Elon Musk: Always A Douche

[The Minsky Moment]

A performance of the Odyssey with historical fidelity would be sung or chanted, likely with accompanying period instruments.  It would be sung in fragments or with relays of performers.  It would not be performed off a fixed written text or script, which means the content would likely vary by performer and by the audience context.  By the time you get to the Classical or Hellenistic Era Greeks, it is already an archaic work that is radically out of its original context.

Once you have a script and scenery and actors, the nature of the work is fundamentally transformed. Translation to another language transforms it again. Trying to grapple with it several thousand years later by figuring out what it really meant and how it was really experienced in its original historical context is an interesting intellectual exercise, but a fool's errand for those looking for a determinate answer.

Once you commit to the idea of making a 21st century motion picture of it, you've already committed yourself to a radical transformation.  Of course, anything you do with it at that point says more about contemporary times than whatever its setting may have arguably been.  And since we are dealing with what at root was an oral tradition, embracing that reality openly arguably shows more fidelity to the living source material, as opposed to creating some pseudo-antiquarian swords-and-sandals-like pastiche in the name of ersatz historical fidelity

[crazy canuck]

And yet it's pretty easy to recognize that Viking ships shouldn't be used.

[Oexmelin]

In a way, Eric Rohmer's Perceval le Gallois was an attempt, not to perform an accurate historical rendition of the Arthurian legend, but one way to evoke it, with sung parts, deliberately hieratic gestures and postures, etc. It's definitely a more challenging watch, but I have always been fascinated with the attempt.

[Sheilbh]

A performance of the Odyssey with historical fidelity would be sung or chanted, likely with accompanying period instruments.  It would be sung in fragments or with relays of performers.  It would not be performed off a fixed written text or script, which means the content would likely vary by performer and by the audience context.  By the time you get to the Classical or Hellenistic Era Greeks, it is already an archaic work that is radically out of its original context.

Once you have a script and scenery and actors, the nature of the work is fundamentally transformed. Translation to another language transforms it again. Trying to grapple with it several thousand years later by figuring out what it really meant and how it was really experienced in its original historical context is an interesting intellectual exercise, but a fool's errand for those looking for a determinate answer.

Once you commit to the idea of making a 21st century motion picture of it, you've already committed yourself to a radical transformation.  Of course, anything you do with it at that point says more about contemporary times than whatever its setting may have arguably been.  And since we are dealing with what at root was an oral tradition, embracing that reality openly arguably shows more fidelity to the living source material, as opposed to creating some pseudo-antiquarian swords-and-sandals-like pastiche in the name of ersatz historical fidelity

Totally agree - and even that would reveal more about our time. A fetishisation of the classical past (which is simultaneously a specific interpretation and reading of that past) which, in the current moment, is buttressing a particular political argument (and feels like an other echo of some of the fin de siecle anxieties and cultural output).

But as you say this is inevitably the case in both the creation and subsequent transmission of the text. It is contained in all projects of translation or adaptation. And my general view/preference is that those works should aim to be effective works of art on their own terms not as "effective" translations (acknowledging there is a need for those in a specific academic context). But I'm an admirer of Alexander Pope's Homer which are great 18th century Augustan English epics (by a poet who knows how to play around with the form) and second only to Milton as an English-language epic - and yet I'm not sure you could reliably call them Homer

In a way, Eric Rohmer's Perceval le Gallois was an attempt, not to perform an accurate historical rendition of the Arthurian legend, but one way to evoke it, with sung parts, deliberately hieratic gestures and postures, etc. It's definitely a more challenging watch, but I have always been fascinated with the attempt.

Arthurian legends are themselves an interesting version of this so I think particularly open to this sort of treatmen - there's like a single line in Y Gododdin (new translation out recently which I have but have not yet read). But also most of the Arthurian legends are Medieval texts - and the Medieval world does not like claims of innovation or inspiration. So very many of the Arthurian legends are constantly saying that it's not their story - they read it in another set of stories and are just transmitting it (the great Medieval literary virtue, as opposed to Romantic "creation").

It's most extreme in the Morte d'Arthur which is intended as a bit of a compilation but Malory is constantly saying that he got all of this from the "Frenshe bookes" even for sections that seem fairly novel Obviously it may simply be that the books he was referring to just didn't survive - it's amazing how many important Medieval texts basically survive because there was one copy in a manor house/universit library normally discovered by a Victorian antiquarian. I think this is also the story of how the notes about the Putney Debates survived, there was a notetaker using shorthand to record the debates and a copy of his notes survived in a university library where they were discovered three centuries later.

One slight exception I think is Gawain and the Green Knight - where there are loads of sources, a lot of the features of the story are tropes. But it is so weird and unique that it kind of stands on its own (with the other works of the Gawain-poet) like a standing stone and it doesn't really wear its sources on its sleeve in the way Malory does.

[The Minsky Moment]

there's like a single line in Y Gododdin

A passing and indirect reference.  And is it original or a later gloss?
Either way, the Arthur we know is a 12th century and later literary invention, whatever obscure role he may have enjoyed in a long-lost Welsh epic oral tradition.

[Norgy]

The Norse sagas are mostly written by people with some big brute standing behind them saying "Make me look good".

[The Brain]

Agabatman in a Viking ship is peak.

[Josquius]

I hear a lot of complaints about viking ships in the Odyssey film. I do wonder if this is an intentional choice to illustrate who these guys are?  They're a lot closer to vikings than settled classical Greeks.

[The Brain]

My guess is it's largely a budget decision. If you don't want to use CGI but need actual ships, and don't want to build your own, then my guess (which is just that, a guess) is that there are more readily available Viking replicas sailing today than ancient Mediterranean style replicas, and they look less out of place to history nerds than say Chinese junks or Pacific islander vessels.

I saw that the people behind one of the Swedish Viking ships used in the movie still haven't gotten fully paid.