Harlock Sholmes

YOU NOW FACE DOOM

Doctor Doom seems to be much bigger on cohost than anywhere else, we have good taste here

One of the most striking and controversial translations of Sappho is that by Eva Mihailovic, the Zefiro Romani poet. Her family fled Latveria during the pogroms and did not return when Victor Von Doom took power. She became famous as a queer poet who harshly criticized both the Doom regime and the US government.

Not long after the publication of her first book, Doom approached her with an offer. Knowing she was working on a translation of Sappho, he offered her the use of his time machine. She would travel to 7th century BCE Lesbos to collect the poems that now only exist in fragments. Doom did not demand anything of her in return; she could continue to protest and write poems against him. His only reward was that the world would know the goodness and generosity of Doom.

Though uneasy, she accepted Doom's offer. She spent, by her account, five years in ancient Lesbos and returned to the present with a translation. It met with massive and immediate popular success. It is a striking work of poetry, passionate and immediate, which combines strongly defined meter with colloquial freshness in a way other Sappho translations have struggled to do.

From the moment it was published, Mihailovic's translation was a source of scholarly controversy. Many Sappho scholars doubted the time machine story, but the translation was clearly the work of someone deeply engaged with Archaic Greek poetry, and showed familiarity with aspects of life on ancient Lesbos which were not obvious to nonspecialists.

Some scholars questioned the work's provenance even if the time travel story had been true, as Mihailovic did not bring any manuscripts with her to the present. Those who were more familiar with the mechanics of time travel had their own questions.

The way time travel works is still poorly understood and, in all futures that have been visited to date, will continue to be poorly understood. In some cases, time travel will lead to the same timeline and actions taken in the past will affect the present. In other cases, any action that would change the past will lead to the creation of a separate timeline. Furthermore, the effects of the timeline split may ripple backwards and create a past history significantly different from the one it branched off from.

All this means that it would take significant time travel-based research to verify Mihailovic's translation, and this is unlikely to happen, as individuals and organizations that possess time machines keep a tight rein on their use.

Historians and literary scholars attempted to determine whether Mihailovic had taken any actions which would lead to a timeline split. It soon became apparent from remarks she'd made what she'd been doing and who she'd been doing it with. This in turn led to a fierce debate about the ethics of time-travel-based fieldwork.

A careful examination showed that many of the poems in the collection had in face been written for Mihailovic herself. Some scholars have convincingly argued that a few of the surviving fragments of Sappho's poetry had clearly been written to her as well, indicating that she was always a part of history, but it is open to question whether these fragments had existed before her use of the time machine.

Today, scholars generally ignore Mihailovic's translation and the host of problems it presents, though it remains popular and is frequently quoted in aesthetic tumblr posts. In any large enough conference, there is at least one panel dedicated to it; many believe these panels are funded by Doom.

As for Mihailovic herself, she has retired from public life and has not been seen for about three years. Some have speculated that Doom had had her disappeared, but those who know him insist he is unlikely to harm one of his own people. It is widely believed she attempted to gain access to another time machine. Perhaps she has vanished into Limbo, unmoored from her timestream by incautious use of time travel. Or perhaps she has successfully returned to ancient Lesbos, or traveled to another point in the past or future.

Ash Ladd, a historian of gender and Old Norse translator who is a controversial figure in their own right, has argued that Eva Mihailovic never existed. She was always a pseudonym for Doom himself; he had staged the whole indcident in order to further confuse his enemies. All her public appearances were a Doombot. Ladd went on to draw some rather startling conclusions about Doom based on the evident dysphoria that led him to disfigure his face rather than accept a small scar.

thank you so much Jon very helpful