Friday Ephemera

This is important; I own three different English translations of The Iliad which are so different from each other…
I just ran across an illustration of the importance of fluency in foreign languages (bolding by me):

As an undergraduate majoring in economics at Harvard, [Thomas] Sowell had been required to take French, a course that he disliked intensely, seeing no use for it at the time in his pursuit of a degree in economics. But years later, the language would prove essential to his dissertation on the theories of French classical economist Jean-Baptiste Say, who developed the doctrine that became known as Say’s Law. It turned out that the writings of one of Say’s contemporaries, the nineteenth-century Swiss economist Jean-Charles-Léonard Simonde de Sismondi, were quite relevant to Sowell’s own interpretation of Say. Sismondi wrote mostly in French. “And so I ended up having to read a half-dozen books in French, including the fifth edition of Say’s Treatise, where he begins to take into account what Sismondi has said and to make fundamental adjustments to Say’s Law,” said Sowell. “And to this day, I don’t know of anybody else who has the same interpretation [that I do] because I don’t know of anybody else who has bothered to read the fifth edition. The fourth edition was translated into English, but not the fifth.”
–Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell, by Jason L. Riley, Basic Books, 2021, first edition, Chapter 3: Higher Education, Lower Expectations

By the end of the first few episodes, a litany of Muslim stereotypes have been poked fun at (“Well, don’t blame me if you run away to Syria and marry a jihadi,” says Amina’s mum, casually).

You’ve blown up that stereotype like a backpack full of shrapnel might blow up a bunch of 11 year old Ariana Grande fans.
In reality, Muslims are jihadi-adjacent enough for their girls to sometimes become ISIS brides.
Is there a reality in which Muslim girls are starting anarchist punk bands, or is it just in your fiction?
I don’t know, that’s a question, so I typed “Muslim punk” into Google, and four of the first ten results were about this very TV series, and another two were about Tawqacore, the name of a fictional Muslim punk movement that became applied to real bands.
I’m actually surprised that it’s still so visibly in the stage of fiction preceding the reality that we’re assured is just around the corner waiting to come into existence when it sees itself represented in the media.
The agenda requires that every aspect of white culture be “subverted” and “reinvented” by having a hijab put on it, with any stresses and contradictions being rechanneled into the shared animus against white men.
And alternative rock, which means rock without white guys or rock where the white guys are too mopey and defeated to strut like normal rock stars, seems like a fertile field for hijabization. There isn’t very much translation required to conceive of a Kim al-Gordon singing about male white corporate oppression.

In honor of Memorial Day.
Have tissues handy. Lots of them.

Is there a word for something that has the power to shock while simultaneously being completely predictable?
horrordained?
foreghasted?
ineviterror?

Theodore Dalrymple has said something to that effect about George Bernard Shaw.
https://www.takimag.com/article/claims-to-fame/
Thank you, Geezer. I could not remember where I saw it.

Dalrymple on Shaw: “He was more than averagely aware of the benefits of self-promotion, in which pursuit he was very thorough.”
Peter Conrad: “[George Bernard] Shaw relished every opportunity to have himself painted, sketched, photographed or carved, because each likeness provided him with a new extension of himself.”
I used to be surprised at how much publicity was generated by notable authors on their own behalf.
There was Walt Whitman, who took a private letter of praise from Longfellow and published it to promote Leaves of Grass. (Whitman: “The public is a thick-skinned beast and you have to keep whacking away at its hide to let it know you’re there.”)
Shaw was not alone in self-promotion. Vladimir Nabokov wrote Life magazine pushing himself as a subject: “Some fascinating photos might be also taken of me, a burly but agile man, stalking a rarity or sweeping it into my net from a flowerhead.” (P.S.: He got the job.)
And when William Faulkner changed publishers, they paid Alexander Woollcott to pump his new book on his radio program.

Daniel Ream mentions that translations of the same text can be very different from author to author. To make this same point to students of Chinese philosophy I used to cite the following popular translations of the first lines of the Daodejing.
Lau: The whole world recognises the beautiful as the beautiful, yet this is only the ugly
Sturgeon: All in the world know the beauty of the beautiful, and in doing this they have (the idea of) what ugliness is
Blakney: Since the world points up beauty as such, there is ugliness too
Red Pine: All the world knows beauty but if that becomes beautiful this becomes ugly
Cleary: When everyone knows beauty is beauty, this is bad
Every one of these translations says something different (sometimes a lot different); and there are at least 100 more (in English) that you can easily find online.

Classics majors at Princeton University will no longer be required to learn Greek or Latin while studying Ancient Greece and Rome.
I’m mildly surprised they still had that requirement. It’s a loss to be regretted. Already we in the Anglosphere no longer learn a second language, as in German, Italian, Spanish, French, Chinese, etc…. with that we lose an effective way to communicate with much of the rest of the world, and to actually partake in the wealth of literature that exists in those languages. But loss of opportunities to learn classical languages is even worse; you not only lose ready access to literature, but to literature which informs you about incredibly important and formative periods of world history.

I’m mildly surprised they still had that requirement. It’s a loss to be regretted.
The murder of Classics has been a slow process. See Who Killed Homer? by Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath, published in 1998.

…you not only lose ready access to literature, but to literature which informs you about incredibly important and formative periods of world history.
I’m certain that it’s merely a coincidence that the people bringing us Five Year Plans and dreaming of the coming Glorious Revolution are discouraging people from reading and learning about Robespierre and Trotsky and Mao.

TimT, Alex,
My own reminiscences…
– circa 1973: Grade 11 French teacher, a very irascible Czech, blasting the school’s English teaching staff because he had to teach his French students grammar before he could teach them French. He said the English faculty should pay him their salaries until this situation was fixed. this uproar did not, I believe, affect his position at the (public) school.
– circa 1980: UC Berkeley Physics department dropping their multiple languages requirements for advanced degrees. Once, one had to learn German or Russian or Japanese or (?)(i.e. 4 years of Uni classes) plus a minor in some other language, to qualify for a PhD. Now, AFAIK, there is no requirement at all beyond the weak general breadth rules of the College of Letters and Science.
Because, of course:
– 1974: 50% of the incoming class at UC Berkeley College of Letters and Science needed to take “English P” (i.e. Preparatory) before they could qualify for the first-year English 1A-1B courses. And at that time, UCB admission was (by statute) primarily the top 12% of California high school students.