Post-Slack: Polytropos
After Slack, a new project. A sculpture inspired by an article about a translation of an ancient story. Finding home.
New to A Slack Story? Check out: Introduction: what if the startup myth comes true
One day, around 2018, back when I travelled a lot for my work at Slack, I read an article in the New York Times about the first woman to translate Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey into English from the original Greek.
The translator’s name was Emily Wilson and her story of the process of translation stuck with me. The process itself struck me as epic, and a few years later I did something about it.
In particular, the story of Emily Wilson’s choice on how to translate the fifth word of the poem – polytropos – stuck with me. From the NYTimes article, a few passages:
“One of the things I struggled with,” Wilson continued, sounding more exhilarated than frustrated as she began to unpack ‘polytropos,’ the first description we get of Odysseus, “is of course this whole question of whether he is passive — the ‘much turning’ or ‘much turned’ — right? This was —”
“Treat me,” I interrupted, “as if I don’t know Greek,” as, in fact, I do not.
“The prefix poly,” Wilson said, laughing, “means ‘many’ or ‘multiple.’ Tropos means ‘turn.’ ‘Many’ or ‘multiple’ could suggest that he’s much turned, as if he is the one who has been put in the situation of having been to Troy, and back, and all around, gods and goddesses and monsters turning him off the straight course that, ideally, he’d like to be on. Or, it could be that he’s this untrustworthy kind of guy who is always going to get out of any situation by turning it to his advantage. It could be that he’s the turner.”
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“So the question,” Wilson continued, “of whether he’s the turned or the turner: I played around with that a lot in terms of how much should I be explicit about going for one versus the other. I remember that being one of the big questions I had to start off with.”
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“I want to be super responsible about my relationship to the Greek text. I want to be saying, after multiple different revisions: This is the best I can get toward the truth.”
πολύτροπος
I knew The Odyssey lightly before I read this article. A few years earlier still, around 2010, I had listened to the story as an audiobook while driving thousands of kilometers across Canada, from Vancouver where I lived, to Winnipeg where I grew up.
The startup company I had founded and sunk my savings into was flailing and reaching its end of life stage, though I hadn’t totally recognized it yet.
On my return journey to Vancouver I dipped southward from Calgary into Montana. I followed a route called the Road to the Sun. I met with our biggest customer in Missoula. I left that meeting disappointed. They were happy with what we’d done for them and might buy from us again, someday. That was the moment I realized my company was done. If we couldn’t get them to buy again, what hope did we have?
I drove back north into Canada and into the valley of Kootenay Lake, listening to The Odyssey. The road and the story together pulled me onwards. The mountains, sharply sheered up against the blue sky, were still capped with snow. In the air around me I heard of Athena, the bright-eyed goddess.
Now zoom ahead with me to a decade later, to the summer of 2020. After 7 years at Slack, I had just left the formal world of work and all that travelling to stay put and start something new.
One of the first projects I worked on turned out to be born from many of the ideas I’d had rolling around in my head — journeys, translation, beginnings, the durability of ideas and materials, home. I felt like perhaps I had been carrying all these ideas with me as I travelled. Together, they started to take shape in a new kind of project I thought of as my own polytropos.
In short, here’s what I wondered. What if the complicated and many turning or many-turned idea of polytropos could be made into an object — a sculpture inspired by an article about a translation of an ancient story? What if that sculpture were cast of bronze, the dominant material of the age of the Odyssey? And what if the object was itself many turning, like a pendant on a necklace or coin on a string?
In that mix of echoing ideas is where I started to cast about. That is where I tried to find my own new beginning to life after Slack.
Casting
If you want to cast something in bronze today, how do you do that?
After a few searches and speaking with two foundries, I learned that to start you find a designer and production house. I also learned that almost all bronze sculpture now gets done for the dead — as headstones and commemorative plaques. Only occasionally is there a commission for a statue or sculpture.
After a few more calls I met Evie Katevatis from Century Monuments.
“Fun fact,” she said in her first email, once I’d described the idea. “My dad is from the island where Odysseus is from!”
Evie reported the island to be Ithica, which used to be known at Thiaki, and now has been officially renamed Ithake. And though some scholars argue with this certainty, to Evie, the line of the story is clear — this is where Odysseus is from. So I’m going to repeat that here too.
By email, I told Evie my idea.
I imagine a bronze sculpture that resembles a large coin with a hole in the centre. The diameter of the coin would be ~25 cms and the diameter of the hole in the centre would be ~7.5 cms. It would hang from a strap and be able to turn in the wind.
On one side would be all the synonyms for the greek word polytropes (many turning) that have been used in the opening sentence of translations of The Odyssey over the years. There are about 40 of them.
On opposite side would be the opening lines of the most recently translation of The Odyssey by Emily Watson (the first woman to translate the poem into English).
Those opening lines are:
Tell me about a complicated man.
Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost
when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy,
and where he went, and who he met, the pain
he suffered in the storms at sea, and how
he worked to save his life and bring his men
back home. He failed to keep them safe; poor fools,
they ate the Sun God’s cattle, and the god
kept them from home. Now goddess, child of Zeus,
tell the old story for our modern times.
