Trump has made various sallies against the idea of an independent Fed, including lots of rhetoric, firing Lisa Cook, aiming to have a CEA chair on the Fed board, and more. Probably the list is longer than I realize.
To be clear, I see no upside to these moves and I do not favor them. That said, I am not surprised that markets are not freaking out.
People, the Fed was never that independent to begin with!
Come 2008, the Fed, Treasury, and other parties sat down and worked out a strategy for dealing with the financial crisis. The Fed has a big voice in those decisions, but ultimately has to go along with the general agreement.
Circa, 2020-2021, with the pandemic, the same kind of procedure applied.
You may or may not like the particular decisions that were made (too little inflation the first time, too much inflation the second time), but I don’t think there is a very different way to proceed in those situations.
And given recent budgeting decisions, fiscal dominance may lie in our future in any case. The Fed is not immune from those pressures.
The Fed is most “independent” when the stakes are low and most people are happy with (more or less) two percent inflation. That is also when the independence matters least.
The real problem comes when the quality of governance is low. Then encroaching on central bank independence simply raises the level of stupidity. Some of that is happening right now.
A non-independent central bank can work just fine when the quality of government is sufficiently high. New Zealand has had a non-independent central bank since the Reserve Bank Act of 1989 (before that it had a non-independent central bank in a different and worse way). There is operational independence, but an inflation target is set in conjunction with the government. You may or may not favor this approach, but it has not been a disaster and it helped to lower Kiwi inflation rates significantly and with political cover.
Way back when, Milton Friedman used to argue periodically that Congress should set the rate of price inflation and take responsibility for it. I think that is a bad idea, especially today, but it should cure you of the notion that “independence” is sacrosanct. Every system has some means of accountability built in, and indeed has to.
I know all those scatter plot graphs that correlate central bank independence with lower inflation rates. In my view, if you could insert a true “quality of government” extra variable, the correlation mostly vanishes. Plus I do not trust the measures of independence that are used.
As Gandhi once said — “Central bank independence, it would be a good idea!”
Addendum: I also find it a little strange that many critics of the Trump actions earlier had been calling for higher inflation targets, say three or even four percent. That is maybe not an outright contradiction, but…the Fed isn’t just going to move to that on its own, right? Central bank independence for thee but not for me?
Artist’s depiction of life as seen from Planet Bluesky (adopted from here)
Bluesky, the Twitter spinoff that was once billed as a kinder, gentler alternative to what is now known as X, probably isn't on death's door. But after a burst of growth around the election, it's shrinking and steadily declining in influence, even as other corners of the left thrive during Trump's second term.
The life and death of social media platforms are dictated by network effects. Although there can sometimes be inflection points, for the most part, their trajectory is predictable. You join them because other people are joining them, and that in turn makes them progressively more useful. And you remain on them out of habit until and unless a critical mass decamps for somewhere else.
Alternatives like Meta’s Threads, Trump’s Truth Social and the independent Mastodon have failed to gain traction. And we’re at a point where it’s probably safe to assume that Bluesky won’t displace Twitter either.
Let’s take a look at Google searches related to each platform.2 By this measure, Bluesky peaked in November, 2024 following Trump’s reelection — although even then, despite largely glowing media coverage, it topped out at about 1/20th the worldwide search volume for X.
Even on a logarithmic scale — on a linear scale, the graph is boring, because everything but Twitter would pretty much just be a flat line — the gulf between X and the other platforms is clear. And since the election, Bluesky has lost ground. More precise data based on the number of unique “likers”, “posters” and “followers” at Bluesky tracks a similar curve, with an initial peak around the election and a secondary peak after Trump’s inauguration but persistent erosion since then. The number of unique posters at Bluesky peaked at just under 1.5 million on Nov. 18, 2024 but has since fallen to an average of about 660,000 on weekdays and 600,000 on weekends: in other words, a drop of more than half.
The decline in Bluesky’s number of unique daily followers is even more substantial. They topped out at 3.1 million on Nov. 18 last year, but are now just under 400,000 per day: almost a tenfold decline. So while a dedicated troupe of Bluesky regulars are still skeeting up a storm, they’re gaining less and less traction, preaching only to the converted.
Why this failure to achieve escape velocity? Well, as I’ve written about before, it might be Twitter itself was the outlier, created by tech nerds and for tech nerds at a time when the Internet was less tribal. Not only is anything else unlikely to supplant Twitter, but Twitter itself would probably fail to realize the same prominence if it were launched today, even if there were no dominant Twitter-like platform competing with it.
Founder effects are powerful in predicting network growth: if you go to a new club and everyone there has very peculiar tastes, it’s unlikely to become the hot new thing in town. Especially if everyone there is annoying and doesn’t seem to want you at their party in the first place.
