What the Internet needs more off...

...is my poor attempts at eloquence. Mostly, I need an excuse to update this thing, so here's some bad poetry. It's like Christmas in August, right? And no, I don't really title these things. I'm not even sure I finished some of these, since I open this thing so infrequently.

Alpha
Speakers crooning
As they often do
Fragile glass
Filled with liver damage

Decadent confections
Corrupt a forgotten smile
Dopamine flutters
Like dandelions in the wind

Beta
Of two forms
In company, in laughter
Gears churning
Behind the curtain
Lying quiet
Fearful of falling bombs

Trigger hangs
Target in the center
Pull the switch

Shields crumble
Broken fortress exposed
Alarms sound
Defend the bulwark
Walls rebuilt
Only to fall again

Trigger hangs
Target in the center
Pull the switch

Gamma
Silence too often recurrent
And never blissful or profound
Punctuates discordian static
No more than bedlam devoid of succor

A friendship tranquil and empty
With allies welcome though bitter and dark
Dulls the quiet refrain of regret
To calm the wish to populate the silence

And thus comes not calm but complacence
With a journey ever downward
Along a path of no returns
And a silent ending of its own

Polutropos Odysseus

Most of us read ancient literature in translation these days, whether in school or for pleasure. These translations range from literal to flowery, but in general, all of them will be missing wonderful things that you can find in the original text. Words in one language don't always translate completely into another, which means that translators have to make choices about the particular meanings that they want to capture when rendering a passage in the target language. Here’s an example. These five lines begin one of the pillars of Western literature, the Odyssey:

ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ
πλάγχθη, ἐπεὶ Τροίης ἱερὸν πτολίεθρον ἔπερσεν:
πολλῶν δ᾽ ἀνθρώπων ἴδεν ἄστεα καὶ νόον ἔγνω,
πολλὰ δ᾽ ὅ γ᾽ ἐν πόντῳ πάθεν ἄλγεα ὃν κατὰ θυμόν,
ἀρνύμενος ἥν τε ψυχὴν καὶ νόστον ἑταίρων.

Here’s my quick and mostly literal translation, though many of you are probably familiar with the lines in general:

Tell me of the man, oh muse, much-turned, who every way
was made to wander, after he destroyed the divine city of Troy:
he marveled at the cities of many men and knew their minds,
and many pains he suffered on the sea in his heart,
striving to save his life and the homecoming of his companions.

Nearly all of us first came into the contact with the Odyssey through some translation or another. Robert Fitzgerald’s translation has long been popular in schools, but you may have first read Richmond Lattimore’s classic translation, Stanley Lombardo’s modern verse rendering, or perhaps an older prose translation, such as Samuel Butler’s or that of W.H.D. Rouse.

All of these translations, and most others, render lines 3-5 in mostly the same way as I’ve done, though each of course exercises his or her poetic muscles in one way or another with word-choice and phrasing. Every translator, however, faces a challenge in the first two lines, largely coming from the word πολύτροπον (polutropon or polytropon). This is the word I’ve translated as “much-turned,” which is an entirely literal reading that gives no real sense of the word's broad range.

Here are some examples to demonstrate what I mean. Take Samuel Butler’s translation of the first two lines (emphasis is mine—the italics are the translator’s rendering of πολύτροπον):

Tell me, O Muse, of that ingenious hero, who traveled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy.

W.H.D. Rouse takes a different approach in his prose translation:

This is the story of a man, one who was never at a loss. He travelled far in the world, after the sack of Troy, the virgin fortress

Here’s Fitzgerald’s, which is probably the most well-known:

Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story
of that man skilled in all ways of contending,
the wanderer, harried for years on end,
after he plundered the stronghold
on the proud height of Troy.

Richmond Lattimore (whose translation was the first one I read), gives us the following:

Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways, who was driven
far journeys, after he had sacked Troy’s sacred citadel.

And last, but not least of the translations I have on hand, Stanley Lombardo, translates these lines so:

Speak, Memory, of the cunning hero,
The wanderer, blown off course time and again
After he plundered Troy’s sacred heights.

Here, just from five examples (six, if you count my own attempt), we have Odysseus described as “cunning,” “ingenious,” “never at a loss,” “of many ways,”  “skilled in all ways of contending,” and the more opaque “much-turned.” Every one of these renderings brings with it a certain picture of the hero, but in the original Greek, polutropon carries all of them and more.

