A few things I learned from sending the first newsletter:
24% of you still haven’t read it.
Including links might be pointless, because you don’t click them. That sounds like an accusation but it’s true. Less than 1/5 of you clicked the top link which was, ostensibly, the whole point of the newsletter. (Real talk here: you should click these links. They’re all gold. Solid gold!)
Which probably means I have to think of other ways to stitch this all together.
Here’s the newsletter. Thanks for reading.
Love is translation.
It’s probably a bit on the nose for me to say this, what with my dating a person whose first language is different to mine. But of course I don’t mean this literally. (You need to know, here at the beginning, that I mean very few things literally. If we’re to get along.)
Every conversation is a translation. Even between speakers of the same language, translations at a micro-level occur with every word. We assume meaning to a ludicrous degree because to do anything else would render all communication practically impossible. If I say to you, “I’ll grab some milk before coming home”, you don’t need to know what kind of milk, or what size, or how soon before I come home, or even when I’m coming home. It’s enough that I’ve grabbed the milk.
Or maybe you do need to know in which case, and I say this gently, we can never be friends even if we are currently friends. Or we can be friends but we must, and again I say this with great care, never have a conversation about milk.
I haven’t read Emily Wilson’s celebrated translation of The Odyssey, but I have read a lot about it. I find both her and the translation fascinating. She writes with the confidence of someone who knows things and the humility of someone who also knows what she doesn’t know.
The sexing up of the sirens is not a modern phenomenon, and is so ingrained in our sense of the word that siren now basically just means temptress. Through Wilson I’ve learned many of the previous translations insist on discussing the sirens’ lips with a lot of… enthusiasm:
The Loeb (again, said to be the "literal" prose version) translates στομάτων as "lips". The word means "mouths". It does not mean "lips". It just doesn't. There's no reason I can think of to turn a mouth into lips, UNLESS you want to make sure the Sirens sound sexy.
“It just doesn’t” is a pro-level throwdown, like Zion Williamson blocking a three-point attempt while he’s still going up. I’d buy a book of her tweets just taking down other translations.
The sirens, it turns out, are not dangerous because they’re pretty. The temptation they wield is knowledge:
The seduction they offer is cognitive: they claim to know everything about the war in Troy, and everything on earth. They tell the names of pain.
(Wilson is also the kind of writer who casually tosses out lines like “They tell the names of pain” at the end of a tweet. If I came up with that shit I’d still be hiding it in my vault of best sentences, too terrified to waste it.)
I don’t know about you, but if I’m going to read one translation of The Odyssey, it’s by someone who’s going DEEP on whether we should be referencing a mouth or lips.
I like to think of loving someone as translating them. They speak to you in their language, which contains all the assembled dictionaries of relationships past and present, and you take those words and you pore over them, picking apart the syntax and signifiers, to arrive at something sensible for you. But you do it with care, because you want to get it right. And that effort is what makes it different from any other conversation with any other person.
Idris Parry writes about struggling with Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies (one of my favourite poetic works of all time) when preparing to read it at an event. None of the existing translations felt right in his mouth, and so, like any multi-talented person, he translated a version of his own:
By version, I meant a close-ish translation, but I had taken considerable liberties with the more difficult passages and inserted what I thought Rilke might have meant or what I wanted him to mean.
How often have we listened to someone only to settle on what we wanted them to mean? And yet… and yet… maybe a part of translation, and therefore love, and a part of love, and therefore translation, is to listen to someone attempt to tell us something and to pull their words toward us and glean from them the meaning they wanted us to experience which was the meaning we wanted to know which was what the words were trying to say all along?
Whenever you have tried to tell me something, I hope I translated with care.
Thom
READ: Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. by Stephen Mitchell
READ: Lost in Translation: What the first line of “The Stranger” should be, by Ryan Bloom