Bluesky was initially popular with Twitter refugees who disliked Musk’s takeover of the platform, some of whom proclaimed that Elon had unleashed the “gates of hell” by restoring banned accounts or predicted that the platform would implode due to a shortage of engineering talent. I suppose I have no problem with this; ironically, the first post in Silver Bulletin history is entitled “In case Twitter goes to zero”. (I wanted a hedge in case it did, although if we’re being honest, I also had one eye out the door as ABC News was beginning to dismantle FiveThirtyEight.3) However, this also self-selected for a certain type of user, adherents of an attitude that I call “Blueskyism”.
Blueskyism should not be mistaken for general left-of-center political views. Google search traffic for Bluesky over the past year is highly correlated with Kamala Harris’s vote share, but has some other skews: controlling for the Harris vote, it’s (statistically) significantly higher in states with a large white population and where the percentage of people with advanced degrees is higher. Bluesky is disproportionately popular in D.C., but also in crunchy white states like Vermont and Oregon. Search traffic for Twitter/X over the same period shows the same bias toward highly educated states, but less toward Harris voters4 and actually an inverse correlation with the white population share. (X gets more search traffic in more diverse states.)
Demographics alone only go so far in explaining Blueskyism, however. It’s not a political movement so much as a tribal affiliation, a niche set of attitudes and style of discursive norms that almost seem designed in a lab to be as unappealing as possible to anyone outside the clique.
Although many people, myself included, find Twitter/X addicting — or not-so-secretly enjoy its drama — the most essential reason to stay there if you were some sort of professional journalist used to be to promote your work elsewhere at places where you might actually make a living from it. Under Elon’s leadership, that use case has been undermined as he’s made the platform more of a walled garden that throttles traffic to other places. (Substack in particular: The share of Silver Bulletin pageviews that originate from Twitter/X has steadily declined to around 2 percent.)
But if the benefit of tweeting all the time is less than it once was, so is the cost — at least for someone like me. That’s because some of the most annoying people on the platform have exited for Bluesky.
As compared to other people with a similar level of public prominence — so not heads-of-state or celebrities or NFL quarterbacks — I was a “trending topic” on Twitter as often as just about anyone for a period from roughly 2018-2021. Matt Yglesias and Maggie Haberman also come to mind as other people who share this particular “honor”, which is not a welcome one: it means you’re the main character of the day, the person that other people have decided to dogpile upon.5
There’s still some of this. If you tweet about election-related stuff, there is a pervasive tendency to “shoot the messenger” from partisans when the polls aren’t going their way. But much less than there once was: no more of the dogpiles for exceptionally strange reasons that I couldn’t even explain to my IRL friends.
And that’s because this behavior — I guess you could call it harassment but I’m a big boy and I can take it — consistently came from a relatively narrow group of power users, birds of a feather who flocked together, people who could demonstrate their fidelity to the group by picking on the main character. On Bluesky, exactly the same people — and I do mean exactly6 — attack exactly the same perpetual enemies, but to roughly 1/60th7 the size of the audience.
So I feel freer using Twitter these days for jokes, memes, and tongue-in-cheek ideas that aren’t meant to be taken entirely seriously, intended to be read as though they’re written in comic sans. Sometimes, the goal is to test the waters for potential newsletter topics, to see what sparks a reaction. But there’s usually some deeper thought behind them. This from the other day was one such example:
This tweet sparked a reaction; the term “Blueskyism” got picked up quite a bit.8 Everybody seemed to have some sense for what Blueskyism meant — except for the high priests of Blueskyism like this person, the podcaster and former Huffington Post reporter Michael Hobbes:
Even though it might be more fun to keep everyone guessing, I’ll explain in a moment what I view as the three essential characteristics of Blueskyism. But first, a little bit of a history lesson in recent online tribalism.
Although Bluesky isn’t very influential today, what I call Blueskyism has a longer history — and predates the platform. It once had a lot of purchase on Twitter at a moment when Twitter was more influential than it is now and often served as the “assignment editor” for the mainstream media.
Blueskyism’s peak actually came before Bluesky was a thing, in roughly 2019/2020. (You’ll notice that Blueskyists often have a lot of nostalgia for this period, the one and perhaps only time when they improbably became the prom king.) This timing coincided with the 2020 presidential primary, when there was a huge gap between the most prominent voices on Twitter and those of the actual Democratic base. The ultimate result was the rejection of various more “online” and left-wing candidates for the stodgy and more centrist Joe Biden, but choices made during period continued to cast a shadow on the 2024 campaign, particularly after Harris’s statements during that period were scrutinized once she took over for Biden.
However, this isn’t the standard claim that Democrats should move to the center. I think the preponderance of evidence suggests that moderation wins more often than not, but it’s complicated, and there can be exceptions. What really matters in elections is simply being popular and winning over new converts. Blueskyism, with its intolerance for dissent, is the opposite of that.
Because, yes, while this is personal for me, annoyingness matters in politics. Zohran Mamdani has deemphasized hot-button cultural issues for the cost of living and taken a more personable approach — scavenger hunts rather than struggle sessions — and he’s probably about to become the next mayor of New York.