Polutropon is an object-form of πολύτροπος (polutropos), a compound of πολύς (polus), “many” or “much,” (which you’ll recognize from “polytheism," and) and τρόπος (tropos), “turn,” or “way.” Tropos also carries the sense of a “manner” or “habit” (which should feel familiar if you've ever spent time at TV Tropes). Taken together, the most sensible literal English rendering of polutropos is “many-turned” or “much-turned,” but neither one of those captures much of the word’s real meaning.

Lattimore’s translation, “of many ways,” is perhaps nearest to providing some sense of the word in English while staying as true to the Greek as is reasonable. Polutropos is also used of the god Hermes, metaphorically, to indicate a certain craftiness or versatility. Odysseus certainly fits that bill, as well, which gives us Butler’s “ingenious” or Lombardo’s ”cunning.”

But, even ”much-turned” describes something about Odysseus. After the sack of Troy, his νόστος (nostos) or “homecoming,” doesn’t come to fruition for ten years. Why does it take so long? The Cyclops Polyphemus, after his famous (and painful) encounter with Odysseus, calls upon his father Poseidon to curse the man “skilled in all ways of contending, ” such that he comes home long after he would otherwise (and to find his home a mess when he finally does). Much of Odysseus’ ten year wanderings are a direct result of this incident, as Poseidon answers his son’s prayer, leaving the hero “much-turned” away from his destination.

Polutropos is just one example of why it can be illuminating and altogether more rewarding to read literature in its original language. Though each translation of the word is in and of itself an accurate one, each is forced to sacrifice some aspect of its greater meaning. Odysseus in particular is exemplary of every shade of meaning polutropos possesses, and the best way to capture that is to go back to the original Homeric Greek.

If you’re interested in learning more about Homeric Greek and Ancient Greek in general, you can head here. This site contains a few texts in the original Greek (like Homer’s Iliad) enhanced with mouseover definitions, as well as some suggestions on how to start learning the language on your own.

I’m eternally grateful to Professor Keith Dickson of the Classics Department at Purdue University, who sparked my love for the classics. This piece is ultimately derived from his lectures on Greek literature, which I thoroughly enjoyed all the way back in 2003.

Historical Rhymes Galore

In two days, I'll be packing up and heading back to the mind-numbing quiet of my hometown, South Bend, Indiana. The last time I did this, I had just finished my last year at Purdue University, but there was largely one thing on my mind:

I had imported the latest Hooverphonic album, and there was a chance it wasn't going to arrive at campus before my final day there. As it happened, it arrived at the last possible moment. I picked it up from the mail room before leaving campus for the final time. I then forced my parents to listen to it for the entire ride home, and it was awesome. For me, anyway.

As someone (who may have not actually been Mark Twain) once said, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes," and I hit the rhyme in stride with this upcoming move. Two years ago, Hooverphonic put out a new album--The Night Before--that came packaged with a new lead singer that never made it stateside. Having found it at an unbelievable-for-an-import price of $7.50, I ordered it and very nearly didn't get it prior to my actual move.

But it came in today, and it's got some of their best work since No More Sweet Music. Since I got the album in time to add it to my phone, I'll be able to listen to it privately for this trip back to South Bend, but I can't help but enjoy the coincidence. For your listening pleasure, here's my current favorite track:

Writer's Block

I often feel the urge to write even though I have nothing worth writing.

Most of the time, I call it writer's block--that's what it is, after all, isn't it? I want to write, to self-express (as Kevin Smith puts it, for instance), but the words are not forthcoming. I often wonder if others face these problems in their mediums of choice. Do artists sometimes not know what to draw? Do the lines just never feel right? The same could be said of musicians and their notes, or sculptures and the clay available to them.

Sometimes--nearly all of the time, in fact--it feels as though the words are there to write what I desire, but the structure is absent. Even now I'm writing largely off-the-cuff, having not known what would spill outward once I started typing into the posting interface on Blogger.  But what I'm writing now isn't what I want to write. It's just a misdirection, meant to trick my fingers and slightly alcohol addled brain into thinking the motions are in the proper place.

I do not, to be honest, understand writer's block. Most of often when I encounter it, the impetus to create is present: that desire inexplicable by any other means but to "self-express" in some fashion or another. For me, that fashion has always been one of words--I lack the talent to turn pencil strokes into recognition except by the arbitrary meanings of alphabet characters strung in still more arbitrary sequences. The words, indeed, are forthcoming, but that thing the words are necessary for: the scene, the character, the theme, the message...these are ephemeral, elusive.

