Greek to them

 If you have not been on Twitter lately, and I know that many of you have left it in disgust, you will not have seen that the silly season is starting early. 

A handful of people have been fulminating over Emily Wilson's translations of Homer, particularly her Odyssey. They have not held back, freely using terms like "outrageous" and "evil." And they have provoked a backlash from classicists challenging their knowledge of Greek and their understanding of how translations work. 

Having no Greek myself, I am unable to weigh the merits of their arguments. But my reading of the emotional undertone of the posts suggests why these people have taken out against Emily Wilson. (1) She is a woman. (2) Her translation displays relatively straightforward English rather than the archaizing artificiality of some other translations. (3) Her work has gotten popular notice.

It would be well to remember that Homer has been through quite a lot, particularly over the Iliad. Keats enthused over Chapman's version. E.V. Rieu rendered it into prose. Alexander Pope turned it into rhyming couplets. The Lattimore and Fitzgerald 20th-century versions have their partisans. Dozens and dozens of translators over the past four centuries have Englished Homer, and the Iliad and Odyssey have survived them all. The Wilson translations will or will not stand depending on how deeply they satisfy before they too are superseded. 

In the meantime, bros, just leave Emily Wilson alone.  

My call is not important to you

 My doctor wants an MRI scan of my hip, and his office called and set up an appointment at a nearby location next week. 

In due time I received a text from a radiology company, asking me to register for the appointment. I tap through the categories at some length, entering miscellaneous pieces of information, coming at last to the discovery that the location for which I am scheduled is not listed. 

Sighing, I call the radiology company. "Your call is important to us." "Your call will be answered by the next available representative." "Thank you for your patience." "Your call is important to us." "Your call will be answered by the next available representative." "Thank you for your patience." And then, helpfully, "You can register for your appointment at our website." 

Ultimately, a human being answers, and we go back and forth until it begins to emerge that maybe the doctor's office sent the order to this radiology company by mistake. I thank the human and move on.  

I then call the place where the doctor's office scheduled the appointment, and a human being answered and said yes, we have your order and the time of your appointment. Just show up. 

This is how it goes in U.S. medicine, a lumbering bureaucracy that offers you two choices: an electronic rigmarole that may or may not be of any use, or a lengthy wait on the phone because they will not hire enough people to handle the traffic. And while it is true that I am seventy-five years old and retired with few obligations, I am not keen to spend what time remains for me listening to inane hold music. 

This, plainly, is nothing more than a bitch session. Feel free to vent in the comments yourself.