conflicted

MEISHA | 19 | lover of words and tales.

[fishandshesmygills]

everything is about reaching the ending except for the ending which is about wanting to go back to the start

[levourdalak]

Orestes by Euripides, 408 BCE (“…μὴ θεαί μ᾽ οἴστρῳ κατάσχωσι.”)

trans. Michael Wodhull, 1782 (“Lest those Goddesses should seize me/ With frenzy.”)

trans. T. A. Buckley, 1858 (“I fear lest the Goddesses should stop me with their torments.”)

trans. E. P. Coleridge, 1891 (“I am afraid the goddesses will prevent me by madness.”)

trans. Arthur S. Way, 1898 (“Lest the Fiends by madness stay me.”)

trans. Philip Vellacott, 1972 (“This: suppose the Furies drive me mad?”)

trans. Kenneth McLeish, 1997 (“If the goddesses come… another fit…”)

trans. David Kovacs, 2002 (“…the fear that the goddesses may seize me with frenzy.”)

trans. Anne Carson, 2009 (“The ghastly goddessess—they’ll send my wits astray.”)

trans. Ian Johnston, 2010 (“I’m worried the goddesses will stop me with this madness.”)

[finelythreadedsky]

#there’s so much lost if you just read one translation#you know the one#translation is difficult#and it’s even more so with an ancient text#meaning is lost#and that’s just the nature of translation#but anne carson did a verse translation#and intentionally sacrificed meaning in favor of poeticism#anne carson is a sublime writer and poet#but her works should be read as poetic interpretations of the text#it’s rotten work#is beautiful in its own context#but gone is the motif of sickness#be it the madness or violence that runs through their bloodline#and that’s why it matters that pylades is orestes and elektra’s cousin#because it’s their family curse#anyway#i just wish people would read more than three lines of one translation#these all reflect the time period in which they were translated#note how the mcleish translation sounds like it’s straight out of angels in america

[afronerdism]

The conversation surrounding cultural appropriation has been so severely mutilated by white “allies” that the original intention behind that conversation has become almost unrecognizable in most social contexts.

[afronerdism]

To explain what I mean, the conversation around cultural appropriation was started by black and native people to discuss the frustrations we feel at being punished socially and financially for partaking in our cultural heritage while white people could take, I.e. appropriate, aspects of our culture that we are actively shamed for and be heralded as innovators. It was about the frustrations we feel when the same white people who shamed us would take our culture and wear it as if they were the ones who created it while still actively shaming us for doing the same.

The original push behind naming cultural appropriation and having these conversations were so that we as a society could evaluate why we were punished for our heritage while white People were not. It was supposed to be about seeking solutions. The idea was to create a society where we could celebrate our cultures with impunity. It was never about telling white people that they “weren’t allowed” to do certain things. We did ask that white People stop doing certain things because they weren’t doing them respectfully and were not invited to do them, but the primary reason we asked them to desist was to reclaim the things they had stolen and to reassign them culturally back where they belonged.

White “allies” saw these conversations happening and instead of trying to aplify our own voices or even try to learn about the complexities behind why we were saying what we were saying, they instead began screaming over us and creating a narrative that was hardly even the bones of what we originally set out to say. It was like they took the conversation we were trying to have, completely decontextualized it, and stripped it of all it’s nuance in order to gain social currency by seeming progressive.

So the conversation around cultural appropriation went from “This aspect of our heritage belongs to us and we find it egregious that we are shamed for it. What steps can we take to address the racism that’s creating this situation as well as rehome the things that have been stolen” to “you’re not allowed to do that because if you do that you’re racist, we don’t really understand why that’s racist but you’re not allowed to do that and if you do that you’re a klansman no exceptions. So you’re not allowed because because”

At the end of the day, did I like the fact that sally was wearing dreads? No. But my primary concern was not that sally was wearing dreads but rather that sally could wear dreads and I couldn’t. THAT was the intended focus of those conversations. It was about addressing the inequality. It was about us. Now the conversation is just about sally and were completely forgotten.