Why Blueskyism once had such a foothold on Twitter is a complicated question. I wasn’t particularly impressed by the Twitter Files — I don’t think they demonstrated that pre-Elon leadership put a particularly heavy algorithmic finger on the scale. But Twitter is a platform designed for conflict, especially in the form of the quote-retweet, and Blueskyists love the drama. These pile-ons can also create an impression of false consensus. If you were a young journalist in your first year on the job, not having built up the audience to spin a failed “cancellation” attempt into a popular Substack, they had to have a chilling effect. The COVID pandemic further accentuated this by turning everyone “very online” out of necessity, giving the Blueskyists a sort of home-court advantage.
But as we’ve seen over the past few months, Blueskyist attitudes aren’t actually winning out in the “marketplace of ideas”, as some Blueskyists would like to think. If they were, it wouldn’t be the case that Bluesky is getting just 1/60th of X’s traffic.9
Even today, Blueskyism is not exclusively confined to Bluesky, any more than, say, Finnish culture is exclusively confined to Finland.10 There are still residual elements of it on X, sometimes on Substack Notes, and occasionally in real life, so some of my examples are drawn from those cases — although Bluesky of course presents a far greater concentration.
OK, then, now onto the main event: the three essential characteristics of Blueskyism.
The first essential characteristic: Smalltentism
Aggressive policing of dissent, particularly of people “just outside the circle” who might have broader credibility on the center-left. Censoriousness, often taking the form of moral micropanics that designate a rotating cast of opponents as the main characters of the day. Self-reinforcing belief in the righteousness of the clique, and conflation of its values with broader public sentiment among “the base”.
A healthy political movement, you’d think, would welcome people who agree with them on 70 percent of issues, particularly if it sees Trump as an existential threat to democracy and wants a broad coalition against him. Blueskyists do literally almost the exact opposite: their biggest enemies are people on the center-left like me and Yglesias and Ezra Klein. Or center-left media institutions like the New York Times, which are often viewed as more problematic than Fox News.
This aggressive policing of boundaries might at least have been tactically smart during the miraculous Blue Period when Twitter was afflicted with Blueskyism. Yglesias, say, is followed by a lot more Democratic staffers than Ben Shapiro or some actual conservative is.
But now that Blueskyism is losing the battle of ideas, it just draws the tent narrower and ensures that it will remain obscure. There’s nothing more Blueskyist than this, literally creating a “list of shame”11 of Bluesky posters who remain active on Twitter.
And sometimes, Blueskyists even make violent threats toward people who disagree with them. For instance, the journalist Billy Binion says he recently “logged onto Bluesky to find thousands of people screaming at me, many of whom were telling me to kill myself” after having posted that “billionaires should exist”. There’s some of that on every social media platform, unfortunately, and I’m not going to make assertions about the relative frequency on Bluesky without taking some more comprehensive approach to the question. It certainly shouldn’t have a reputation for civil discourse, however, and this may help to explain the high rate of exits from the platform.
The second essential characteristic: Credentialism
Appeals to authority, particularly academic authority. Centering of the suitability of the speaker based on his or her credentials and/or identity characteristics (standpoint epistemology) as opposed to the strength of his or her arguments, accompanied by the implicit presumption to claim to be speaking on behalf of the entire identity group.
Although Blueskyism is small, its practitioners mostly consist of people within the professional-managerial class: (over)educated blue-state liberals, perhaps people who have drawn the short straw of elite overproduction. You can see that in the demographic data, or in the attitude site management takes: the platform literally just banned people from Mississippi because of a dispute over age verification.
And Bluesky has become relatively popular among academics, which I regard as a problem on various levels. The Democratic Party has already forgotten how to talk to large groups of voters like young men, who have become considerably less likely to complete college than young women. Meanwhile, the experts have made a lot of mistakes, and sometimes the reason is because they’ve become self-serving in pursuit of social media validation or blinded by political partisanship. Increasingly often, I’ll see academics engage in incredibly sloppy argumentation and this seems to be correlated with recent exposure to Bluesky. Because Bluesky is so small, it has a highly specific signature. It’s like if you have some toxic persona on the periphery of your friend group; someone starts speaking in a particular way that you just know they recently hung out with George or Gina.
While academic credentials are one way to gain credibility under Blueskyism, they aren’t the only one. Even though the Google search data suggests that the platform is disproportionately white, an alternative is to claim to speak on behalf of a disadvantaged group. I swear to God, I’m not trying to make this about “wokeness” but there is overlap there.
Perhaps the most prominent example of Blueskyism creeping into real life is when a group of left-leaning public health professionals, who often took a bullying approach during Twitter’s Blue Period, went out of their way to rationalize mass protests after George Floyd was murdered in 2020. Personally, I think it was perfectly fine to join in on these protests; political expression is important (and these protests were usually outdoors and masked). But I also think a lot of other things, like sending your children to school or visiting your dying relatives in the hospital, would have risen to this threshold also, and this group specifically used their credentials to endorse the Floyd protests after having campaigned for those other activities to be prohibited.
