteer efforts support the Red Army in a Home Front kind of way” association arose in the 1940’s.
Putting “Тимуръ” into Google Books gets pretty much entirely references to Tamerlane.
And a search on “Тимур” limited to 1890-1925 gets the same sort of hits.
A Greek-Welsh couple (friends of my Hispanic son) threatened to call their daughter Cariadne, but happily recoiled from the brink and called her Ariadne instead.
@JWB: i think the number of u.s.ians who’ve heard of mr. t under either name is pretty small!
which is a pity, because the marlowe play is (to me at least) just fantastic, and would be such a crowd-pleaser if it were put up more often. the only chance i’ve had to see it staged was in 2014 – and that claimed to be the first “major”* new york production since 1956.
.
* whatever that means. i think in this case it’s mostly a way to not have to decide whether charles ludlam’s Conquest of the Universe, or When Queens Collide – perhaps an even better play – counts.
in re Attila and Timur, Trevor Noah tells the story of how one of his friends in their teenage rock and roll band in South Africa, was named Hitler.. they went to play a gig at a Jewish school and it did not end well.
Sparknotes glosses this as,
Many Black South Africans chose European names like Hitler, Mussolini, or Napoleon out of a vague sense that these were powerful men whom white people fought against. The Holocaust is the worst moment in history for many people in Western cultures. For many black Africans, Hitler was seen as little more than a significant historical figure.
Timur makes me think of Tamburlaine, but I have always read too much.
I enjoyed Stivers’ review, seemed to me trenchant and interesting.
Man named after Adolf Hitler wins local election:
Well, one man’s thug/tyrant/usurper is sometimes another man’s historically transformational hero. I didn’t post at the time, but I wasted some time yesterday evening poking around in the SSA baby names database on trends over time (the interface is currently set up to give you easy results for 1900-2022, even though they have some late 19th-century data that you ought to be able to get into those graphs) in given names of US-born boys that some might feel negatively about for historical association reasons. I decided it would be imprudent to investigate names derived from U.S. presidents with divisive legacies, so these are all names that might be associated with controversial foreign strongmen. Results:
Caesar (lowish popularity in early 20th century – not in top 1000 after 1922)
Cesar (first appeared in top 1000 in 1948, steady increase presumably due to increased Hispanic population until peak at #158 in 2004, decrease since then presumably due to changing fashions – #345 in 2022)
Julius (most popular in the decade before WW1 when it bounced around between #95 and #113 – slow but steady decline bottoming out at #438 in 1975 then some modest subsequent cycles of resurgence and decline – #348 in 2022)
Augustus (started century modestly popular, e.g. #288 in 1902, with slow but steady decline leading to total absence from top 1000 from 1971 through 1990, then reappearance and resurgence – #467 in 2022)
Napoleon (modest popularity in early 20th century peaking at #390 in 1901; slow subsequent decline – not in top 1000 after 1972)
Adolph (always more common in U.S. than “Adolf” variant spelling; #180 in 1900, slow steady decline with pace not accelerating that notably during 1930’s but then fairly dramatic year-over-year drop between 1941 and 1942, then comparative stability at a lower plateau through around 1960, then steady decline – not in top 1000 after 1970)
Adolfo (ups and downs over course of 20th century not obviously corresponding timelinewise to notoriety of Hitler; eventual peak at #488 in 2003 followed by somewhat mysterious rapid decline and disappearance from top 1000 after 2009)
Benito (rising in early 20th century to fairly steady-if-modest popularity from early 1920’s through early 1980’s, then decline until disappearance from top 1000 after 2003 – brief blip of negative association seen in significant year-over-year drop from 1941 to 1942 but back above 1941 level by 1946)
Fidel (steady low-frequency over course of 20th century but significant year-over-year increase in 1959 over 1958, returning after a few years to relatively steady plateau at prior level until final decline – was at #811 in 1997 but disappeared from top 1000 after 2005)
Early in my legal career (maybe ’94 through ’96) I spent a lot of time working on a very large case that was pending in front of this now-deceased federal judge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon_A._Jones_Jr.
I think it was Trevor Noah who told about a childhood (black South African) friend named Hitler, without anyone noticing anything out of the ordinary. My daughter in South Africa reports that for her college friends, European issues like the war in Ukraine, or Napoleon, or the political aspects of WW2, seem distant and quaint. It’s a lesson worth learning that what is laden with importance in one culture or part of the world may be utterly meaningless in another, even if the basic values are the same.