White People are always asking me what they can do to help. You want to know? Stop talking. Aplify our voices and shut the fuck up because you all have pretty much derailed this conversation and many more like it to the point that we no longer are trying to make steps to understand and dismantle the racism around cultural appropriation and instead are just using it as social shaming tactics.

[afronerdism]

TL;DR: read my post. Most things worth learning about can’t be summarized in the bullet points of a buzfeed article. Don’t come into academic circles and complain because everything hasn’t been conviently summarized for you. Stop pretending that things aren’t accessible to you because you refuse to do the intellectual labor that is learning.

[nubbsgalore]

veitnamese farmers harvest water chestnuts in fields of blowing waves of grass (x)

[souuadd]

Serie of things I like, for no apparent reason:

1. Kitchens

[thunderstruck9]

Julio Larraz (Cuban, b. 1944), L'Heure de l'apéritif [Aperitif Hour], 2015. Oil on canvas, 30 x 40 in.

[weltenwellen]

Emily Luan, “Because I dare not be in awe“

[studioghiblisworld]

[ceremonial]

Women, they have minds and they have souls as well as just hearts. And they’ve got ambition and they’ve got talent as well as just beauty, and I’m so sick of people saying that love is just all a woman is fit for. I’m so sick of it! But… I am so lonely. Little Women (2019) dir. Greta Gerwig

[mashamorevna]

“The family is truly desperate. And when people get desperate, the knives come out.” - Knives Out (2019)

[aseaofquotes]

Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

[januaryhoney]

when héloïse in portrait of a lady on fire asked ‘do all lovers feel as though they’re inventing something?’ 

and when sarah ruhl said ‘there was once a very great american surgeon named halsted. he was married to a nurse. he loved her-immeasurably. one day halsted noticed that his wife’s hands were chapped and red when she came back from surgery. and so he invented rubber gloves. for her. it is one of the great love stories in medicine. the difference between inspired medicine and uninspired medicine is love. when i met ana i knew: i loved her to the point of invention.’

and when yehuda amichai said ‘we were such a good and loving invention. an airplane made from a man and wife. wings and everything. we hovered a little above the earth. we even flew a little.’

[ghostcradle]

when anne carson said ‘all lovers believe they are inventing love’

[the-sunrise-and-the-sunsets]

also when jeanette winterson said “ ‘i love you’ is always a quotation. you did not say it first and neither did i, yet when you say it and when i say it we speak like savages who have found three words and worship them.”

[lifeinpoetry]

& later, i spot him in the super- market & know he knows i’m watching the way a shepherd tends his flock or the way the ocean shivers when the moon slides onto its back. & there is no significant body of water in the suburbs, nothing to drown in yet we drown anyway. & i take him in the long grass of the park, i taste him in the weeds, knees wet with mud, the night buzzing with the deaths of mosquitoes. the wild silence after, mouths heavy with musk, is complete & even the birds are mute with love in their nests. there is no song except our huffed breaths, the shuffle of grass bending beneath us, tick- ling skin, the whole world an animal gone quiet.

— Omar Sakr, from “Fridays in the Park (or how to make a boy holy),” The Lost Arabs

[soracities]

“Her eyes were no violet, after all- they were amber. They were the color of candied ginger or a slice of cinnamon cake. Faded paper, polished leather, a brandied apricot. Orange-peel tea. I considered them, imagining the letters I would write to her. Pipe tobacco, perhaps. A honey lozenge, an autumn leaf.”

— Timothy Schaffert, The Swan Gondola  (via pomegranatetree)

[theglowpt2-deactivated20200101]

“Fireworks” - Mitski // Morning Sun - Edward Hopper // “Beach Life-In-Death” - Car Seat Headrest // Automat - Edward Hopper

[driflloon]

lanvin fw19

[nevver]

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