Take Things Apart and Put 'em Back Together Better

Immediately reminded me of this @babischlong-six image

I'm crying she basically just said

I'm crying she basically just said

Banichi: That is not how this works, Bren'ji.

The first time Bren runs back for one of his bodyguard, he gets slugged for it. By his bodyguard! Because he's not their lord, he's their principal; he's their job as an object, not a subject. (The subject is Tabini.) And he's done something utterly stupid and wrong to the atevi mind: he has jumped in a direction .

But by the time we get to the first space trilogy, Bren has accrued not only a household full of atevi who ... cannot officially say they feel man'chi toward him, but also a team of four Guild Assassins of high skill assigned to him who also ... cannot officially say they feel man'chi toward him. And this not-technically-an-aishid has been acting, for the entire first trilogy, like Bren is an object and not a subject. They work for Tabini, they are not an aishid, they are emphatically not Bren's aishid, except they are, because what else could they be?

But on their own planet, on their own continent, in their own culture, those barriers are solid. In space, on a human starship, on a human space station, with their own island of atevi sanity precariously constructed adjacent to the Dowager's, and Tabini two years away, the walls come down. The shapes they are in, as household, as aishid, anchored on Bren—what if they stopped pretending it was pretense? What if they let it be real?

What if, Jago says, we let Bren really play the part of our liege lord? Then we can stop playing parts, and our instincts will just work. The one thing that's missing, the one thing that's not "real" about their arrangement, is Bren as object. And Bren has never, to this point, really slotted in neatly that way. The shapes of atevi life around him don't precisely work if he isn't their active, agentic subject. There's an atevi intimacy to the aishid wrapping itself around their lord, a gut-level rightness, that's being held at a distance as Banichi and Jago keep treating their job as in some sense still working for Tabini, part of which is guarding the human, part not. Sure, they're going to have to deal with the fact that their lord has a tendency to try to protect them—but that has its own benefits, and out here in space, surrounded by humans, making up so much as they go along, can you imagine the temptation as they give in to it?

Banichi: That is not how this works, Bren'ji.

This is a close up? A CLOSE UP YA JERK! A CLOSEUP!

We see Garibaldi make very early-series references to his "favorite thing in the universe," which are passed off as sexual innuendo at first, with Ms. Winters. But then we see him with Delenn, in his quarters, watching cartoons, and she is eating popcorn and puzzling over "Duck Dodgers" as presumably Garibaldi explains.

The simple fact is that an equitable, more objectively good translation of the text of Homer that respects both its original linguistic and cultural contexts and the linguistic and cultural usages of today's English-language audiences is not possible without some baseline commitment against Western patriarchal white supremacist empire and the ways it has abused "Classics."

It is not a new thing, today, that nationalistic fascists have claimed the putative and entirely whitewashed Classical Heritage of the West as the ground of their entirely selective Modern notions of virtue (in the sense of vir and virtus and virility).

But in the 17th through 19th centuries, they didn't have to be nationalistic fascists; they just had to be privileged, bigoted white men in positions of relative dominance in structures of violence and oppression that let them use the arts and academé in support of empire and its own constructions of virtue.

Every translation of the Classics is a cultural project.

And most of them, historically, let's be clear, have not been thinking very hard about it. You don't have to think critically about your culture to replicate its implicit and explicit structures in basically everything you do.

The only people, by and large, who think critically about the culture of their society, how it functions and what its real principles are, are those it is structured to harm—not those it is structured to benefit.

All advances in translation quality come from one of two things:

advances in our knowledge of and so speculation about the period and contexts of the work's origins; and

advances in our critical thinking about and so awareness of the cultural contexts into which we are attempting translation.

So I will certainly grant that Dr. Wilson is right; the bar is higher for actively, ideologically feminist translations, translations that seek to represent feminist principles. Or queer principles, or Womanist principles; we all doin' our own kinds of work here, and we must all, as James Baldwin said, do our first works over again:

"Go back to where you started, or as far back as you can, examine all of it, travel your road again and tell the truth about it. Sing or shout or testify or keep it to yourself, but know whence you came."

And Dr. Wilson has been clear, all along the way, that her project—which does not exist without the work of feminist movements fighting against misogyny, among other such movements—is not about representing ideology, whether that of patriarchal Western empire or that of any counter-movement to it.

It's about representing Homer, and scraping off and ripping out the accretions and insertions endemic to Western translations that do not for those reasons accurately represent Homer.

It's about setting the bar higher than it has ever been, historically, for telling the truth about Homer instead of making him support a cultural project.

But you can't get there without all of the critical thought and understanding about the cultural projects that have abused Homer to their own ends, without therefore understanding misogyny and racism and cisheterosexism and everything else bound up in there.