[jf]

When I read a critique that could roughly be summarized as "I could have done better" my response generally falls somewhere between "you should" and "I'd like to see you try".

Not everyone understands just how hard it is to create something from nothing, so I can excuse a certain level of ignorance in a critic. But I find it very disappointing when a critic does understand how hard it is in their domain, but isn't able to transfer that understanding to another.

When I think of critiques, I often thing of this quote from the book "Art & Fear":

  Writer Henry James once proposed three questions you could productively put to an artist's work. The first two were disarmingly straightforward: 

  What was the artist trying to achieve? 

  Did he/she succeed? 

  The third's a zinger: 

  Was it worth doing? 

  Those first two questions alone are worth the price of admission. They address art at a level that can be tested directly against real-world values and experience; they commit you to accepting the perspective of the maker into your own understanding of the work.

[bb86754]

The article seems to me just a regular criticism, not her saying she could do better?

Counterpoint to your view on critics. A discerning audience is equally as important to a thriving culture as artists. If critics just clap their hands whenever someone tries to make something, granting that making a bad work of art is often just as difficult as making a good one, we get junk. I don't see why the perspective of the maker is relevant at all.

“You don't have to lay an egg to know if it tastes good.” - Pauline Kael

[squibonpig]

This didn't read at all as "I could have done it better" and there's no way for any one person to create that movie, so of course she couldn't have done it better. Every single criticism of any kind will read as "I could have done it better" because the criticism points out flaws in the thing.

[jrimbault]

How do you get 'roughly be summarized as "I could have done better"' from this critique? Nowhere does she say something vaguely like that.

[potsandpans]

People increasingly do not understand that there can be nuanced criticism of things they liked.

It seems like most people can still understand, "I didn't care for it." Even if sometimes even that's too much to bear.

But I've observed that the expansion into, "I noticed some problems, and I'll articulate them" seems to get bluntly polarized into something much less generous.

"I'd like to see you do better" is a run of the mill response to criticism. Which overall demonstrates a lack of maturity / confidence in ones own taste.

For the record, I loved the movie. I thought some parts were odd. I found this piece interesting.

[weiliddat]

Orthogonal to the movie/review, but if I could upvote this 100 times I would. These 3 questions were drilled to me in an elective Study of Visual Arts course in college and changed how I thought about everything and everyone.

[suttontom]

This seems like a great insight at first but:

"What was the artist trying to achieve?"

How is that "disarmingly straightforward"? Does that mean it's a straightforward question for anyone to answer because it's obvious, or that it's straightforward for the viewer of the art because in that case the answer could be anything? If the former, that's an incredibly difficult question to answer and kind of nullifies the point of this entire exercise.

[remus]

> When I read a critique that could roughly be summarized as "I could have done better"

This feels like a pretty shallow take on a what seemed to me like a pretty in depth and interesting review. Clearly there's a huge amount of potential ground that could have been covered in a film like this, so a critical look at what was and wasn't included, the angles that were chosen, the parts that were glossed over etc. can be revealing. Put another way, I think the review is a pretty in depth look at the questions "what was the artist trying to achieve?" and "Did they succeed?".

[izacus]

This is the person who created one of the translations this movie is based on (arguably THE translation Nolan based it on), so they - literally as it goes - indeed have tried and done better.

[jf]

I knew of Emily Wilson and her credentials when I wrote my comment.

For what it’s worth, I think there’s a case to be made that Gareth Hinds‘ adaptation of The Odyssey was just as much of an influence.

[keiferski]

Except the translation is not very good and dumbs down a lot of the language to fit the translator’s worldview.

I’d say Wilson did “try to do it herself,” and it’s not much better than the film. Hence this critical review is a bit unnecessary, frankly.

I say this as a subscriber to the LRB, which has at least one snarky put down review every issue.

[izacus]

There's no such thing as an "unnecessary" review, especially from people that are familiar with topics in a given media.

People are allowed to have opinions. Yes, you too.

[keiferski]

It’s a magazine that I pay money for. I’m allowed to have an opinion on the reviews they include, and yes, some reviews are unnecessary in the sense that they are overly critical just for the sake of it.

I don’t think Wilson’s translation is very good, and ergo I think a snarky review putting down a film is a bit like the pot calling the kettle black.

[archagon]

Pretty much anyone worth listening to agrees that Wilson’s translation is excellent.

[keiferski]

Do you have an opinion yourself? Because "anyone worth listening to" is not a comment with content.

Furthermore, it's simply not true. Lattimore is generally considered to be the most authentic translation. There are plenty of criticisms of the Wilson translation that aren't culture war complaints. You seem to have the impression that they are, which is factually wrong.

If you don't care about authenticity, well, the Wilson one doesn't win any aesthetic awards either. It translates polytropos, a notoriously complex and multi-faceted word, as complicated.

There are hundreds of such examples. Lattimore translates one line as "Troy's sacred citadel," whereas Wilson chooses "Holy town of Troy." It's dumbed down and artless.

And we haven't even gotten to the ideological choices of certain word translations, but I won't get to that here.

[archagon]

Wilson wrote in great and excruciating detail about why she chose “complicated” as the translation, yet you dismiss it as if if was some sort of casual, thoughtless decision: https://emily613.substack.com/p/on-complicated

Rest assured that she’s given more thought to every single word in that poem than almost anyone else alive.

Wilson’s translation is in my reading queue before I see the film, but whether I like it or not is completely irrelevant to the quality of the work, which is best assessed by the folks who actually study this stuff for a living.

I see nothing tangible in your comment other than “I think it’s artless and dumb,” which is not as convincing as you seem to think.

[keiferski]

Translating the Odyssey is not some new thing. There are dozens of other translations in English, and yet pretty much all of them have put just as much or more effort into questions like these...and yet few are as artless and bland as "complicated."

If you actually spend some time looking into scholarly discussion of the translation... it's seen as quite deficient and indeed cuts out a lot of meaning in the original Greek.

Just give this a cursory scroll, for example:

https://casa-kvsa.org.za/legacy/AC63-Whitaker-18DEC2019.pdf

But you don't even need to do that. Just get a PDF of Fagles or Lattimore and compare lines word for word to Wilson.

And if you don't have an opinion yourself, and I'm guessing you haven't read any other translation, or perhaps even Wilsons? Which means you're just arguing with me because what... some culture war thing? There is such a weird obsession with defending this translation, ostensibly from people that haven't even read it or other translations. So absurd.

[boogieknite]

im getting more of a "books are better than movies" feeling from the review. pretty weary take because, yeah, duh. Everyone whos read a book and then seen the adaptation figured this out when they were 9 reading Tolkien

[phoronixrly]

> Emily Wilson is a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Mocked with Death: Tragic Overliving from Sophocles to Milton, The Death of Socrates and a biography of Seneca. She has also translated Seneca and Euripides as well as both the Iliad and the Odyssey.

It seems to me they did indeed try, and you didn't even check who the author was.

[traes]

Writing a screenplay adaptation of a poem and writing a translation in contemporary language are entirely different endeavors.

[vintermann]

They're pretty related endeavors. Not literally the same of course, but in both cases you're trying to convey something profoundly alien (because of its age) to a modern audience.