#but 'nonentities' just seems like the worst of all worlds to me—an active‚ obtrusive choice that doesn't seem to add anything!

[aeide-thea]

also like. after that last reblog i thought to myself belatedly, okay, but given that i'm always saying it's more responsible to examine a snippet in context i should probably practice at least a little bit of what i preach, so i went and looked up what wilson had done with the rest of that sentence and uh—

εἰ δέ τις ἀθανάτων γε κατ᾿ οὐρανοῦ εἰλήλουθας, οὐκ ἂν ἐγώγε θεοῖσιν ἐπουρανίοισι μαχοίμην.

in her rendering apparently becomes

If you are one of the immortal gods descended from the sky, I come in peace— I am not one to fight the heavenly gods.

'i come in peace'???? not only is that made up out of whole fucking cloth, it's giving jarringly incongruous first-encounter-with-aliens vibes. 'take me to your leader (priam).'

and then there's that 'descended,' which first of all is, imo, a pretty heinously baroque way to render what's ultimately a form of the language's most straightforward word for 'come'? but it also, even less forgivably, introduces a new and confusing ambiguity to the sentence, such that it's now unknowable whether the descent in question is literal or lineal unless you refer back to the original greek—like, hello, it's entirely possible for a god to be descended from ouranos in the genealogical sense! that's a perfectly plausible interpretation of wilson's english! but it's absolutely not a possible interpretation of homer's εἰλήλουθας.

obviously you can't judge a whole translation on the basis of one sentence, but. can't say i'm too impressed with what happened to this one. :/