Brendon Zatirka @BrendonZatirka Twitter profile

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Brendon Zatirka

2 months

🚨AHEM🚨 my new translation of Sappho’s fragments, PIECES OF THE PURPLE SEA, is set to come out 2.11.2025!! 🏺🌊🎵 Cover to come, along with other fun things 😋

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

2 years

if twitter is collapsing then let my last translation post go out with a bang

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

8 months

Once again, the literal founders of Zionism expressly called it a settler/colonizing ideology. That’s literally what it is. You literally have Zionist Israelis literally stealing the houses of Palestinians.

Mikel Jollett

@Mikel_Jollett

8 months

To those calling Israel a “settler” or “colonial” nation: Israel is only 25% white. 70% of Israeli Jews are Mizrahi or Sephardic—brown skinned people from the Middle East or Africa. Millions of Jews were forcibly expelled by neighboring Arab countries.

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

2 years

hey question, why won’t you name Lockheed Martin? is it because it’s one of the largest defense contractors that provides arms to Is/r @el and played a role in American imperial reaches in both Iraq and Afghanistan? ($75 billion in pentagon contacts in 2020 alone??)

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

6 months

@symfloraphilia I literally gasped reading this!

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

2 years

of course you’ll be defended bc white queers and their complicity in acts of war will be excused as “well people have to work”??

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

2 years

like i do not care if you don’t directly work on software related to missiles, arms, or military planes (unlikely) but to be legacy hired onto this kinda company is extremely fascinating lmao

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

3 years

Starting a new project today:

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

2 years

i’m crying over this 19th c. commentary on Catullus 16

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

5 months

Art cannot simultaneously be so unimportant that you’ll disrespect the people who create it and also so important that you need a constant flow of it

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

1 year

Happy Pride! Here’s a little sample from my Sappho translation in progress!🏺

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

1 year

Honestly the most cursed kind of footnote formatting

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

3 months

“Readers” on here make everything worse for everyone when they loudly claim fiction is not allowed to depict terrible things and terrible people without immediately indicting the author’s character

Molly X. Chang✨

@mollyxchang

3 months

It features an unreliable narrator who convinces herself to do terrible things to protect those she loves, but when she finds the full truth of the occupying regime she does NOT continue harboring any illusions about it

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

9 months

This claim in particular is funny to me. (1) to what purpose do you make this point? (2) it’s not that “she believes” the words “weren’t suggested in the original Greek” it’s literally that those words do not appear in the Greek. Again, if you knew what you were talking about…

Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

9 months

Have you ever actually read the Iliad? Have you read about translation? Do you know Greek or about the epic tradition? Because this review tells me you’re not very qualified in any of these fields

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

6 months

I will make sure Shaun King goes to hell even if I have to take him there myself

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

5 months

It really grinds my gears that capitalists think art is merely a product that can be made as increasingly rapid rates (with terrible quality) rather than the purist expression of humanity that’s been around since humans first learned signs and signifiers.

Reid Southen

@Rahll

5 months

And there it is. Study shows 204,000 entertainment jobs will be disrupted by AI over the next 3 years. Some of the most impacted people in film are artists like me and my friends. When someone hand waves your concerns, show them this study. Be loud.

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

1 year

if your myth retelling includes Dionysus and your selling point is that it’s a “queer reimagining” I know for sure you don’t have any real knowledge of the source material

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

4 months

Everyone kept saying Yellowface was too on the nose but like…whew buddy Cait Corrain should really just fade into obscurity at this point. Spinning your racism into mental health and substance abuse is wild

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

2 years

@eeberquist

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

6 months

@XiranJayZhao “I just remembered something important” this is so WILD what!?

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

2 years

my first 10 lines of the Odyssey

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

9 months

Have you ever actually read the Iliad? Have you read about translation? Do you know Greek or about the epic tradition? Because this review tells me you’re not very qualified in any of these fields

Valerie Stivers

@valerie_reads

9 months

I wrote about how a new translation of the Iliad’s “critique of machismo” really kills the story. @compactmag_

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

2 years

oh, to be a happy octopus in the Mediterranean

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

3 years

“For these purposes close enough to Greeks” lol

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

3 years

*screaming in ancient greek*

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

9 months

This “review” is frankly one of the worst written pieces I’ve read in a while. What do you mean “Wilson’s Hector, I would say, is an affectless psychopath, shifting topics abruptly from grief to neglected housework”? That’s literally the narrative! She isn’t adding anything!

