just a couple of lesbians running a blog about more lesbians // by following you agree never to use the words "the original myth says" on one of our posts // sappho loves trans women and so do we, terfs will be blocked // both mods are white and transmisogyny exempt.
I've been meaning to make a new pinned post for this blog with a few resources etc. for a million years and now I'm procrastinating so here it is.
Link to old pinned post (articles about racism and white supremacy in classics) here. I highly recommend checking it out.
Click here for fundraisers to support Palestinian students!
Under the cut you will find a list of resources that I have found invaluable. Please put your own in the replies and reblogs!
Dickinson College Commentaries: Latin and Greek grammars, word lists, and intermediate level commentaries on ancient texts.
Perseus Digital Library and Scaife viewer: absolute classic. Ancient texts and dictionaries. You can click a word in the text and see its potential functions and its definition in a few different dictionaries. also will let you view some texts side by side with an English translation.
philolog.us: literally just Lewis and Short, LSJ, and Slater dictionaries imported from Perseus, but with a really simple interface that makes it the easiest online dictionary to use if you just want to look up a word.
Logeion and Morpho: Logeion lets you look up a word in Latin or Greek and see it in a ton of different dictionaries at once. Morpho will tell you all the possible forms for any given word.
Diogenes Viewer: app that basically does what Perseus does except you can download it. There's a web version with open source texts but to get the full benefit you need to have both the app and the TLG and PHI Greek and Latin text databases downloaded. Send an ask off anon if you want more information about those.
Haverford Bridge: vocab lists for selected texts. There's also a page with the tools they use to generate the lists so you can make your own.
johnstoniatexts: texts that Ian Johnston has translated and put online for free. It doesn't have everything but it has kind of a mind-boggling amount considering everything on here is translated by one person. The translations tend to be a little wordier than I prefer but it's still my first stop when I'm looking for easily accessible translations to recommend to people because I know they're fairly recent and reasonably well-done.
Geoffrey Steadman: free early intermediate level commentaries in Latin and Greek. If you use them and have the means please consider giving him a couple dollars!
PHI Latin Texts: lots of Latin with word + author search functions.
theoi.com: theoi has source material in translation for a number of gods and mythical figures. They don't have everything but if you're looking for every story with x god it's usually a decent place to start.
Intermediate Ancient Greek Language: free open source Greek textbook covering Greek in more detail than your intro textbook/course.
Latin Macronizer: you can paste in a Latin text and it'll add macrons to long syllables! It highlights forms it isn't sure about and you can double check it. (Related tip: the LaNe dictionary, on Logeion, is considered the gold standard for checking which syllables are long by nature in a given word!)
Race and Ethnicity in Classics Pedagogy: A Starter Pack: Google Doc with links to resources to help understand topics relating to race and ethnicity in classics. Aimed at educators but the resources can help anyone.
This list is not comprehensive and I will probably keep adding to it!
Also if you're looking for anything feel free to send an ask and I'll see if I can find it and/or poll the masses (everyone following this blog). Every so often I turn off anon but I'm always happy to answer asks privately, just say you'd rather it not be published.
going to start saying everyone needs to switch to linux not because of windows 11 forcing ai on everyone or because it provides a higher level of control over your computer experience but because the polytonic greek keyboard that comes preloaded is genuinely the best ancient greek keyboard i know of
#IT HAS A POLYTONIC GREEK KEYBOARD INSTALLED? (via @fyshee)
so i think both windows and mac have default polytonic greek keyboards you can install/use as well. saying linux "has anything installed" is a bit treacherous because there are so many different distributions/desktop environments etc and technically my os came with nothing at all installed but i have used two desktop environments (Xfce and KDE) and both came with the polytonic greek keyboard i mention in the above post. the main thing is that, where windows has a different key for every single combination of diacritics, the linux keyboard i've used just gives each diacritic a key and lets you combine them at will. so if i type ;:a, for example, it comes out as ἄ. so i don't have to memorize as much!
there are probably other polytonic greek keyboards you can use on linux and i'm sure you could make your own too if you don't vibe but i honestly do love the one i have, and i did not do anything to get to it other than just kind of choosing the default option
two more points about that anon: 1. i don't think i've ever gotten even a slightly snide anon, on this or any other blog, and not had an inkling of who might've sent it. i suspect i could at minimum narrow down anon hate senders to a small group of people with like 99% accuracy. they are not actually invested in the post or even this blog; they have beef with me specifically. and 2. i know anon doesn't care, but for those of you who do, i would prefer not to be called "girl." "woman" is fine. although of course "woman shut the fuck up" would be rude for other reasons
can anyone on this gay ass website give me an opinion on which translation of the epic of gilgamesh i should read? ive been wanting to read it for ages but theres a number of common translations and i know translations can make or break a story; i dont want to start with the wrong one
I've read a few so I can offer recommendations! I started with the Sandars translation, which is a good starting point but a pretty early translation. Benjamin Foster's translation is one of my favourites, and the version I read (Second Norton Critical Edition) includes some really interesting discussion essays with it. Andrew George's translation received an update a couple of years ago so is up to date with Foster's translation, though I prefer how the language flows in Foster's.