A Recognition Scene

For context, you can listen to the following (or at least Google the lyrics):

More specifically, the recognition scene (or anagnorisis) in a Greek drama involves the sudden revelation to the main character of a critical fact. The most well-known example is probably the scene in Oedipos Tyrannos in which Oedipus learns that he is the murderer (of his own father) at the center of the play's central conflict (the plague) and the husband of his own mother (the queen). The recognition scene in the embedded Mountain Goats song is sweeter, in some ways (and not just because of the stolen candy), as it captures in time the moment in time when one of a pair of friends realizes not only that the other is crucial to his or her (though the singer is male, it's not specifically called out as such in the song's narrative) life, but that they will probably be separated someday. It's a bittersweet moment, and one that many people can probably relate to.

I do not often free-write, but I'm in the mood to, and recognition scenes are on my mind. So here's a recognition scene (post-writing comment: in verse, apparently, even if prose was my original intent). I make no apologies for the lack of literary quality, as the intent here is to put words to paper (haven't I done that already up above?), and there's Guinness and Jameson both at hand. Hopefully, the words that follow do not assault the senses violently, at the very least.

Ordered strips of gray concrete
Dividing patches of densely packed snow
So blinding in the early morning sun

 Mercury hovers in digits solitary
And the wind defies the numbers
Stinging skin, dying it painfully red

But it is that time appointed
A finger already numb from cold
Rings a doorbell in sweet anticipation

Yet harsh exposure continues
The programmed chime left unanswered
A meeting perhaps forgotten or forestalled

Minutes tick while the flow of blood slows
And dry eyes well with tears soon frozen
By the bitter truths of mid-December

Something masquerading as a finger
Strikes the doorbell thrice more
First in concern, then desperation, and finally anger

Morning crawls on, limping in the harsh chill
Time passes unmarked as higher thought declines
Such that departure is dismissed on principle

An age goes by and only then a door opens
Fury hardened in winter melts like ice in summer
Leaving only three words spoken from visitor to guest

The Magic of the Kindle Made Me a Believer

This will be a short one, contrary to my normal verbosity.

I've resisted getting a Kindle (or some other e-reader) for some time. Like others, I wanted the feel of a real book in my hands, and ultimately worried that the experience of reading wouldn't be the same without that. There's just something in the feel of the paper in your hands, and the weight of the book itself, that has always contributed to the experience for me.

Today, in light of a surprise influx of funds, I picked up a Kindle Touch, ultimately because the lower price of ebooks would go a long way to supporting my interest in way too many books that come out these days. I'm incredibly happy to report that reading on my Kindle feels so much like reading a regular book that I find myself acting out old habits while reading: reaching for the top corner of the device as I near the last line on the page, so I can turn it seamlessly; looking for my bookmark as I pause my reading to take care of something else; and cradling the Kindle (with the fold-over case) just like I would any other book.

While I was in line at Radio Shack, the guy behind me mentioned that he loved his Kindle, and that I would "read more and read faster," and at least, for the moment, I'm inclined to believe him.

If you've been on the fence, do yourself a favor and go pick up one of the many Kindle models (personally, I'd stick to the E-Ink screens, rather than the backlit screen of the Kindle Fire, though). If you love books as much as I do, I don't think you'll regret it.

On Mass Effect 3: A Broken Narrative

I discussed before how Bioware failed to live up to the expectations they fostered for Mass Effect 3. That failure has played a part in the controversy surrounding the game's finale, but it's by no means the only part of the problem. The largest contributor to the outcry, as you might expect , the ending itself. The ending, only the last fifteen minutes or so of the game, contains a large number of inconsistencies and other narrative problems [N.B. Spoilers abound in the link and the rest of this post], lovingly collected for your pleasure by the fans.  These issues are so numerous that fans combined them with a mountain of circumstantial evidence from the rest of the game to conclude that maybe Commander Shepard was in fact dreaming while unconscious or "indoctrinated" by the Reapers.

To be honest, inconsistencies like these aren't exactly rare in video game narratives (or in narratives in general). Mass Effect 2 had a number of them all to itself, and the same could be said of many other games. With any narrative work, the audience suspends disbelief so that these things don't get in the way of their enjoyment; however, if a writer isn't careful, his narrative may end up breaking this suspension of disbelief, intentionally or not. When that happens, the audience often finds it very easy to pick apart the entire work, viewing things as problematic that they may not have noticed at all otherwise. In a nutshell, that's what lead to the massive Google document on the inconsistencies I linked above.

