Top Posts Tagged with #polytropos

Can you list some epithets of Odysseus? ^_^

Oh my gosh! I love this questioooooooon! And I was thinking of making some post about it!!!!! Gosh I am so sorry to be so late but here we go!

Beware of a long list because I have no self-control and I wanted to include a small variety of the main epithets! My main sources are the homeric poems for this one!:

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There are two ways to read the scene where Odysseus stabs Diomedes

Either a) you pretend it never happened, stick your fingers in your ears and go ‘la la la’ until the guy trying to educate you gives up

Or b) the better, and infinitely funnier option, it did happen, and Diomedes just didn’t give a shit. Like he was like “damn man you suck at assassinations” and Odysseus was like “man why you gotta be so mean” and then Diomedes says “you missed all my vital organs, you donkey. You absolute imbecile” and Odysseus is like “want me to try again ? :)”

#diody #odydio #the iliad #greek mythology #odysseus #diomedes #polytropos #tagamemnon

The classicist Emily Wilson has given Homer’s epic a radically contemporary voice.

Throughout her translation of the “Odyssey,” Wilson has made small but, it turns out, radical changes to the way many key scenes of the epic are presented — “radical” in that, in 400 years of versions of the poem, no translator has made the kinds of alterations Wilson has, changes that go to truing a text that, as she says, has through translation accumulated distortions that affect the way even scholars who read Greek discuss the original. These changes seem, at each turn, to ask us to appreciate the gravity of the events that are unfolding, the human cost of differences of mind.

The first of these changes is in the very first line. You might be inclined to suppose that, over the course of nearly half a millennium, we must have reached a consensus on the English equivalent for an old Greek word, polytropos. But to consult Wilson’s 60 some predecessors, living and dead, is to find that consensus has been hard to come by…

Of the 60 or so answers to the polytropos question to date, the 36 given above [which I cut because there were a lot] couldn’t be less uniform (the two dozen I omit repeat, with minor variations, earlier solutions); what unites them is that their translators largely ignore the ambiguity built into the word they’re translating. Most opt for straightforward assertions of Odysseus’s nature, descriptions running from the positive (crafty, sagacious, versatile) to the negative (shifty, restless, cunning). Only Norgate (“of many a turn”) and Cook (“of many turns”) preserve the Greek roots as Wilson describes them — poly(“many”), tropos (“turn”) — answers that, if you produced them as a student of classics, much of whose education is spent translating Greek and Latin and being marked correct or incorrect based on your knowledge of the dictionary definitions, would earn you an A. But to the modern English reader who does not know Greek, does “a man of many turns” suggest the doubleness of the original word — a man who is either supremely in control of his life or who has lost control of it? Of the existing translations, it seems to me that none get across to a reader without Greek the open question that, in fact, is the opening question of the “Odyssey,” one embedded in the fifth word in its first line: What sort of man is Odysseus?

“I wanted there to be a sense,” Wilson told me, that “maybe there is something wrong with this guy. You want to have a sense of anxiety about this character, and that there are going to be layers we see unfolded. We don’t quite know what the layers are yet. So I wanted the reader to be told: be on the lookout for a text that’s not going to be interpretively straightforward.”

Here is how Wilson’s “Odyssey” begins. Her fifth word is also her solution to the Greek poem’s fifth word — to polytropos:

Tell me about a complicated man. Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy, and where he went, and who he met, the pain he suffered in the storms at sea, and how he worked to save his life and bring his men back home. He failed to keep them safe; poor fools, they ate the Sun God’s cattle, and the god kept them from home. Now goddess, child of Zeus, tell the old story for our modern times. Find the beginning.

When I first read these lines early this summer in The Paris Review, which published an excerpt, I was floored. I’d never read an “Odyssey” that sounded like this. It had such directness, the lines feeling not as if they were being fed into iambic pentameter because of some strategic decision but because the meter was a natural mode for its speaker. The subtle sewing through of the fittingly wavelike W-words in the first half (“wandered … wrecked … where … worked”) and the stormy S-words that knit together the second half, marrying the waves to the storm in which this man will suffer, made the terse injunctions to the muse that frame this prologue to the poem (“Tell me about …” and “Find the beginning”) seem as if they might actually answer the puzzle posed by Homer’s polytropos and Odysseus’s complicated nature.

Complicated: the brilliance of Wilson’s choice is, in part, its seeming straightforwardness. But no less than that of polytropos, the etymology of “complicated” is revealing. From the Latin verb complicare, it means “to fold together.” No, we don’t think of that root when we call someone complicated, but it’s what we mean: that they’re compound, several things folded into one, difficult to unravel, pull apart, understand.

“It feels,” I told Wilson, “with your choice of ‘complicated,’ that you planted a flag.”