Indeed, this controversy recently resurfaced on Bluesky. After Brian Schatz, the Democratic senator from Hawaii, wrote sympathetically in response to a Sean Trende12 tweet that recalled the hypocrisy of endorsing the protests, he and other “Dem elected/staff/consultants” were blamed on the platform for being “awash in right-wing brainrot.”
The third essential characteristic: Catastrophism
Humorless, scoldy neuroticism, often rationalized by the view that one must be on “war footing” because the world is self-evidently in crisis. Sublimation of personal anxiety as a substitute for political activism or material solutions to the crisis, with expressions of weariness and pessimism signaling virtue and/or savviness.
Although the first two characteristics already limit the appeal of Blueskyism, this makes it worse. Even people who might otherwise be sympathetic to Bluesky have noticed how impossible it is to get away with a joke on the platform, one of the things that X sometimes13 still has going for it. The Bernie-era, Chapo Trap House strain of left-wing discourse also at least had a caustic if sometimes juvenile humor streak. Blueskyism does not.
Instead, the prevailing Blueskyist attitude is often something like this — that we’re in the midst of a “late stage capitalist hellscape” and that you have to be “delusional” to have any amount of hope or optimism”:14
Any sort of subculture, of course, attracts people who are looking to fit in somewhere. Blueskyism is hardly alone in this.15 Still, a subculture like Blueskyism that sees depression as a rational and even virtuous response is going to select for a lot of miserable people.16 And misery likes company. So the Blueskyists gather in a corner, exchanging tales of woe, while the rest of us slink away.
Still, I don’t expect the decline in usage of the platform to continue indefinitely. Bluesky will probably settle into a small but sustainable steady state as the equivalent of a niche hobbyist subreddit: a peculiar online neighborhood that someone wouldn't encounter unless she takes a wrong turn, its facades gradually decaying into disrepair as its residents leer at passersby from their lawn chairs.
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For what it’s worth, if you run a regression analysis, the relationship with the Harris voting share on X disappears once you control for these other factors.
It didn’t actually take that much to become a trending topic: my impression is that the Twitter algo looked for mentions relative to some baseline. So if you were a trending topic, it didn’t mean people were tweeting about you more than they were about, say, Donald Trump, but rather that you were being mentioned more than you usually were.
To take a different “very online” subculture I’m more sympathetic toward, see this Asterisk Magazine article on rationalism and the types of people it attracts.
Five, apparently. That’s five armed police officers, of course. Heaven knows how many unarmed officers it would take to bring down a mighty warrior like Graham Linehan.
“There is no ‘right’ to undo another nation’s existence. There is no international principle that compels one people to surrender sovereignty so that their state can be destroyed — a state created as a haven for a people nearly annihilated, and after a defensive war they won. Until the Palestinian leadership abandons this claimed right of return, there will be no peace and certainly no two-state solution. Because the refusal to abandon this made-up ‘right’ means they don’t want two states. It means they want one. And they want the Jewish state to vanish.”
For those interested, I can recommend this overview about some of the issues from a pro-Israel, but not uncritically so, writer – Noa Tishby.
Another book by two authors, Adi Schwartz and Einat Wilf, dissects, in painstaking detail, how the “right of return” claim lies at the heart of why two-state solutions to the Israel/Palestinian conflict have foundered in the past. Here’s a review of that book.
Today, tutoring is seen mostly as a corrective to failures within the bureaucratic structures of education, like an intervention to help out a course, grade, or test. In general, those doing well in school don’t get tutoring—it’s like we’re applying the secret genius sauce solely to the kids who aren’t going to be geniuses.
Jeffrey Duban’s new book Homer’s Iliad in a Classical Translation is obviously a labour of love. No sane person would willingly translate 15,000 lines of ancient Greek poetry into modern English verse without some good reason to do so. Duban seems eminently sane, and highly competent, so we can trust that he has not done this merely on a whim. But countless translations of Homer into English already exist. What is the point of expending so much time and energy on a project that has already been successfully executed more than once? This is a question that every translator of a famous literary masterpiece ends up asking himself, and the answer is rarely self-evident. In this instance it takes some thought to unravel the mystery.
On Translating Homer
The classic introduction to rendering Homer into English is a series of lectures that were delivered by Matthew Arnold in 1860 and published in 1861 under the title On Translating Homer. For today’s readers, these lectures are by no means easy reading. They were written for audiences who knew Latin and Greek, could at least struggle through Dante in Italian, and were at ease with the full range of English literature, including the Homeric translations of George Chapman (completed in 1616), Alexander Pope (published between 1715 and 1726) and William Cowper (published in full in 1791). Chapman and Pope still enjoy a certain name recognition nowadays, but few readers will encounter their versions of Homer outside of a PhD course in English literature.