Many of the problems in Mass Effect 3's ending are minor and don't explicitly endanger the narrative. For example, while it's pretty odd that Admiral Anderson says he follows the Commander up to the Citadel (the setting for the game's last few scenes) when he's clearly ahead of Shepard on the path and seems to have gotten there before her according to some of the following dialogue, the throwaway line about rooms shifting is enough to allow the audience to wave it off. These minor issues, however, have some pretty big friends, all of which break from the narrative substantial ways. These larger inconsistencies ultimately create the impression that Mass Effect 3's ending was written for some sort of alternate reality Mass Effect series that had different emphases and themes. This Bizarro World Mass Effect (let's call it Massive Effect) would, in accordance with the ending of Mass Effect 3, have an emphasis on uniformity as the answer; a focus on the galaxy rather than the individuals within it; and have the tension between organic and synthetic life as its central conflict. By contrast, Mass Effect as we received featuresan underlying method of unifying the diverse to overcome a common enemy or threat; a focus on individuals and their lives, from family problems and love to matters of revenge and personal hatreds; and a central conflict in which "small" beings struggle against the impossible and win.

The differences between Massive Effect and Mass Effect are easily seen in their disparate approaches to the theme of diversity. In the "best" ending to Massive Effect, we're given the opportunity to create a new form of life that synthesizes organics and synthetics into a new hybrid form of life that eliminates by necessity the conflict between the two of them. This synthesis option neatly ties up the organics/synthetics problem that the ending presents as paramount (which I'll discuss in more detail below), but it's a jarring break in Mass Effect's treatment of difference up until this point.

Throughout the series, Commander Shepard assembles a rag-tag team of humans and aliens of varying species to combat a threat that's greater than all of them. Their differing backgrounds, unique perspectives, and areas of expertise all prove valuable to the mission at hand. In both Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2, Shepard brings aliens aboard human-centric vessels that are initially hostile to alien life. Through victory, she then proves that the hostility is unwarranted. On the smaller scale, this idea of working together in spite of difference is displayed in the resolving of loyalty conflicts between squadmates in Mass Effect 2. Examples continue of the strength to be found in unity despite diversity in Mass Effect 3, with Shepard doing the same thing on a galactic scale, bringing together numerous diverse fleets and research crews for the final battle with the Reapers. The downloadable Prothean squadmate, Javik, even comments near the game's end that it is the acceptance of diversity within the galactic fleet that has made victory against the Reapers attainable, as opposed to the situation in his cycle, where every race, under the empire, was essentially Prothean in outlook and strategy.

Positioning synthesis as the best ending (by having it only available in a mostly complete playthrough or with lots of multiplayer to boost your "score" in single-player) puts it at an odd place with regard to this long-running theme of the series. Up until that point, the solution has always been for diverse individuals (or races) to work together despite their differences (and indeed, often to succeed because of those differences), not to abandon those differences in favor of making everyone the same. This break in the narrative doesn't in and of itself a narrative problem, but it certainly causes a thematic one, which leads to an overall decrease in narrative cohesion.

Just as the ending to Massive Effect performs a weird about-face on diversity, it also abandons one of the greatest strengths and focus of the Mass Effect series: its characters. Over the course of three games, the Commander works with a menagerie of team mates, many of which become loyal friends and some of which are potential romantic interests. We learn about their histories, their peoples, their problems, and their dreams. We reunite them with lost family heirlooms, help them get revenge, save their families, represent them in court, and a number of other things that are entirely personal and only tangentially related to the greater cosmic threat of the Reapers. We do these things because the characters are well written, interesting, and the sorts of characters that really come alive in a narrative. Such characters are somewhat rare in fiction, but not in Mass Effect as a whole. Beyond your squadmates, there are bit-part characters that are just as memorable as the ones with all the screen time, from an annoying, sensationalist reporter to a battle-hardened (and totally awesome) quarian lieutenant.
Admittedly, the characters didn't come fully into the spotlight until Mass Effect 2 (which has a kind of Ocean's Eleven vibe), but even then, half the joy of the characters was meeting old favorites from the original Mass Effect. Because the audience has come to care so much about these characters, they could have (and I think, should have) been a centerpiece of the game's conclusion. There are any number of character-related plot-lines that are ultimately left unresolved in the ending to Massive Effect, ranging from whether Tali'Zorah vas Normandy gets to build her house on the quarian homeworld or whether Urdnot Wrex can truly manage to unite and control the bloodthristy krogan in light of the curing of their sterility plague.