Well, xkcd appears to approve of it.
https://xkcd.com/2837/
@Trond although of course increasing international migration creates additional issues as cultures that have different modes and levels of response to e.g. the Nazi regime thereby come into closer contact and thereby have more opportunities for mutual confusion and misunderstanding. To give one relevant example, the number of people living in the U.S. who are adherents of Asian-origin religions that view the swastika as a very positive symbol that is absolutely definitely not taboo has increased dramatically (from a low base) in recent decades. Should the immigrants assimilate to our swastika taboo or should we modify our taboo in the interests of multiculturalism and/or realism about the complexity of the world? How do we reconcile this with the curious fact that the swastika has become *more* taboo in the West in recent decades as the actual Nazi regime recedes farther into the past and the number of people still alive with any first hand memories of it continues to decrease?
My state’s brand new legal restriction on Nazi symbols has a clause explicitly saying swastikas used in connection with Buddhism, Hinduism or Jainism are not Nazi symbols. My child’s school friend is named Swastika. I’ve seen swastikas on the door of newly completed houses in my street in the past few years. On a theoretical level, I see that there’s some tension that might need reconciling. In practice, it doesn’t seem such a big deal.
Maybe where you are, but I’m pretty sure that’s not the case elsewhere. I have not seen swastikas in public… well, ever, as far as I know, nor do I know anyone called Swastika. I mean, good for your state, but it’s not representative.
My local area is far from representative of my city as a whole, let alone “the West”. It just seems like a good example of increased concern about Nazi related swastikas and increased presence of immigrants wishing to use the swastika for other reasons co-existing without much trouble.
Is that the US catching up with Europe?
Where I lived in SoCal 1978-82, swastikas were a common graffito indicating that the graffitist was an ignorant white boy. Jubilant swastikas blossomed everywhere the day after Reagan was elected.
Ew.
But interesting to see that the edgelords were already overwhelmingly Republican in 1980.
I’m not sure there’s an immediate connection. 1980 was about the exact moment when swastikas and other Nazi-related graffiti were at their height in Norway too, and, since we don’t start trends, surely other parts of non-German Western Europe. To me, 12 years old and observing national news and the big boys around me, it seemed aligned with punk.
Punk would soon grow into something very different.
Just re “catching up with Europe” I was actually thinking about this story from 2020. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53249645
For that first generation of big-P Punks, it was not about Nazi sympathies, but about visibly not giving a shit about expectations or religious and moral norms, and especially not giving a shit if Nazi symbols were bad. One generation after the war, they were fed up with everything, and especially the history of WW2,
FWIW 1980 is around when I would attend a suburban US public high school (thousands of miles east of California) wearing a denim jacket adorned with inter alia a button with a picture of the then-recently-deceased Sid Vicious. Who if you looked closely enough was wearing (as he was wont to do in real life) a t-shirt with a swastika on it. I would have if challenged indignantly insisted that wearing a picture of a guy wearing a swastika was a totally different thing than, you know, wearing a swastika. Not that anyone (including school authority figures) ever challenged me about it. Third-Reich-type imagery had been common in the U.S. in the outlaw-biker subculture long before punk-rock came along, for essentially the same reason – viz. it hopefully freaked out the uptight squares. Thoughts about other potential semiotic angles one might be broadcasting regardless of ones subjective intent and whether one should want to be signalling them were even more unlikely to penetrate the outlaw-biker mindset than the punk-rocker mindset.
Maybe I should add that on account of having lived for a few years in Japan I was much more aware than the average American of the Buddhist-etc. angle, but I would not have tried to argue “hey, how do you know Sid wasn’t trying to symbolically embrace Buddhism or Jainism.”
Per a 2018 article in a local newspaper, there are swastika tiles all over the floors of the Brooklyn Garden Apartments (4th Ave. between 23rd St. and 24th St. in that borough) that startle new tenants and visitors. The building was constructed in 1928; unfortunately the architect is not known, but tile experts say that it was simply a geometric symbol without a special significance at the time, like the crown, cross, and overlapping-circles tiles also found there, and that in the 1920s such symbols were a common tile motif.
