Another Homeric epithet that’s fun to think about is the one that Anglophones know as “the wine-dark sea”—which, like “wingèd words,” has by now entered the English language so forcefully that it’s hard to see what image H was actually thinking of. The Greek adjective “oinôps”… …used to describe the sea (pontos) in fact has nothing to do w/ darkness or even color: it literally means “wine-FACED” (cf. “kynopis”, which = “dog-faced”). So what does it mean to have a “face like wine”? Hmm. *Is* Homer thinking of color here—the darkness of the open sea ?…

1/One can certainly argue with various of Wilson's choices--a number of (classicist) reviewers did when her Odyssey came out; I myself am not persuaded by some of them--but is incorrect to suggest that her approach is the product of a recent "woke" trend in Classical scholarship.

https://twitter.com/mualphaxi/status/1695481359072964734

2/ What EW and other feminist translators are doing is to put into the practice of translation the insights, now over two generations old, of a number of classicists whose investigations into Greek society and literature spotlighted the deeply patriarchal nature of that culture.

To me, Sondheim was the Euripides of American musical theater: formally, the artist who blooms at the end of a tradition, both recapping & interrogating its forms even as he expands its possibilities; historically, the dramatist of the end of culture during a time of cynical wars In a funny way, “Follies” and “Trojan Women” are strikingly parallel: self-conscious theatrical pageants in which classic female “types” are paraded, singing their greatest hits, against a backdrop of a culture that has collapsed & whose values the play holds up for examination.