“It is a flag,” she said.

“It says, ‘Guess what?’ — ”

“ ‘ — this is different.’ ”

The First Woman to Translate the Odyssey Into English, Wyatt Mason

#university of pennsylvania #translation #The Odyssey #Wyatt Mason #Emily Wilson #words and writing #polytropos

i see him when i find little trinkets that are just odd and charming enough to keep. i smile at him when i run and feel the breeze in my face. i feel him there when only one sock goes missing and it's never to be seen again, or when i find the pair of one i'd already thrown out. i think warmly of him when i hear a kid laughing and running from a neighbor after ringing their doorbell repeatedly. i roll my eyes at him when the air makes a shiver tickle my skin, my shaky laughter surprising me.

my radiant, wily boy. there's a little part of him everywhere, if you'll just pay enough attention to see it.

#devotional poetry #kind of? poetry?#devotional writing #hermes deity #hermes worship #kharidotes #mekhaniotes #polytropos #aglaos #helpol #hellenic polytheism

Penelope Πολύτροπος

“πολύτροπος” epithetum Penelopae ipsi idoneum est.

“πολύτροπος” is an appropriate epithet for Penelope herself.

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You might be inclined to suppose that, over the course of nearly half a millennium, we must have reached a consensus on the English equivalent for an old Greek word, polytropos. But to consult Wilson’s 60 some predecessors, living and dead, is to find that consensus has been hard to come by. Chapman starts things off, in his version, with “many a way/Wound with his wisdom”; John Ogilby counters with the terser “prudent”; Thomas Hobbes evades the word, just calling Odysseus “the man.” Quite a range, and we’ve barely started. There’s Alexander Pope’s “for wisdom’s various arts renown’d”; William Cowper’s “For shrewdness famed/And genius versatile”; H.F. Cary’s “crafty”; William Sotheby’s “by long experience tried”; Theodore Buckley’s “full of resources”; Henry Alford’s “much-versed”; Philip Worsley’s “that hero”; the Rev. John Giles’s “of many fortunes”; T.S. Norgate’s “of many a turn”; George Musgrave’s “tost to and fro by fate”; the Rev. Lovelace Bigge-Wither’s “many-sided-man”; George Edgington’s “deep”; William Cullen Bryant’s “sagacious”; Roscoe Mongan’s “skilled in expedients”; Samuel Henry Butcher and Andrew Lang’s “so ready at need”; Arthur Way’s “of craft-renown”; George Palmer’s “adventurous”; William Morris’s “shifty”; Samuel Butler’s “ingenious”; Henry Cotterill’s “so wary and wise”; Augustus Murray’s “of many devices”; Francis Caulfeild’s “restless”; Robert Hiller’s “clever”; Herbert Bates’s “of many changes”; T.E. Lawrence’s “various-minded”; William Henry Denham Rouse’s “never at a loss”; Richmond Lattimore’s “of many ways”; Robert Fitzgerald’s “skilled in all ways of contending”; Albert Cook’s “of many turns”; Walter Shewring’s “of wide-ranging spirit”; Allen Mandelbaum’s “of many wiles”; Robert Fagles’s “of twists and turns”; all the way to Stanley Lombardo’s “cunning.”

Wyatt Mason, The First Woman to Translate the ‘Odyssey’ Into English, New York Times, NOV. 2, 2017

#Odyssey #Emily Wilson #Homer #polytropos

I love Odysseus because the interpretations of his character vary so greatly.

Like, with Diomedes, Achilles, Patroclus, and what have you, you have general baselines of what kind of person they are, and most adaptations tend to stick to them

Odysseus ? People just go buck-wild with his characterisations, like to a hilarious degree

Sometimes he’s a genial, story-telling merchant king with a penchant for killing and trickery.

Sometimes, he’s a wise old mentor with a wily bent, more akin to Phoinix and Nestor

Sometimes he’s an absolute rat bastard of a man, who’d sooner stab you in the back than shake your hand

Sometimes he’s a man, who, despite a penchant for lying and trickery, is ultimately a good person who loves his wife and family and longs to return home

Sometimes he’s a loving husband, who only sleeps with women other than his wife when put under duress and forced to

Sometimes he’s a womanizer, who, while he still loves his wife, sleeps with both Circe and Calypso willingly, without any form of coaxing or duress

It’s hilarious. Polytropos, indeed

#odyssey #the odyssey #odysseus #polytropos #the iliad #homeric epics #homer #homeric poems #tagamemnon #greek mythology #classical mythology

Let’s all start arguing over the translation of polytropos in relation to the king of Ithaca again

#the man of many turns #homers odyssey #odysseus of ithaca #polytropos #emily wilson