I would also recommend Gilgamesh Retold by Jenny Lewis for a translation with a more modern poetic take.
Benjamin Foster’s Gilgamesh condenses all the different tablets we’ve found together to make one cohesive narrative which is way less intimidating and therefore my go-to if you want something that feels cohesive while also sticking very close to the language of the original. 10/10
Andrew George is the most thorough and up-to-date, and sticks as close to the text as you can get. It does, however, separate out all the different tablets, and feels very unedited in its style. Definitely not a “pretty” version. 10/10 cuz he’s a legend and this is the most definitive scholarly edition but don’t start with it.
Maureen Kovacs has a lovely translation with some very interesting footnotes on word choices. Her Ninsun is absolutely incredible and if you want to cry your eyes out over Gilgamesh’s fate that’s the one for you. It’s one step up from Foster’s in terms of poetic-ness but still pretty close to the original. 8/10
Sophus Helle is more poetic than Kovacs but BRILLIANT, one of my favourite Enkidus and his Shamhat is wonderful. Top favourite of all time. This is a very good starting point. 9/10
I wouldn’t recommend Sandars simply because it’s prose, and also condenses the twelfth tablet into a nice tidy ending that doesn’t really work with the Standard Babylonian narrative. 6/10
Lewis’ Gilgamesh Retold is more of a poetic retelling than a translation; it’s beautiful but definitely not a starting point. Sweet and gentle Enkidu though, very charming. 7/10
Stephen Mitchell I’m not a fan of. He smooths the poem out into something tame and very expected. This is my personal bias but I really dislike his Shamhat. His Enkidu and Gilgamesh are also explicitly more like brothers, which is a valid interpretation but also again not one I lean towards. 5/10
Herbert Mason’s Gilgamesh has some stunning moments in it (Enkidu! They do not know you like I know you!) However it is nowhere near the real text BUT closer than Lewis’. Changes the ending of the poem so it’s about Gilgamesh mourning Enkidu rather than mourning his own mortality; a much sadder conclusion with less resolution than in the Standard Babylonian. 7/10
BONUS ROUND:
Derek Hines’ play GILGAMESH is fucking DERANGED guys. Ten Gilgillion out of ten.
if you ever feel bad about your laundry situation you can reflect on book six of the odyssey where princess nausicaa has been putting off her laundry for so long that the GODDESS ATHENA notices and COMES TO HER HOUSE using a lecture on laundry procrastination to get her to meet odysseus
It has a huge variety of historical recipes from different regions, taken from manuscripts, transcribed and translated, and a whole section of notes about the context for the recipe. It's really fun and I AM going to try a couple of these recipes.
Look at how this lamb recipe is presented:
This is just such a fun way to learn more about historical foodways and discover traditional cuisine.
Look at all the filters you can use:
Maybe if I can forage some good blackberries this year, I can make a 300 year old recipe for blackberry wine!
image description: a cartesian plane with color-coded quadrants. the x-axis goes from 'sex scenes' to 'no sex scenes' and the y-axis goes from 'food looks good' to 'food looks horrible' /end description
the thing about the emily wilson odyssey review (linking for anyone who hasn't read it) is that christopher nolan is going around quoting her translation to the point where many news outlets are saying her translation specifically is what inspired the movie so her response is interesting to me for being the response of someone who knows everyone is looking at her to say Something and who needs to make it clear she was not at all involved in the production of a movie she dislikes
like i do disagree with her on a few things and i do think she comes off as disdainful in her criticism in ways i don't respect (more so in the anne carson review than here + i'm sure christopher nolan can use his millions of dollars in box office sales to comfort him) but it is like. she did one skilled and well-publicized translation and now she/her work are part of the marketing for literally anything anyone else wants to do/say about the odyssey. daniel mendelssohn has like three pages in his introduction criticizing her. christopher nolan is quoting her opening line in every interview. omitting discussion of her translation in any conversation about recent translation/reception of the odyssey would feel like a glaring error. i too would be coming out swinging in this scenario. ultimately it shows the level of self assurance that you need to survive academia, let alone becoming a public figure as an academic and then having everyone assume your influence on any new odyssey reception. emily wilson + her translation are a huge elephant in the room when the odyssey comes up and she knows it and to some degree has to defend herself from it
Thank you for pointing out Wilson's comment about the sea people in her review, because yeah, hard disagree on that part as well! And also on the argument that Homeric epic is a mishmash of different periods, so it doesn't matter if the costuming and props are, too. I think that logic only works if you don't set your movie in a specific period - which Nolan evidently did do - and also if those different periods don't include Viking ships. Like, sorry, but that's a step too far^^