Despite all this, On Translating Homer rewards the struggles involved in getting through it. The central insight is easy enough to digest:
The translator of Homer should above all be penetrated by a sense of four qualities of his author;—that he is eminently rapid; that he is eminently plain and direct, both in the evolution of his thought and in the expression of it, that is, both in his syntax and in his words; that he is eminently plain and direct in the substance of his thought, that is, in his matter and ideas; and, finally that he is eminently noble …
Arnold wants translations of Homer to be grandly simple and plainspoken, in the way that Dante’s Divine Comedy is. He thinks that the standard English verse line, the ten-syllable iambic pentameter, is inadequate for translating ancient Greek epic poetry, whether rhymed (as in Pope’s version) or in unrhymed ‘blank verse’ (as with Cowper). Instead, Arnold thinks that translators of Homer ought to attempt an English equivalent to Homer’s dactylic hexameter, which features six units of two or three syllables, and thus would have lines of between twelve and eighteen syllables.
Arnold’s entire discussion is intricately complex and subtle, and there is no need to summarise all of it here. Duban appears to have grappled with Arnold and accepted certain of his insights whilst blithely rejecting others. For example, he agrees that a hexameter line is ideal for his purpose, but he uses a regular twelve-syllable iambic hexameter rather than a Greek-style line with a varying number of syllables.
Perhaps the most important disagreement between Duban and Arnold involves the most suitable diction for rendering Homeric Greek into English. Duban does not believe in plainness or simplicity, in part because he sees himself as fighting against an impoverished contemporary literary culture that has simplified language for all the wrong reasons. Also, he regards self-conscious archaism as an essential feature of Homer’s epic poetry and thinks it important to remind English readers of this feature. Duban is not interested in reaching audiences who need to be spoon-fed.
There is nothing else quite like Duban’s translation. Perhaps this is because Homer’s status has recently changed, at least in the English-speaking world. The poet Christopher Logue, who could not read ancient Greek, produced a series of iconoclastic Modernist-style retellings of the Iliad (collectively known as War Music), which were published between 1959 and 2005. Yet even he worked under the assumption that Homer was central to Western culture and enjoyed a prestige unmatched by any other author. Logue could take Homeric authority for granted because he lived in a world where nobody seriously questioned it. Duban, by contrast, is acutely aware that the entire classical tradition is under serious threat of disappearing.
In 1998, the Classics professors Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath published Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom, one of the best-known polemics in the Culture Wars of late-twentieth-century America. Much of what the authors said about dismissive attitudes towards the classical tradition among classicists themselves seemed far-fetched at the time. Almost thirty years later, it has become obvious that they were not pessimistic enough about classicists’ collective self-loathing. These days, a verse translation of a poem that was composed in the late eighth or early seventh century BC will be met with passive-aggressive side-eye even by professional classicists.
Not only is Classics suffering as a discipline—literature itself is too. American literary culture has been seriously eroded in the twenty-first century, to the point where poetry as an art form is effectively dead. Memoirs and autobiographical fiction have become the dominant highbrow literary forms. Who reads poetry, other than the people who write poems themselves? Whatever might have inspired or provoked Duban to translate Homer into verse, it certainly was not fame or worldly advancement. Things have moved on since the early eighteenth century, when Alexander Pope could become financially independent through translating the Iliad and Odyssey into heroic couplets.
So, why write something that only a handful of people might read?
Homer’s Primitive Qualities
Although Homer is the first real poet in the Western tradition, anyone who has taken the time to study the Iliad and Odyssey recognises that there is little about Homer’s artistry that could be described as “primitive.” He boasts a complete panoply of narrative tools and literary devices at his fingertips. Overall, his technical sophistication and sheer intelligence make Matthew Arnold and his Victorian peers seem effete by comparison.
The world that Homer depicts is perhaps less polished than the means that the poet has at his disposal to tell stories. Any account of the Iliad should make clear that this epic is the product, not of an old or exhausted society, but of a fresh, vigorous, new one that celebrates youth, strength, and beauty so fiercely that modern readers often find the Homeric world shockingly cruel—and indeed primitive.
At the end of the first book of the Iliad, the blacksmith god Hephaestus tries to calm a tense situation among the gods on Mount Olympus by reminding his mother about the time Zeus, the King of Gods, grabbed him by the ankle and threw him out of Heaven. After falling for a day, he landed on the island of Lemnos at sunset and ended up permanently lame. When he tries to serve a peacemaking drink to the assembled gods, they laugh at how he hobbles. This diffuses the tension. In the eyes of many classicists today, the scene demonstrates a kind of infantile savagery—the gods behave here like children who rip the wings off insects for fun.
The second book of the Iliad features a scene that seems even harsher, because it involves mortal men rather than gods. One of the few non-aristocratic soldiers in the poem is an ugly, lame, bandy-legged, loud-mouthed commoner named Thersites. His commanders loathe him. He harangues King Agamemnon, leader of the Greek invasion force, in the following words (in Duban’s translation):
Fault-finding Atreïdēs, what, pray, is your beef? Your tents with bronze abound, and many the woman Awarded you whenever we Argives raze a town Are you desperate for gold, that some horse-taming Trojan might fetch you from Troy, a son’s ransom, whom I or another Danaan deliver bound, Or for some winsome girl to gratify your groin, Whom you cravenly fondle and maul? How grievous When Argive leaders heap toil on the Argive host! For pity! Reproaches all, Achaean women, No longer men! But here let’s do abandon him, Prognosticating on his gains, that he perceive Whether we promote his enterprise or not who Has thus dishonoured Achilles, a better man By far than he, having pilfered and impounded His prize. But truly is Achilles unperturbed, Uncaring quite, or this your final insult were.
