What the critics thought of Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey; Jaron Lanier’s Dawn of the New Everything: and Artemis by Andy Weir
Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey is “[a] literary event; it is the first published English translation of the epic by a woman”, wrote Helen Morales in the Times Literary Supplement. “She translates the poem through a politically progressive lens … in a way that resonates with today’s politics. Her translation, spare and provocative, will engage a new generation of students.” Nilanjana Roy in the Financial Times also thought that Wilson “tells the old story for our modern times ...” and found the translation “radical”: “Wilson’s Odyssey feels like a restoration of an old, familiar building that had over the years been encrusted with too much gilt … She scrapes away at old encrusted layers, until she exposes what lies beneath.” The New York Times’s Gregory Hays was another fan: “To read a translation is like looking at a photo of a sculpture: It shows the thing, but not from every angle. Like every translator, Wilson brings out some features more clearly than others. But altogether it’s as good an Odyssey as one could hope for”, he wrote.
Dawn of the New Everything: A Journey Through Virtual Reality describes our technological present and its author Jaron Lanier’s personal past. “It’s about technology and the way the brain works. It’s about how virtual reality actually functions. We get to see inside the mind of Lanier, one of the true pioneers of Silicon Valley. He tells us his life story. It’s vivid and absolutely extraordinary … this is a terrific book by a supremely intelligent guy,” enthused William Leith in the Evening Standard. The Observer’s Simon Parkin was pleased that: “By interspersing drier chapters that explore the general ideas, principles and promise of VR with intimate autobiography, a human and, often, romantic (if meandering) route into what might otherwise be a somewhat dry subject matter is laid.” While the Times’s Hugo Rifkind cut to the chase: “He’s as weird as hell, and fascinating as life itself … He is, I suspect, something of a mansplainer … What a wild, roaming mind, though, particularly when compared with the sly, corporate automatons who run Silicon Valley today. Lanier says little about the contemporary tech industry ... He doesn’t even say much about modern VR ... Probably, he finds it all a little disappointing and unambitious. How thrilling to be part of the dawn of a new everything. How sad that we’ve ended up with data harvesting, and cat photos, and masturbation, and making a buck.”
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