Thank you!! It's a bit frustrating because on the one hand a lot of non-specialists (like Nolan tbh) overwhelmingly blame the Sea Peoples for the Entire Bronze Age Collapse, even though systems collapse theory has been around for decades, but on the other hand Wilson's response calling them "a now debunked 19th-century theory about maritime tribes who were thought to have attacked Egypt around 1200 BCE" is just such an extreme pivot in the opposite direction that straight up ignores the primary texts from Medinet Habu!! Like, we can debate who the Sea Peoples specifically were/what they were doing/where else they went/their impact/etc until the heat death of the universe, but at the end of the day they're still epigraphically attested in some sort of conflict with Egypt! Same with how she describes Nolan's "we are the Sea Peoples" schtick as him "creating a characteristic narrative twist about the identity of ‘the sea peoples" when,,, afaik the similarity between 'Denyen' & 'Danaan' has been and continues to be generally accepted in scholarship?? Unless there's been a sudden shift in the past like 6 months?? From what I can tell, Wilson doesn't work on LBA archaeology at all, which is probably why this part of the review is so weak compared to her great analysis of the Polyphemus scene, thematic aspects, and misogynistic elements (since the text is more her wheelhouse). But since she has so much influence in how general audiences are introduced to Homeric epic (and by proxy its LBA/EIA setting), her sweeping generalizations about the Sea Peoples feel a little irresponsible? If only because I worry that some people are going to walk away with the assumption that there were no 'sea peoples' fighting Rameses III.
And you make a fantastic point re: Nolan's messy chronological approach! I think his costuming/props wouldn't have stuck out so much if:
He didn't put in so much dialogue about "the people from the sea" and lines like "our age of bronze is coming to an end." Which just reinforces the chronological discrepancies.
They didn't look so jarringly different. The helmets were already giving off the vibes of a slightly cheaper 300, but the Viking-style longship throws the aesthetic forward by ~2000 years!!! I didn't actually really comprehend that gap until just now but. Can you imagine an adaptation of Julius Caesar where its still the Late Republic but they use American horse-and-buggies in the background?? People are bound to comment on that! And his anachronisms stand out even more when you look in the background and see (what looks like) Protogeometric pottery?? It's all over the place, aesthetics-wise.
It's not the worst part of the movie (that award probably goes to the British colonialist undertones) but man does it affect some of my enjoyment of the good scenes.
Yeah, that comment about the sea people really stuck out. Like, news to me that this has been debunked entirely! As the sole cause of the BA collapse in Greece, sure, but that´s it.
And the time discrepancy is what drives me up the wall. I once described that in a similar context to a friend as watching a movie about the Norman conquest of England, in which the Anglo Saxons are wearing chain mail, the Normans 16th century plate armour, there is a tank somewhere in the background, William the Conqueror is dressed like Napoleon and also he´s riding a unicorn. And if you are really unlucky, the movie gets marketed as historically accurate.
(I blame the fact that as archaeologists we kind of depend on having a good visual memory - and we get actively trained on that. So this mix simply looks wrong, even if you try to not let it distract you).
the thing about the emily wilson odyssey review (linking for anyone who hasn't read it) is that christopher nolan is going around quoting her translation to the point where many news outlets are saying her translation specifically is what inspired the movie so her response is interesting to me for being the response of someone who knows everyone is looking at her to say Something and who needs to make it clear she was not at all involved in the production of a movie she dislikes
have you read emily wilson’s review of anne carson a while back? i’m not planning on seeing the odyssey but i did Not appreciate her carson takedown on the whole (although her comments re: sappho were astute).
ah i just looked it up. anne carson is a bit hit or miss for me at this point (like wilson, i was mad at eros the bittersweet) but i do also feel like wilson often has a fairly narrow view of what constitutes good english poetry. and in this review as well i feel like there's a narrow view of what constitutes good academic writing, which is one of the things that really makes me mad about academia, even though i don't think eros the bittersweet is a well-executed example of writing that breaks the mold. like, it's not bad because it's poetic or somewhat speculative, it's bad because of the nonsensical leaps of logic. it just doesn't hold together, whatever the genre. but i feel like wilson has some disdain for carson not being a proper academic and it's true i have no patience for that. and also it's supposed to be a review of a totally different book.
here is an archive link of the review (i hope this is the one you mean!)
the thing is i'm sure i will see the nolan odyssey eventually because as much as it looks like a bad movie it also looks like a movie i'll have interesting things to say about but at the end of the day i have seen one (1) movie in theaters since well before the pandemic started and that was wicked part one. and folks i have to say. wicked part one was worth it and christopher nolan's the odyssey was not
ok wait suspend the great debate about whether iphis was a lesbian or a trans guy for a sec can we talk about how iphis' mom telethusa definitely hooked up with io/isis
