She’s not a lit critic, rather a classicist and the author of the most popular recent translations of Homer.

Also one of the most controversial translations, if memory serves.

It's not controversial. It's only controversial in the culture wars part of the world. There has been some critics* of her translation among classicists, but not _controversies_.

*: which is only natural, that's their job to criticize each others' translations

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modo_mario 11 hours ago | parent [-]

>It's only controversial in the culture wars part of the world.

I haven't read her version but I believe that's why I heard it criticised? That the culture war speeps into it.

In fact she keeps at it here "The race-neutral casting of Nolan’s Odyssey was inevitably deplored in some quarters. But there is nothing progressive about it. Most of the non-white actors – Zendaya, Lupita Nyong’o, Himesh Patel, Corey Antonio Hawkins, Travis Scott – play versions of the Black best friend, whose only role in the drama is to provide aid to the white protagonist."

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watwut 10 hours ago | parent [-]

The culture war does not speeps into the translation itself. There is literally no culture war in the book itself. Not even a hint of it.

What she wrote in the last paragraph in the review is response to the usual suspects working hard to make the casting into culture war. You know, that black actor being in the movie is a great offense to the classic argument. It is ok to respond to it once that argument was made by powerful people with a lot of following.

The "she keeps at it" is weird considering this a review where commentary fully belongs and culture war thing was not started by Willson or even Nolan. They just made their things. Then other people made it into culture war. Then Willson responded to existing culture war claims in her review of the movie. Is the underlying assumption that only Musk gets to broadcast his opinions? And that if others respond then it retroactively invalidate their previous work?

	▲	modo_mario 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>Is the underlying assumption that only Musk gets to broadcast his opinions? No the underlying assumption is that there's no one side to such a thing named a culture war regardless of how much of an idiot musk is. Whitaker and the like criticised her for changing from the original according to personal biases and from her responses she quite alignes with those. There's a progressive perspective there that she does not deny and that i found mentioned in any praise of the translation. One can't be claiming and praising progressive influences and then claim the detractors are imaginging them the next moment. >What she wrote in the last paragraph in the review is response to the usual suspects working hard to make the casting into culture war. What she wrote is a response to the actual movie. We can assume it to be her opinions regardless. And yes it does show a perspective that some would count as woke. Things such as saying that filming in the western sahara is a normalisation of violence against the Sahrawi which 99% of viewers will not have heard of. Saying that the perspective of the victims must be shown and incur horror in a movie portrarying war is not something that falls in line with those ancient retellings, it's her own progressive take regarding media in general. The same with clamouring for pushing female characters forward in a deeply patriarchical tale or calling anything other than raceswapping the main character of greek mythos not progressive all point in that direction.