The Atlantic

@TheAtlantic

9 months

Emily Wilson’s new translation of "The Iliad" brings the epic’s characters closer to us, @gcaw writes. But it doesn’t capture the barbaric world it was meant to describe:

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

3 years

Somebody please explain why people are so quick to ignore the fact that England is one of the most prominent racist-imperial machines ever

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

10 months

This vine has been seared into my brain for a decade

xanax in cinnabon (ali)

@xanabon

1 year

tell me a Vine you’ve never been able to get out of your head

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

3 months

This sort of belief is, to me, on par with far-right reactionaries. If you children are not grown up enough to understand fiction can and should explore terrible people and terrible things, then stick to simpler books.

RUH-ROH-RAGGY!!!

@ohangiemyangie

3 months

something is deeply deeply wrong w u if u take the TRAGEDY and trauma your grandfather endured and make it into a fetish romance novel, I wanna pay for ur therapy or for ur brain to be studied for science

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

1 year

Plato literally wrote that Achilles bottomed for Patroclus. Cope and cry about it

The Franklin

@TheFranklin000

1 year

Not an original take on my part, but these people can't imagine that men can have relationships that are not sexual because everything about these people is identity through depravity and justifications for such.

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

7 months

Bisan hasn’t posted in 21 hours. Plestia got hacked. Motaz’s latest IG story is all orange with fire and bombs. This is fucking insane I feel fucking insane

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

2 months

full offense but many of the younger writers on here could stand to spend more time thinking about the stories they’re writing than being manipulative abusers bc the books you’re trying to shove into buyer’s hands are not good to begin with

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

6 months

@KaylaAncrum We watched this in like 6th or 7th grade and it permanently altered my brain chemistry

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

2 years

me, every day i don’t have @kuangrf ’s BABEL

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

3 years

These are my only two moods

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

3 years

This is my favorite natural lighting

breezeh

@briscoepark

3 years

Photos I took at blue hour

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

10 months

When I say I need this translation

Aaron Gwyn

@AmericanGwyn

10 months

In his translation of The Iliad, Robert Fagles has Achilles call Agamemnon a “King who devours his people.” Emily Wilson, in her new translation, renders that line: “Cannibal king, you eat your people up.”

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

2 years

get your hands on a copy! my retelling of Orpheus’ death by the Bacchantes is in it: “They break my body open like a pomegranate, and their nails, deep red, scoop out the seeds of my grief.”

Air and Nothingness Press (aanpress.com)

@aanpress

2 years

'Orpheus + Eurydice Unbound' is now available for order on our web site -

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

1 year

trash jones

@jzux

1 year

adulthood is a slow, terrifying process of realizing no matter how many versions of yourself you try, you can ultimately only pick one and then spend the rest of your life watching the other versions crouch in the dark corners of your brain

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

3 years

hot take: Women of the Assembly is a better play than Lysistrata, but @Poochigian ’s translations of them both are soooo good. crystal clear, accessible, and HILARIOUS

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

10 months

If you don’t know Ancient Greek and have never read a single piece of translation theory then you have nothing to say worth listening to. Cry about more you big man baby

Max Meyer

@mualphaxi

10 months

Her translation of the first lines of the Odyssey is so bad that I don’t even know where to start I almost wonder if I’m contributing to the crime by even commenting on it. This is it — but in order to set up just how bad it is, you need to look at a few normal translations.

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

2 years

There is not a single ounce of queerness between these two

Red, White & Royal Blue on Prime

@RWRBonPrime

2 years

ICYMI: #RWRBMovie is officially in production! You're welcome x

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

3 years

a little excerpt, from one of my favorite moments. Medea’s planning of Jason’s doom is deliciously intense

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

2 years

please explain to me what 17 dead Palestinian children and photoshoots outside a bombed out hospital have to do with book-banning??

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

4 years

any ancient poem that suggests same-sex desire: straight male scholar: clearly this poem is using a persona to express different-sex desire

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

5 months

Like OBVIOUSLY artists want to make a living off their art but humans create art bc that’s what we do! Taking art, the best expression of human pain and joy, and giving it over to AI machines to make hollow products for consumption is such a tragic disregard for humanity

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

4 years

I only like my handwriting when it’s in Greek

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

5 months

@KaylaAncrum I need this written or I need to write this 🤩

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

3 years

I didn’t wanna tweet about M/B again but who she does and does not interact with is all I need to know about her.

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

4 years

Please enjoy a rare snippet of the Medea translation I’ve been working on

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

1 year

Normalize not being a neo-liberal shill who thinks education is just a way into become a laborer for the work force

Jacy, LPC

@ATMwithJacy

1 year

The first two years of college are unnecessary as they’re only pre-reqs to your actual major. Normalize only having us take the classes that will help us learn about our MAJOR/CAREER.