Thersites has flagrantly breached protocol by addressing such criticisms of a king to his face. Odysseus, the cleverest of Agamemnon’s officers, responds by clubbing Thersites over the back and shoulders with a golden sceptre, raising a bloody welt. Thersites begins to cry; his fellow-soldiers react thus (again, in Duban’s translation):
. . . the men on his account Though pained, laughed affably, and furtively peering Addressed their neighbours each: “Lord what wonder betides! Myriad goods has Odysseus undertaken, Plans deftly devising and waking men to war, But best of blessings on the Argives now bestows Who bridles this blundering lout, unbearable. Certain will testy Thersitēs never again Be predisposed to clash disdainfully with kings.
In the Iliad, death is simply impossible to ignore, whilst wasted human life seems a commonplace reality. Everyone shrugs their shoulders at these things, because they have no choice but to accept it. Thersites tries to complain about all of this and is beaten and laughed at for doing so. Modern readers often sympathise with him rather than with those who scorn him and are taken aback to see him punished for speaking his mind.
Diego Velázquez, The Forge of Vulcan [Vulcan is the Roman name for the Greek god Hephaestus], 1630 (Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain). Source: Wikimedia.
To translate the Iliad into a modern language involves finding a means of communicating, not just individual words, phrases, or thoughts, but an entire vision of reality that seems utterly alien. Yet, Homer’s depictions of human nature seem recognisably true, and universal. He is at once sympathetic and utterly pitiless. This pitilessness must be what makes him seem so primitive in a Christian or post-Christian world. We are uncomfortable with a tragic vision of reality.
Do We Need Another Iliad?
As I noted above, it seems fair to ask why anyone would choose to translate the Iliad when so many renditions already exist, some of which have become classics in their own right. Perhaps the most frequently read version is the old Loeb Classical Library edition, which is a godsend to fledging classicists who have not yet mastered the peculiarities of Homeric syntax, grammar, and vocabulary. Among more recent renditions for students, the very best introduction to Homer is Simon Pulleyn’s exemplary edition of Book 1, published by Oxford University Press in 2000. George Steiner’s splendid 1996 Penguin anthology Homer in English provides some idea of the sheer range of English-language literary versions of the Iliad and Odyssey available. Arguably the finest modern verse renditions of Homer are by the late Peter Green, who published the Iliadin 2015, the Odysseyin 2018, and died in 2024 a few months short of his hundredth birthday. Green was a distinguished translator and man of letters and wrote Alexander of Macedon(1970), one of the best-known historical biographies of modern times. His renditions of Homer are the work of an old-fashioned English adventurer. Duban’s translation, much of which was drafted during the pandemic, is the product of a very different moment in history:
The work’s conclusion in 2023–2024 amid the Israel–Hamas War bore witness throughout the world to harrowing on-campus displays of anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism and the assault on American values. Yet in every rendered line I felt the world, like the Iliad itself, reconstituted and preserved. Such was my “personally taken” response to the dissolution from which this Iliad emerged––a work, like its original, seeking the fixity and order of art, even as all crumbled around me. This is what art does, as they who most value it know.
The project’s political dimension is made explicit in the introduction:
This work ... stands as a reproach to Cancel Culture, the movement as of early 2020, gaining apace under the hashtag #DisruptTexts, tweeting its successes as they accrue. “Very proud to say that we got the Odyssey removed from the curriculum this year,” tweets a Lawrence High School English teacher—this in response to a tweet from her friend and colleague: “Be like Odysseus and embrace the long haul to liberation (and then take the Odyssey out of your curriculum because it’s trash).” Lawrence High School (as this Boston boy has known) is one of the traditionally poorest-performing schools in Massachusetts. It is thus, unsurprisingly, pleased to jettison the ballast that would steady it. In the longer picture, its actions are the trickledown of a now decades-long curricular decline in colleges and universities, where courses of a once-recognised formational value are swept aside by the outpour of identity and oppression faddism. “Who kills Homer?” indeed.
Duban came of age in a very different America. He was educated at the Boston Latin School, studied Classics at Brown University, earned a doctorate at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, and left academia to work as a lawyer, but never lost his fascination with ancient literature. His translation of the Iliad serves in many ways as a memorial to the now-vanished ‘middlebrow’ culture of twentieth-century America. Intellectuals have long scoffed at the idea of middlebrow culture, which arose from attempts to make high culture accessible to everybody, regardless of background or social status. Yet there is surely something healthy about a culture that inculcates some notion of self-improvement, as opposed to one that rewards self-pity, self-loathing, and unjustified self-forgiveness.
