Talk:Works and Days

Comments

I just want to say that the URL for the electronic version of my paper listed in the "further reading" section has changed because of a reorganization of my website, and that is why anyone who clicks on the link presently given there is getting an error message. I don't have time to learn how to fix it in the article itself, but people who want to read the paper should go to http://poetry.efbeall.net/pandora.htm. Thanks, E. F. Beall 141.161.98.183 (talk) 14:28, 3 July 2009 (UTC) ____________________________________________________________________________________________________

It's good to see an article on the Works and Days at last!

I wonder if it would be better for the quotations from the poem itself to appear in the text rather than in footnotes? This is just a meditation, I don't feel sure about it ... Andrew Dalby 13:56, 19 August 2006 (UTC)

the link to the translation

http://www.animalrightshistory.org/hesiod/cooke/works-and-days-1.htm presents a very curius translation. i thought at first of deleteing it but since a literary work (a translation is one of them) should be judged by its own quality, i leave it there. if you want a translation which stick to the original, follow the first link.

manuscripts

I moved manuscripts section from Hesiod to here, though the section has problems. McCronion (talk) 02:10, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

Translations

Why is George Chapman's 1618 translation not included in the list of translations? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Rabs222 (talk • contribs) 22:17, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

Mankind versus Humankind

Mandruss: Thank you for reverting the edit by KindOfHuman who should not have changed "mankind" to "humankind" in the article's description of the poem's first lines. But your edit-summary reason, that it's gender-neutral, isn't the point -- Hesiod wasn't being gender neutral. The word he used was ἄνδρες. which (unlike ἄνθρωποι) primarily means "men" i.e. "males" . The Wikipedia editor who used "mankind" was probably paying attention to the poem. Peter Gulutzan (talk) 14:41, 1 July 2018 (UTC)

@Peter Gulutzan: It was just one of a recent series of many, many edits by that editor with the totally baseless MOS:GNL rationale in their edit summaries. I have reverted all of them using the same edit summary I used here, which may have been too blunt an instrument in a few cases. The general issue is under heated discussion at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#Updating "Mankind". ―Mandruss ☎ 14:57, 1 July 2018 (UTC)

@Peter Gulutzan: Well, what you may be hinting at when you say "primarily" is that ἄνδρες is actually sometimes gender-neutral, at least in poetry: for instance, πατὴρ ἀνδρῶν τε θεῶν τε "father of men and gods", a set phrase used in many places in the Iliad and Odyssey to refer to Zeus. (πατὴρ ἀνθρώπων τε θεῶν τε "father of humans and gods" has one too many syllables to work metrically.) It would be strange to assume that Zeus is the father only of the male half of humanity. It is probably being used gender-neutrally at least some of the time in Hesiod as well. There is lack of gender neutrality in the fact that it is a word that usually refers to males that is used in a gender-neutral sense, rather than γυναῖκες "women". Anyway, mankind is a bad choice if one wants to render a lack of gender-neutrality in the original Greek: it is usually gender-neutral. I suppose it does nowadays connote a lack of gender neutrality in the sense above because it does relate to a word man, that is now most often used in a gendered sense. — Eru·tuon 20:39, 1 July 2018 (UTC)

Actually I was thinking of Liddell and Scott's primary sense: "man, opp. woman (ἄνθρωπος being man as opp. to beast)", before they get to secondary senses, none of which suggest Greeks of the time thought the term included women. If one says "Zeus had a boy" that wouldn't imply that Zeus never had a girl and so wouldn't imply that boy is a gender-neutral word. As for your suggestion that "mankind" is usually gender-neutral -- I don't know that, but if it is true that's all the more reason that KindOfHuman had no reason to change it. Peter Gulutzan (talk) 21:12, 1 July 2018 (UTC)

@Peter Gulutzan: Well, below that sense you will see the gender-neutral sense: "man opp. god", which is the sense used in the case of the phrase translated "father of men and gods". That doesn't mean "male human as opposed to god", but "human as opposed to god", because man too has a gender-neutral sense, though it is becoming old-fashioned and if you use it, you are fairly likely to sound sexist. The gender-neutral sense was the primary sense of mann in Old English (i.e., Anglo-Saxon), when there was a separate word, wer (from which werewolf derives), that referred to a male human being. — Eru·tuon 21:37, 1 July 2018 (UTC)

Anyway, yeah, I agree about retaining mankind. I'm just quibbling about the interpretation of the Greek. — Eru·tuon 21:43, 1 July 2018 (UTC)

You are right, what I said was more than what the original allows, and I was the guy who started this by quibbling at Mandruss. But neither of us is concluding that πατὴρ ἀνθρώπων τε θεῶν τε should be rendered as parent of humankind plus god-or-goddess-kind, so however we get there, we end up concluding that mankind is appropriate wording. Unless KindOfHuman joins this talk to convince Mandruss and me and you otherwise, I hopefully think that's the end of this proposed change. Peter Gulutzan (talk) 12:56, 2 July 2018 (UTC)

👋 for president 🎮

I don't want to be home by seedweed 73.70.138.62 (talk) 01:55, 24 June 2022 (UTC)

Synopsis

The synopsis is long and detailed, but lacks information on the central agricultural content of the book and focuses mainly on the myths found near the start. small jars tc 07:40, 2 September 2022 (UTC)