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

3 years

Look at these cute lil calamondins i grew. They taste like warheads

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

1 year

. @simonschuster should be embarrassed to publish this shit. please explain to me how some white guy trying to surgery his way into a Korean person has anything to do with “the gender ideology movement”

Oli London

@OliLondonTV

1 year

PREORDER📕Detransition: A Memoir “How one man's struggles with self-identity & detransition lays challenge to the very foundations of the gender ideology movement” Simon & Schuster Amazon Barnes & Noble

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

9 months

@arakkisuperstar Idk what it is about LoK but I find most people just do not understand that show at all lol

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

9 months

This bit of Wilson’s translator note is so interesting to me

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

2 years

lmaooooo i love Brandon Taylor

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

3 years

Everyone should try some fan fiction if they wanna be a good writer. How do you think we got the Aeneid? 😌

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

5 months

A white woman married to an Israeli shouldn’t be anywhere near a history book of Gaza are you people insane?

BookBrunch

@BookBrunch

5 months

. @simonschusterUK has signed A Short History of The Gaza Strip by historian @Anne_Irfan , 'an illuminating and necessary primer for anyone who wants the context to the current war' (£)

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

3 months

Glad to see this acct going fully mask off by using diversity as a punchline. Now we can stop pretending like this journal is worth reading or writing for

Antigone Journal

@AntigoneJournal

3 months

The Antigone Team is very pleased to announce that we are now recruiting to expand the team in several important directions! 4 vacancies are currently online, with more to follow in coming months. Further details available here: Come join us! Pls share! 🙏

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

1 year

When you think about the importation of Greek myth into Brit/Western education because 18/19th c xenophobes considered classics the highest education, while simultaneously pilfering material culture from a people who btw were under Ottoman occupation at the time, it gets weird

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

8 months

How did you all think Free Palestine was going to happen? A peaceful chat with Benny? Or did you just expect Palestinians to sit by and accept their oppressors violence and genocide forever?

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

4 years

Sorry folks :/ you can’t teach Beowulf or the Odyssey unless you have the full poem memorized and you can recite it. You gotta bring LIFE to it :/ I don’t make the rules :/ Laura does :/

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

3 years

When they accidentally get it right??

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

1 year

As much as I love writing them I actually am exhausted with Greek myth retellings from people who think they’re like…just fun! Read some dang Euripides!!

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

7 months

Bringing a certain “Fuck Israel” energy to Mt Rainier

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

9 months

What does this even mean? You’d think this reviewer has owned every translation of the Iliad printed and held it to be a dear and personal text and EW’s was a personal insult lmao

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

4 years

I AM SCREAMINGLG AT LAST

DiscussingFilm

@DiscussingFilm

4 years

‘THE GREEN KNIGHT’ will now release on July 30, 2021.

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

2 years

happy Valentine’s Day, here is my favorite image of Venus, from the manuscript of Christine de Pizan’s Epitre d’Othéa

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

3 years

Omggggg it’s finally here!!!! My Hyacinth short story, illustrated BEAUTIFULLY here, is finally out!!!! Read and share, lovelies

Matt Ortile

@ortile

3 years

so excited to publish @brendonzatirka 's short story "Petals Bend in the Wind," a retelling of the myth of Hyacinth, his lover Apollo, and his death at the hands of the jealous Zephyrus: "I know all too well how quickly that wind can turn violent."

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

2 months

@cellulitespace Everyone in the comments complaining about her performance but this wasn’t Sasha’s night so why would she try to steal the light from Nymphia and Sapphira? We all know she can deliver

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

2 years

me after a bad day: i think i will treat myself to a lil wine and weed me after a good day: i think i will treat myself to a lil wine and weed

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

7 months

These people should not have a single peaceful night out for the rest of their lives if they refuse to acknowledge this genocide

Jewish Voice for Peace - Boston

@JVPBoston

7 months

A Palestinian woman who has lost 68 family members in Gaza confronts Senator Warren. She had no answer We mobilized with Harvard students and others in Cambridge to disrupt @SenWarren at dinner We will keep disrupting until our politicians listen to us & call for a CEASEFIRE

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

10 months

This is the kind of analysis I expect from a freshman who never took his English classes seriously. Pack it up pal, nothing you say is correct or even interesting

Max Meyer

@mualphaxi

10 months

Wilson LAUGHS as she explains to the NY Times exactly what πολύτροπος means (turning many ways) And then she just translates it as "a complicated man” anyway. She doesn’t care about the truth.