Tenants are divided: leave them alone, paint over them, put up a historical plaque. The landlord, who by his name is Jewish, is not going to do anything. “It’s just an emblem engraved on the floor”, he says.
Oh. Oopsie.
The Finnish Air Command logo story is interesting to me for the fact that all the media stories are from 2020, when the symbol had already been “quietly dropped” a couple of years earlier. It also led to lots of online discussion stating that they’d dropped all the swastikas in their emblems and flags, but in truth it was only the most prominent one that was replaced.
I suppose it is different thing from the new Nazi symbol laws here in Australia, which are prompted by concern around neo-Nazi activity rather than discomfort over a long-standing symbol.
There’s a building at Indiana U, also, that has swastika tiles.
As chance would have it, yesterday I pulled into a parking spot at a rest stop along the Massachusetts Turnpike right next to a Harley-Davidson. Whose none-too-young rider, when we both got back to our vehicles, turned out to be wearing an outfit proclaiming an affiliation with the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablos_Motorcycle_Club. No swastikas that I noticed as part of the jacket’s decoration, but multiple iterations of the SS runes (doppelte Siegrune) and some Totenköpfe, although to be fair I would not have given the latter a German label but for the former. I did not engage him in conversation to inquire what these various symbols meant to him …
Just returning briefly to the question of the political valence-if-any of males from formerly-Soviet-territory family roots named “Timur,” it turns out that there’s a talented ice hockey prospect named Timur Ibragimov (who doesn’t have an English-language wiki page and is 25 years younger than the retired Uzbekistani boxer of the same name who does). He’s been bouncing back and forth between the Нью-Джерси Девилз and their minor-league affiliate the Ютика Кометс. I saw Ютика playing last night against the Бриджпорт Айлендерс but for whatever reason (injury? in transit back up to N.J.?) Timur was not in the lineup. Each team did (despite the negative publicity the current Russian government is attracting in North America) still put one Russian* player out on the ice. Ютика played a Даниил, while Бриджпорт played a Руслан.
*The North American hockey world just identifies players by country of origin/citizenship, so either/both of these guys could have Russian passports but belong to a non-Russian minority ethnicity.
Нью-Джерси Девилз
Some Russian reporters today seem to try harder for veridicality than Anglophone speakers (in days gone by) with their “Munich” etc.
But Timur is Mongolian төмөр, is it not? It means “iron” or “steel”. Would people in Russia simply be aware of that etymology, rather than harking back to Tamerlane?
I am skeptical that the median Russian-on-the-street knows much of anything about Mongolic etymologies, including of words that have entered the Russian lexicon. It might be otherwise with members of ethnicities that currently or historically spoke Turkic languages (with their own inventories of Mongolic-origin loanwords), although it’s also the case that Tamerlane might loom unusually large in their particular ethnicity’s sense of history. FWIW, wikipedia asserts that this hockey-playing Timur’s surname (Ibragimov) “is a common Azerbaijani, Bashkir, Tatar and Central Asian surname.” Now attested as far away as Mars, where there’s reportedly a crater named for the Soviet/Azerbaijani astronomer Nadir Baba oğlu İbrahimov / Надир Баба оглы Ибрагимов (1932-1977).
although it’s also the case that Tamerlane might loom unusually large in their particular ethnicity’s sense of history.
Under former president Karimov, the Uzbek regime created something akin to a national cult of Amir Timur (Tamerlane) as virtual founder of the Uzbek nation. I don’t know how much this cult is still maintained under his successor Mirziyoyev, who has distanced himself in many areas from the policies of his predecessor.
OTOH, naming someone Timur doesn’t necessarily imply worship of Tamerlane. The name was seen by many people with Central Asian ethnicities in the late-Soviet and early post-Soviet period as a good compromise that was both “oriental” but also familiar to and not stigmatized by the Russian-dominated culture – ethnic, but not too extreme. For that reason, I was a bit surprised by rozele’s reaction to the name – in the corner of the post-Soviet world I am most familiar with, Timur is usually a moderate compromise in naming, not a radical statement.
The name was seen by many people with Central Asian ethnicities in the late-Soviet and early post-Soviet period as a good compromise that was both “oriental” but also familiar to and not stigmatized by the Russian-dominated culture – ethnic, but not too extreme.
Yes, that’s my understanding as well.
