In my first year of college, for a class called “Philosophical Perspectives on the Humanities,” I wrote a paper on the different connotations of “fate” and “destiny” in The Odyssey. I got a B- and the comment that they’re the same word in the original text.
You will (not) be shocked to learn that I did not major in either philosophy or classics after this experience.
this is so fascinating and I have so many follow-up questions! Like, doesn't your argument still hold, but about the TRANSLATION rather than the original text, and isn't there an interesting claim to be made there about nuance that the translator might have been picking up on? Which professor was this? And, also, if I remember correctly, didn't they give everyone a bad grade on the first essay of first year just to knock everyone down a peg because we were so used to acing everything in high school?
I had to go look up who my instructor was: Avner Baz. No idea if that's meaningful or not.
But because I am a data hoarder, I easily called up my paper from cloud storage. It was actually on The Iliad, not The Odyssey. I can't bring myself to focus on reading the whole dang thing, mostly because the references are a muddle to me these days, but it might well be coherent to someone with greater familiarity. (I like to hope I would have gotten a worse grade if it was baseline incoherent.) I appear to have been proposing that fate is connected more to the event of death and destiny more connected to the events of life. It was probably tenuous at best, but it's not impossible that the translator had something going there. Still probably not strongly enough to merit anything more than a 4-page essay by a brand-new college student, though.
In my first year of college, for a class called “Philosophical Perspectives on the Humanities,” I wrote a paper on the different connotations of “fate” and “destiny” in The Odyssey. I got a B- and the comment that they’re the same word in the original text.
You will (not) be shocked to learn that I did not major in either philosophy or classics after this experience.
this is so fascinating and I have so many follow-up questions! Like, doesn't your argument still hold, but about the TRANSLATION rather than the original text, and isn't there an interesting claim to be made there about nuance that the translator might have been picking up on? Which professor was this? And, also, if I remember correctly, didn't they give everyone a bad grade on the first essay of first year just to knock everyone down a peg because we were so used to acing everything in high school?
I had to go look up who my instructor was: Avner Baz. No idea if that's meaningful or not.
But because I am a data hoarder, I easily called up my paper from cloud storage. It was actually on The Iliad, not The Odyssey. I can't bring myself to focus on reading the whole dang thing, mostly because the references are a muddle to me these days, but it might well be coherent to someone with greater familiarity. (I like to hope I would have gotten a worse grade if it was baseline incoherent.) I appear to have been proposing that fate is connected more to the event of death and destiny more connected to the events of life. It was probably tenuous at best, but it's not impossible that the translator had something going there. Still probably not strongly enough to merit anything more than a 4-page essay by a brand-new college student, though.