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

10 months

Then shut the fuck up

Max Meyer

@mualphaxi

10 months

Disclaimer: I took a year of classical Greek at Stanford I was an average student, definitely not as good as the experts here, including Wilson herself. I couldn't translate it myself But I think you will see that many of my criticisms don’t require any knowledge of Greek

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

3 years

🥂 31 🎂

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

7 months

I just think if you’re going to post an email from a Zionist agent (or, most ambiguously, a neutral one) who says “watch what you post online” in some weird creepy surveilling way, you need to put that agent fully on blast. Why are you protecting THEM? Type out that name!

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

9 months

HELLLLLLO

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

2 years

watching what straight people do with twitter circles (get confused, ask what’s the point) vs what gay men do (post thirst and pole) is hilarious

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

4 years

Forbidden salsa

Wonder of Science

@wonderofscience

4 years

This is how geologists collect lava samples from an active volcano.

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

4 years

God this is ME

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

2 years

since y’all like Catullus so much

Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

2 years

if twitter is collapsing then let my last translation post go out with a bang

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

7 months

Have a little Catullus translation

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

2 years

this portrait is,,, 🥹🥹

tului ^-^ @ COMMS OPEN

@geneslovee

2 years

if i was a silly little poet novelist of children's books (chukovsky) and a renowned brilliant painter (repin) casually painted me this way i would casually literally fall in love forever

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

2 years

hello i just found out my Orpheus short story is going to get published in a printed anthology 👀👀👀

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

3 years

wearing a crop top, translating the odyssey

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

10 months

@aaronhaceves This would be my villain origin story

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

1 year

my most cancellable classics take is y’all should be required to read some translation theory and take at least one (1) class on literary studies bc you spend way too much time thinking about what the words mean and not enough about what the words MEAN

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

2 months

I’ve been in this writer space since 2014 and the landscape has changed drastically. Everyone just wants to be published. Nobody cares about writing as a craft.

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

2 months

#TeamNymphia since day one 🥹💛

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

1 year

@callmefaggg If you’re replying to this saying OP should’ve texted back then idk what to tell you. This is very invasive and inappropriate. Maybe you are also the type of guy who would do this. Not getting a text back does not warrant violating personal boundaries.

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

2 years

🎂32🎂

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

9 months

If all of classics worked with ONLY translation and zero engagement with Latin/Greek then they would not be properly engaging with ideas. Translations, no matter how good, are ALWAYS acts of INTERPRETATION

Hands off Rafah 🇵🇸

@FeyeraBender

9 months

academics who speak and read multiple languages are so obsessed with saying u can’t engage with ideas properly without speaking and reading multiple languages. funny

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

5 months

@RAMONASWlNGER It’s not even a micro-aggression at this point. This is just Dorit being aggressive(ly racist)

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

9 months

Why do you people keep acting like Wilson is writing fiction and inserting or removing material? Can you read? The writing of this piece is absolute shit, doesn’t get to the point, and bumbles around in any attempt at trying to sound well-read while effectively being unorganized

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

9 months

@mooninabucket @ihussainwriter I don’t think it’s “entirely devoid of meaning” when poetic form is all about sentences and line breaks—so how long does a full complete sentence go on for? One line? 3 lines?Emily Dickinson rarely uses a period, so what’s up with that?

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

3 years

this is funny bc “ΝΙΚΕ” is literally right there in the Greek

Greek City Times

@greekcitytimes

3 years

Nike’s 'Air Force 1 low' pays homage to the Goddess of Victory #greece #greek #greekcitytimes

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

2 years

being legacy hired (for 15 years) into a company that sells missiles for war and genocide is not “surviving oppressive systems” LMAO get a GRIP. that is absolutely something that speaks to a person’s character, to say nothing of the fact that his family works there too

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

1 year

this Anthony Bourdain quote immediately comes to my mind whenever Henry Kissinger is mentioned

Peter Baker

@peterbakernyt

1 year

Henry Kissinger turns 100 years old tomorrow and his son reflects on the secrets of his longevity. Hint: It's not the diet heavy on bratwurst and Wiener schnitzel.

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

2 years

if I were Sar*h B*nd I simply would not out myself for killing that review!!

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

3 years

Is there anything more chaotically queer than the summer Byron, Shelley, Shelley, and Polidori shared a house in Switzerland?

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Brendon Zatirka

@BrendonZatirka

3 years

People who draft out of order and people who don’t outline are all sorts of chaotic. I admire them and fear them

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