u/SnooPets7983

Tried to figure out how to use this thing with a friend who has a lot of experience on a similar gamma machine and we could not figure out how to use it. Cranking felt like too much pressure and winding the string around the crank (picture 2) would either pinch the string to the point of notching (which is what broke it) or just not pull. I was given this a few months ago by someone who swore it works. I have no way of contacting him or id ask directly.

Any info appreciated!

Age of Innocence: A great way to start the month. Wharton’s prose is so full of subtleties of psychology. I thought the middle section dragged a little but when I got to the end I realized what it was all for. I thought the moment when Newland realize he’s been the subject of the gossip of all of New York society and that May thinks he’s having an affair was particularly poignant. The final chapter i found totally gut wrenching. A beautiful, heartbreaking book.

The Iliad: My first time reading this or the Odyssey and I started so I could have the source material complete before seeing the movie later this summer. I loved this poem and this translation. I thought the struggle for Sarpedon’s corpse as well as the later struggle for Patrocles’ were particularly poignant although basically every part of this poem that wasn’t a list was amazing (the lists got pretty boring but what are you gonna do). Having never read the poem before I was surprised at how ascent Achilles was although looking back that’s basically the point.I think what is often misunderstood in discussions of Wilson’s work is not the individual word choices but the flow of the work in aggregate and I thought the effect of the breeziness of the translation was pretty propulsive. I could not put this or the Odyssey down.

The Odyssey: 10/10 insane banger. Wilson’s translation is so breezy and really kept me hooked on the tale. What was particularly great about her Odyssey translation was the introduction which really grounded the work and contextualized the story within the culture of Ancient Greece. Particularly useful was an extended overview of “guest friendship.” So much of the poem is about overstaying your welcome/ leaving too soon so without the context the introduction provided I don’t think I’d have appreciated that theme as readily. I checked out a bunch of other translations at my local library and found several other notable translations to lacking in the introduction department.

This was absolutely the highlight of my reading this month. I was moved to tears at multiple points. I know this is like the classic of classics but I still couldn’t believe how great it was. So grateful for this reading experience.

The Aeneid: I STRUGGLED through this poem. Of the three epics I read this month this is the only one I had ready previously. I read the Fitzgerald translation in HS. I appreciated sections of it then but had an apprehensive feeling about the poem at the time that I didn’t have the language to articulate. I started with Scott McGill and Susannah Wright’s translation. Being as it had an introduction written by Emily Wilson and it had a similar meter, it seemed a natural place to start. That was where the similarities ended. I found that the McGill/Wright translation suffers from all of the issues that people levee against Wilson (sounds like a Wikipedia page/feels soulless and flat). While I understand cognitively that McGillWright are scholars in their own right, while reading their translation I couldn’t shake the sensation that they were Wilson’s graduate students trying badly to imitate their beloved professor. I tried the Flagles translation for a book but was comparing directly with the McGill/Wright as well as the Shadi Bartsch. Ultimately, I settled on the Bartsch as it felt most clear and easy to read and I was so frustrated at that point I wanted something that I could power through as aside from my issues with the translations I was struggling with aspects of the poem itself. I loved book 2 and thought the extended description of the Trojan Horse (which to my surprise was not mentioned in the Iliad and mentioned only in passing in the Odyssey) and the sack of Troy was vivid and moving. At no point in the poem is Aeneis’s duty more highlighted than it is carrying his father out of a burning Troy. Book 4 was amazing, I can see why Donte chose Virgil to be the narrator’s guide in the first two Canticles of the Divine Comedy. In my translation research I found that Seamus Heaney has a stand alone translation of this book of the poem, the idea of reading that was exciting. The Trojan games chapter was fun. The bloodshed at the end of the poem and the ending of the poem came as a surprise and really rescued it for me as the back half of the poem really had presented a struggle as to that point the second half of the poem had really read like a shitty knockoff the the Iliad. Seeing Aeneas’s piety and dutifulness boil into a rage and bloodlust was an interesting way to go and really complicates a pretty one dimensional characterization. Lots of people before me have characterized this poem as propaganda. I was suspicious of this reading at first but I think it’s totally fair. It felt while reading it that this was a foundational text to the settler myth that we’ve seen so much ugliness from here in my home nation (US) as well as abroad. I would be curious to read any scholarship on this mater as I’m far from an expert here. All of that to say that the whole “we need a strong leader so we can find our destiny building a great city where these other people live” thing was not for me.

Dubliners: The story about the guy who gets yelled at by his boss and then drinks his money away and goes and beats his kid destroyed me. 10/10 book amazing stories. It took like 2 days to read I couldn’t believe I had put off reading it for so long. A perfect palate cleanser after the long and turgid struggle of the Aeneid.