Netta’s Reviews > Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys Through Ancient Literature > Status Update
Netta
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Sappho appealed to later poets because she created a new way of speaking about distance, alienation and desire. If her work is universal, it is not because she invites us in - even if 'we' belong to particular marginalised groups, as women, lesbians or oppressed minorities - but because she shows us what it means to be excluded and alone.
— Jul 28, 2026 02:18AM
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Netta’s Previous Updates
Netta
is 21% done
A key premise of the myth is that she [Helen of Troy] is attractive in some absolute and total way that defies description […]. As Blondell neatly puts it, 'A beauty that is in the eye of the beholder may launch a ship or two, but only a beauty upon which all beholders agree can bind a generation of heroic males under oath and generate an enterprise as cataclysmic as the Trojan War.'
— Jul 28, 2026 08:03AM
Netta
is 9% done
Readers of contemporary fiction are likely to expect a
'good' translation to read smoothly and fluently in English, masking its status as a translation, whereas readers of canonical ancient literature in translation are less likely to have these expectations, no matter how smooth or fluent the original may be.
— Jul 28, 2026 06:38AM
'good' translation to read smoothly and fluently in English, masking its status as a translation, whereas readers of canonical ancient literature in translation are less likely to have these expectations, no matter how smooth or fluent the original may be.