Maybe a similar vibe with “Ruslan,” the first name of one of the Russian-passport hockey players I did actually see out on the ice on Saturday night. Wiki says it’s a name “mainly popular among Turkic (Turkish, Azerbaijani), North Caucasian (Avar, Chechen, Lezgi, Cherkes, Ossetians) and some East Slavic people.” His surname (romanized as Iskhakov) is borne per wikipedia by an ethnic-Tatar former mayor of Kazan, with Ishkhakova borne by a Bukharian Jewish musician and the slightly-differently-spelled Iskakov(a) being allegedly primarily borne by Kazakhs.
Yes, Ruslan is similar in its connotations. One of my Kazakh nephews is called Ruslan.
Re Ishkakov vs. Iskakov, one of the characteristics of Kazakh is a chain shift Turkic /t_S, d_Z/ -> /S, Z/; Turkic /S/ -> /s/, which explains the variant Iskakov.
I know a Ukranian-Kazakh whose name is Ruslan. I did not realise the implications. Ruslan to me is just a poetic name.
But I have to agree with rozele here, I don’t think they picked Timur just for the neutrality of it, with the eXile connection.
The name Timur was bowderalised but not completly. “Timur and his command”
Demir “iron” figures prominently in Turkish surnames. Özdemir “true iron”, Gökdemir “blue iron”, even Demirtaş “Eisenstein”.
“Steel” seems to be çelik.
If you read the Post review online, it’s a lot less noticeable than in the paper edition that it ran with a sidebar by Emily Wilson (archived) that is of even more Hattic interest, since it discusses five specific translation word choices she made, and compares them with other translators. For example, kunops, applied by Helen to herself, literally as “dog-face”: “The Homeric Helen is certainly canny enough to be speaking with some level of irony. I felt these ambiguities could best be evoked by rendering the word as literally as possible” — unlike some other translators, who chose “slut”, “whore”, or “wanton” there. And should the same English translation be used when the same Greek word is used by Achilles to insult Agamemnon? Wilson did, but she knows it’s not a trivial question.
(Typographical note: the web page successfully renders macrons on transliterations such as mēnin, ōkumoros, etc. The printed version failed, leaving blank spaces in place of the letters with macrons!)
I’ve seen too many come and go
According to Wikipedia, this is the 15th English translation of the Iliad in the 21st century.
Lying dog-faced pony soldier?
I am grateful to ktschwarz for the paywall-evading link to Wilson’s sidebar on word choice. I found the discussion of “wrath” for μῆνιν a bit odd because (unlike with the other examples) she doesn’t compare or contrast her judgment with that of other translators. “Wrath” is a pretty venerable choice here, not an innovation on her part: Chapman’s translation (already centuries old when Keats hyped it) begins “Achilles’ baneful wrath resound, O Goddess.” Indeed (and perhaps this is why this struck me), “wrath” is the default English translation for μῆνιν I have in my head, and I was somewhat surprised to learn via googling that the two most common translations that were floating around in my undergraduate days (Lattimore & Fitzgerald) both use “anger” instead. I don’t know if some other translation I ran across back then used “wrath” (I certainly did not read Chapman), or my fixed notion that “wrath” was the most cromulent option arose out of various in-class or after-class discussions in Greek 301b back in ’86, when the late Prof. Gould made us memorize the first seven lines in Greek. (I could still remember them two decades ago – by now I’ve only retained lines 1, 2 & 7 and get muddled in 3-6.)
Obviously in the KJV, “wrath” is used indifferently for divine wrath and human wrath. Whether that has shifted more recently because more archaic lexemes are more persistent in religious contexts seems plausible but also the sort of empirical question that someone could maybe do a good corpus linguistics investigation of to see if Wilson’s Sprachgefuehl is empirically validated. Could go either way! FWIW the google n-gram viewer shows “wrath of Achilles” modestly more common than “anger of Achilles” pretty consistently since the 1830’s, and that word order is more likely in freefloating commentary than in literal translation.
when the late Prof. Gould made us memorize the first seven lines in Greek.
Good ol’ Tom Gould again. I’ve been thinking about the “it’s a small world” phenomenon recently. I now see it to be a result of selection bias, or a kind of recency illusion, or one of them things.
There are zillions of well-known people whom many people know of, but probably don’t know. I only happen to have known Gould because, like myself, he was a cove that dared not speak his name. And an intellectual, like myself. In the Classics Department coven of UT Austin.