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[–] 33 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Here's her essay talking about her translation:

The study guide SparkNotes describes these women as “disloyal women servants” who must be “executed,” while CliffsNotes calls them “maidservants” who were “disloyal,” and claims that their murder has a “macabre beauty.” In the poem’s original language, Telemachus refers to them only with hai, the feminine article—“those female people who . . . slept beside the suitors.” In my translation, I call them “these girls,” and hope to convey the scene in both its gruesome inhumanity and its pathos: “their heads all in a row, / were strung up with the noose around their necks / to make their death an agony. They gasped, / feet twitching for a while, but not for long.”

By the way, this is only a few dozen lines after Odysseus gives Eurycleia a civility lecture about how it's a major faux pas to celebrate someone's death. (In that case, the someones are all of the suitors, and he brings Eurycleia in to mop up the blood.)

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  • [–] 32 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

    This is also perhaps the best opportunity I'll have to talk about how hilarious 19th century commentaries on Greek and Latin texts can be. In a commentary on Xenophon's Cyropaedia, set in Persia during the childhood of Cyrus the Great, the Victorian commentator footnotes a mention of mascara to say that "In the East, women paint their eyes to this day." My monocle fell into my soup when I heard that one.

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