I will have to pick my Divine Mother, Hekate!

1. Who Keeps Watch and Ward (Phylakê)

2. Guardian; One Who Watches Over (Episkopos)

3. Torch-bearer (Dadophoros)

4. Averter (Apotropaios)

i like wilson because she’s very readable and not obsessed with denigrating the women in the text for no reason but her lines often don’t hit me as poetry the way fagles or fitzgerald do (the other translations i’ve read; i’m just now starting lattimore so i can’t say much other than his introduction was funny, i feel like we could have had lively conversation). part of the reason i like to read the odyssey is that the language is beautiful, so to me that is wilson’s major shortcoming.

i’m most familiar with fitzgerald, who was the favorite of my first lit professor who i miss very much, but i get the sense that he’s just doing his own thing. keeping in mind that i don’t read greek and also kind of don’t trust translators, which is part of why i’m so obsessed with comparing them. still, that is my sense of things. like, when he has hermes and the sirens speak in rhyme, doesn’t he have to pad the text out to make that work? i’m not even sure i don’t like it, but i’m like bro you can just do that???

fagles is like the most misogynistic but also has my not-so-secret favorite version of this passage at the beginning of book 20, the morning after penelope talks to odysseus in disguise; now penelope is inside their house dreaming odysseus is back, and odysseus is outside hearing her cry and dreaming that she knows him:

strongly agree | agree | neutral | disagree | strongly disagree

Thank you! :)

Kodachrome / Mabellene - Live at Central Park | Simon & Garfunkel

Almost (Sweet Music) | Hozier

wow this is so sweet !!!!!! 😭😭😭