Instead of rewarding our dedication to and love of these characters, Massive Effect presents us with an ending that has massive consequences for the galaxy at large, but the impact of which on our friends and favorites can only be speculated upon. Indeed, with the majority of the galactic fleet potentially stranded in Earth's solar system after the final battle, we can reasonably wonder if Tali'Zorah can even make it home to build her new house or if Wrex will ever make it back to his homeworld to lead his people to greatness. Your crew is (maybe?) stranded on some unknown garden world with apparently no way home, and with various species requiring differing types of food to survive, there's no telling who would be able to live and thrive on such a mystery world. At the end of Massive Effect, we've saved the galaxy, but we may have doomed our friends to painful (or at the very least, lonely) deaths. This again breaks from the strong character focus of Mass Effect as a whole, placing Massive Effect in Bizarro World as an alternate story that somehow got mangled with the one that had been so successful going back to 2007.

The last split between Massive Effect and Mass Effect that I want to address, that of their differing central conflicts, has been the subject of a lot of ridicule. The Catalyst in Massive Effect reveals that the purpose of the Reapers is to protect organic life from being wiped out by synthetic life, which is a somewhat circular argument, since the Reapers are largely synthetic themselves. The break in the narrative from Mass Effect comes in two parts here. Firstly, while the geth are painted as synthetics bent on destroying organics in the original Mass Effect, we learn that they do so largely because of the influence of the Reapers themselves. Additionally, through interaction with Legion (an advanced geth that becomes a squad member) in Mass Effect 2, we learn that the geth have a history of only attacking organics in self defense (as they did in the Morning War with their quarian creators, after which they let the quarians retreat without wiping them out). In Mass Effect 3, we're even given the opportunity to reconcile the story's main organic/synthetic conflict between the quarians and the geth, achieving unity despite diversity (which I dealt with above as well). While the example of the quarians and the geth does not by itself disprove the Catalyst's assertion that synthetics will always wipe out organic life eventually, the assertion is thematically at odds with the game's own narrative, which suggests that organics and synthetics do not, in fact, have to be at odds with one another.

Secondly, the games have never been primarily about the above conflict. The geth in Mass Effect were mostly unimportant servants of the actual threat, the Reapers themselves. From our first real interaction with a Reaper through our last one before Mass Effect 3, the Reapers are painted as a cosmic, unknowable force of evil, "beyond [our] comprehension." To them, the races of the galaxy are no more than "dust struggling against cosmic winds." The central conflict of the series has been between the Reapers and life throughout the galaxy: ants struggling against giants. In both Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2, Shepard and crew do seemingly impossible things in the fight against the inevitable: first destroying a Reaper and then entering uncharted space at the center of the galaxy to stop a second attempt by the Reapers to harvest life less directly. The theme itself is carried forward into Mass Effect 3, in that uniting the races against the Reapers seems impossible, but Commander Shepard does so (and spectacularly so in "perfect" playthroughs). This theme, and the conflict that goes along with it, are largely abandoned in the ending in favor of the secondary organics/synthetics conflict, which was resolved to narrative satisfaction several missions prior to the game's ending (with the geth/quarian conflict being its primary representation, it is also the vehicle for its resolution in a narrative sense). This sudden shift, from defeating the Reapers to resolving the apparently inherent conflict between organic and synthetic life (which the narrative has prior to this point shown to be a suspect assumption) takes the wind out of the game's narrative sails.

Ultimately, that's what you would expect if a narrative had an ending so different in theme and structure from everything before it. Mass Effect and my hypothetical Massive Effect are two different narratives with different themes and strengths, and they should have never been blended together into one story. The ending of Mass Effect 3, as a result, breaks the narrative of Mass Effect as a whole, and unfortunately, the schism is so great that the "clarification" that Bioware has suggested we will receive in Extended Cut DLC has very little chance of actually repairing any of the damage. But hey, Mass Effect was always a series about doing the impossible...maybe there's at least a glimmer of hope yet.

We'll see when the DLC is released later this summer.