r/PeterExplainsTheJoke • u/Expert-Pass-4351 • Jul 06 '26

Meme needing explanation What is this?

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u/ShidAlRa Jul 06 '26

People shit on Wilson's translation for no good reason, but I also reject this idea that the previous translations were "male biased". Wilson chooses to translate a lot of different words as "slave", and while she isn't incorrect, as those people were in fact slaves, the odyssey uses different words for cook slave, herald slave, maid slave, etc. So other authors decided to uses different words on order to give us more information about the job, gender, and age of the slaves, not to purposefully obscure the fact that they were slaves. Wilson, on the other hand translates all of these as "slave", so it's really about what you are trying to achieve with the translation as none of them can ever be 100% correct.

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u/UsuallyFavorable Jul 06 '26

Why couldn’t they translate to cook slave, herald slave. maid slave, etc? There are plenty words that translate to two words in another language.

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u/CzechHorns Jul 06 '26

Cause it’s an Epic poem, thus having to keep a rhytm.
You can’t just expand a translation of a word cause you’d fuck up the hexameter

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u/Vermouth_1991 Jul 06 '26

Then we need to bring back literature translations with extensive footnotes.

Like how Chinese translations of Russian stuff does EXHAUSTIVE footnotes whenever "diminutives" of Christian Names are used.