Duban might be a product of twentieth-century literary culture, but he is emphatically not a Modernist: as he says in his introduction to Homer’s Iliad:
A reproach to characteristically sparse (i.e. excessively monosyllabic) and often unimaginative (or too imaginative) modern, Modernist or post-modern idiom, the present translation seeks to recall and find a place in the estimable literary past.
In line with this approach, Duban’s diction and idiom
are designed to elevate the language of Homeric translation from the banalities of the past seventy years and more… “Banality” includes flatness of expression, most often marked by excessive monosyllabism. It results from lack of effort, imagination, and often the Greek language itself in those who purport to translate. Excessive monosyllabism has also been the fate of recent translations of Homer’s Odyssey and Vergil’s Aeneid.
He makes no apology for his style—quite the contrary:
when translators ‘contemporise’ with anachronistic daring or idiosyncrasy—[Christopher] Logue’s Iliad, [Maria Dahvana] Headley’s Beowulf—they are deemed devilishly clever. The critics, intent on displaying their own flamboyance, parse and parade the peculiarities for all to gawk at. The difference in response reflects Modernist preference: out with the old, however appropriate; in with the new, however outrageous. Il faut épater le bourgeois—today as during the birth of Modernism in the early twentieth century. A 2020 review of [Duban’s book] The Lesbian Lyre concludes that “Duban’s insistence upon discipline, decorum and formality in poetry is part of his philosophy of life.” It would need be, as such notions are nowadays deemed quaint, regressive, or simply obsolete. But let that be. I have sought to create a work “old enough to be new”—new by virtue of its datedness. Indeed, something of what is now considered dated need be preserved, as older, yet serviceable, uses succumb to the social media juggernaut. The rule is time-honoured: when something is replaced, it is all too often lost—if not recollected with scorn.
Duban errs on the side of generosity, not just in explaining and justifying his decisions, but in supplying the reader with appendices, indexes, maps, lists of names, summaries of all twenty-four books of the Iliad, and commentary that is often amusingly pugnacious. He has also created a website for his translation that includes additional supplements that he decided not to include in the printed edition of the book, which weighs in at 621 pages, not including over forty pages of prefatory material. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” as T.S. Eliot says in The Waste Land. Duban is trying to ensure the survival of everything he has learned, it seems.
“What Has He Done?”
As Ralph Waldo Emerson, Duban’s fellow-alumnus of the Boston Latin School, puts it in his essay “Spiritual Laws” (1841):
“What has he done?” is the divine question which searches men, and transpierces every false reputation. A fop may sit in any chair of the world nor be distinguished for his hour from Homer and Washington; but there need never be any doubt concerning the respective ability of human beings. Pretension may sit still, but cannot act. Pretension never feigned an act of real greatness. Pretension never wrote an Iliad, nor drove back Xerxes, nor christianized the world, nor abolished slavery.
Duban, with his forthright, studiously unpretentious manner, is steeped in a peculiarly Bostonian culture of learning. The qualities of his Iliad translation are difficult to demonstrate succinctly. This is in part because he has created a kind of performance text that is meant to be read out loud, or recited from memory, so that the insistent rhythm of the verse appears to drive the narrative forward. To read Duban’s Iliad silently on the page is to miss this essential element of what he has tried to create. He is perhaps at his best when rendering Homeric speeches into English. In such passages his innate sense of drama shines through and counterbalances the occasional clumsiness of his idiosyncratic diction.
Readers who have never studied the ancient languages may be surprised to learn that Duban’s translation is often freewheeling. He does not seek word-for-word fidelity to Homer’s verses; rather, he seeks to recreate something of the effect that the original words have on him. The following passage comes from the beginning of the eighth book of the Iliad (in Augustus Taber Murray’s somewhat eccentric translation from the 1924 Loeb Classical Library edition):
[1] Now Dawn the saffron-robed was spreading over the face of all the earth, and Zeus that hurleth the thunderbolt made a gathering of the gods upon the topmost peak of many-ridged Olympus, and himself addressed their gathering; and all the gods gave ear: [5] Hearken unto me, all ye gods and goddesses, that I may speak what the heart in my breast biddeth me. Let not any goddess nor yet any god essay this thing, to thwart my word, but do ye all alike assent thereto, that with all speed I may bring these deeds to pass. [10] Whomsoever I shall mark minded apart from the gods to go and bear aid either to Trojans or Danaans, smitten in no seemly wise shall he come back to Olympus, or I shall take and hurl him into murky Tartarus, [15] far, far away, where is the deepest gulf beneath the earth, the gates whereof are of iron and the threshold of bronze, as far beneath Hades as heaven is above earth: then shall ye know how far the mightiest am I of all gods. Nay, come, make trial, ye gods, that ye all may know. Make ye fast from heaven a chain of gold, [20] and lay ye hold thereof, all ye gods and all goddesses; yet could ye not drag to earth from out of heaven Zeus the counsellor most high, not though ye laboured sore. But whenso I were minded to draw of a ready heart, then with earth itself should I draw you and with sea withal; [25] and the rope should I thereafter bind about a peak of Olympus and all those things should hang in space. By so much am I above gods and above men. So spake he, and they all became hushed in silence, marvelling at his words; for full masterfully did he address their gathering.