Find the beginning.
I’m not a designer and I have no experience as a sculptor or working with bronze, so I’m seeking help and expertise. I always thought of using bronze because the age of Odyssey was the Bronze Age, so that symmetry was nice.
So that’s the outline of the project. Does that sound like something you’d be interested in learning more about?
Evie proved to be interested and excellent. She listened and coached me. Her expertise guided the sculpting process: sizing, fonts, lettering, design.
Soon enough we had a PDF mock up that we emailed back and forth. We agreed on details. The PDF got output to a polymer casting that the foundry would use to form the bronze sculpture. I signed off on my parts and hoped.
The foundry
A few weeks later, we had a production date at OBRONZE in Richmond, BC. Another week later and I got a call. The finished piece was ready to be picked up.
I dropped my son to school and drove out to get it. The address for OBRONZE led me to a series of warehouse fronts on a dead-end cul-de-sac behind a collection of auto body shops. Some of the warehouse doors gaped open. Others stood rolled shut. Signage was minimal so I parked and started to walk. Eventually I found a bronze plaque next to one of the gaping doors that read OBRONZE.
The acrid darkness inside smelled of fire and the bloody tang of metal. I knocked on the frame of the door, “Hello?”
From the darkness a voice answered. Then a man appeared in a heavy apron seasoned with soot. He held metal mandibles. I introduced myself and why I was there. He told me he knew my piece. He pointed with the mandibles to a glass door behind me. “Pay at the office and bring me the receipt.”
I crossed to the glass door and pushed it open. The venetian blind on the back side of the door clattered. Before me was pretty much every industrial office I’d ever visited: foam-panelled suspended ceilings, veneer walnut desks, a grid of security bars, dust.
“Hello?” I called out. The venetian blind tinkled back against the glass. A voice answered and I pushed through another door. A small woman with silvering black hair said she knew my piece. “I came from over there,” I told her, pointing back to the darkness.
“The foundry,” she said, and this was remarkable to only me.
She had a bill for the agreed-upon price. I handed her a credit card that she fitted into a manual impression device — chuck-chunk it went as she rolled the plastic bar, and this was also only remarkable to me. She waved the duplicate impression at me with little time for chit chat. “Take this to Irv.”
With my receipt in hand I returned to the darkness of the foundry. Irv in the apron was waiting just inside the door. He had my piece boxed up in his hand. He wanted to know what I was going to do with it.
I told him I planned to hang it from a rope as people used to hang coins that they carried. He turned the piece over in his hands, as if imagining it hanging from a rope. He handed me the small rectangular box.
“You know it will turn when you hang it, right?”
“Yes, I hope so.”
A silence stretched out between us. He grinned but didn’t ask any more. I wanted to tell him more, but resisted. I took the piece and weighed it in my hands. Twelve pounds of dense mass. I didn’t know how to tell Irv about the intention of the piece, or the origin of polytropos, or the story and the ideas and the translation of the meaning. All that felt like it would gush out at once. I hadn’t even had the chance to see it yet!
“Good luck with that,” he said finally and turned back to the darkness.
“Thank you,” I called.
I found my car and opened the tailgate and put the box down. I unfolded the flaps that held it closed. Inside was a film of bubble wrap surrounding a round shape. I peeled back the plastic and saw the piece for the first time. I turned it over in my hands. The edges felt sharp under my fingers and its golden lustre reflected the light in angles. It still smelled of the acrid darkness, of fire and the bloody tang of metal.
I wondered how long the edges would stay sharp. How long before the bright shine dulled? How would time pass and change this piece? I wanted to find out.
Coda: So, I’m asking you about home
One more thing to add as a kind of coda to this project. From the excellent podcast, that I recommend listening to in its entirety, Conversations with Tyler: Emily Watson on Translations and Language, episode 63.
COWEN: Here’s another reader question about translation: “Could you please ask her about home? Her translation pulls this word to the foreground more than I remember other translations doing, and that decision made me read the text differently. It also made me realize that home is not a concept that I interrogate nearly as much as I should.”
So, I’m asking you about home.
WILSON: I love that question. The Greek text has a lot of uses of the noun nostos, from which we get nostalgia, the journey of homecoming, the event of homecoming, and then of cognate words. I wanted to use the word home as a way of signaling the centrality of the concept of home, and of defining the concept of home in the poem.
It’s already a very loaded word in English, I think. It’s a word which means so much more than just house or place where you live. The Odyssey is fascinating in the ways that it defines home as something which involves both a living space, a particular kind of community, and a space where at least one member of the household has the choice about who to keep in, who to keep out.
Up next:
Day 1: San Francisco
Day 1: 5:30 am in Vancouver. Get up, get moving. Get the taxi to the airport to the flight to San Francisco. All of it a bit bleary.
I like the idea of Odysseus either turning or being turned. A question that I think about a lot: are you happening to the world, or is the world happening to you?
I can't wait to see the bronze piece in person!
Bronze is made from tin. I see what you did there. Smooth