One of John Flaxman's illustrations of the Iliad (engraved by Thomas Piroli), 1793 (Bibliothèque nationale, Paris, France). Source: Wikimedia.
This is difficult to read for anyone who is not used to this peculiar pseudo-Biblical idiom. Yet the translator sticks quite close to the original text and scrupulously avoids adding anything of his own (other than the self-consciously archaic style). Compare this to Duban’s rendition of the same passage, which is even more archaic:
O’erspread the dawn her saffron robe around the world, And lord Zeus Cronídēs in thunder delighting Convened the throng of Olympian gods immortal, Cloud-resident on craggy-crested Olympus. Exhorted he the gath’ring, and the gods gave ear: “Hearken unto me, you gods and goddesses all, That I speak what the spirit within me commands. Let not any goddess nor any god, for that, Attempt to contravene my word, but assent you Alike thereto, that I straightaway accomplish My purpose: whomever I distinguish ranging Wayward from the gods to hearten either Trojans Or Danaans, dearly and deservedly drubbed Shall he return Olympus-bound; or captured hurled Headlong to hateful Tartarus, remotest off, Its portals iron pounded wrought, its threshold bronze, Where gapes neath earth the pit profound, hewn as distant Neath Hades as starrèd heaven o’erheightens earth. Then shall you acknowledge me of gods mightiest E’ermore. But approach and assay me now, you gods, And ascertain: from heaven sling a golden cord And tautly gripping it, you heaven-dwellers all, You would not dislodge me earthward from Olympus However much endeavouring to dethrone me; But were I with gladdened heart to attempt the same, Then would you all midst earth and oceans be deposed, And the rope next secured about a pinnacle Of snowbound Olympus, that you all pendant be. So much superior to men and gods am I.”
Thus he spoke, and utterly silenced they remained, Astonished at his words, for imperiously Had he admonished their ranks.
Any reader who treats Duban’s verses as prose, without paying attention to the rhythm, will find all of the curious word order (“in thunder delighting,” “Its portals iron pounded wrought,” “utterly silenced they remained”) simply perverse. Then there is the diction.
Phrases like “cloud-resident on craggy-crested Olympus” and “dearly and deservedly drubbed” are embellished for effect; they don’t obviously reflect Homer’s own words. Also, they feature alliteration that vaguely recalls the conventions of Old English verse, rather than those of Greek or Latin epic. In line 2, Duban refers to Zeus as “Cronides” (‘the son of Cronos’). This isn’t in the original text. Evidently he is trying to add a further layer of archaism to the Iliad, and for some tastes this may seem gratuitous. But Duban has a sweet tooth for this sort of grandeur.
In the first line in this passage, Homer describes dawn as “yellow-robed” or “saffron-robed,” and says she herself is spread all over the earth. Duban changes this slightly so that dawn spreads her saffron robe over the earth. There are other such changes throughout Homer’s Iliad in a Classical Translation that might lead some readers to question how closely Duban has read Homer’s Greek. That would be foolish: Duban holds a doctorate in Classics from Johns Hopkins and has been thinking about ancient epic for well over half a century. Even so, it wouldn’t be difficult to go through his translation line by line to show how he has consistently altered the text. But that would miss the point of the exercise.
This translation is a faithful attempt to replicate the Iliad as it sounds inside Duban’s head. For all its scholarly apparatus, this is a deeply personal project. Readers who persist all the way to the end will come to feel that they know Jeffrey Duban at least as well as they do Homer or his Iliad. He has put his whole self into the introduction and commentary as well as the verse, and the depth of emotion throughout seems palpable.
Why did Duban undertake this exercise, if he was not trying to produce a faithful rendition of Homer’s Greek? The main epigraph to this volume, a quotation from Marcel Proust, provides a few clues as to why Duban chose to work in such an elaborately archaic style. There is more to all of this than mere nostalgia, or antiquarian interest.
Attentive readers will note that the translation is dedicated to the memory of Paul Petrek-Duban (1989–2019), whom Duban describes as “my son, my hero, and best boy.” In other words, Homer’s Iliad in a Classical Translation was Duban’s way of working through grief. The Iliad is not just a poem about war or the wrath of Achilles. In the twenty-fourth and final book of the epic, Priam, the aged king of Troy, visits the tent of the Greek hero Achilles to ransom the body of his son Hector, whom Achilles killed in single combat. Achilles says to Priam, in Duban’s translation:
… you were once reported To rule, in offspring and fortune felicitous. But, from the time the immortal gods rained sorrow On your being, unending war and butchery Afflict the town. But abide, nor unabated Be the heartbreak for your son; nor will you restore Him, enduring some other misfortune ere then.
To read this passage is to understand at last why Duban embarked on this project. It is not an attempt to seek literary glory, professional recognition, or a political triumph in the culture wars: it is a memorial to his son. No child could wish for a more moving tribute.
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