I have been using Mint for a long while now, and I’ve been very happy with it. Can’t say I’ve felt the need to try anything else…

I was surprised at the amount of things that just broke when I tried Wayland a couple of months ago, but that’s a lot of time to fix bugs and implement missing features.

But what about second lunch?!

You are absolutely correct, my bad. Fixed

I agree with most of your points, but not the last one. I think it’s perfectly OK to take an ancient work of poetry and produce a modern adaptation. This happens for many, many texts - where you can choose between a modern version that is easier to read and more “engaging” and relatable, or a more classical version where the translator tries to maintain the original nuance, structure, rhythm.

I don’t know Arabic at all so I can’t tell for sure, but the translation in the book just seems like a very poor attempt at translation, and so it fails as a modern adaptation, and fails as a “classical” translation. It’s just bad. :)

I’ll be in the opposing camp.

Paraphrasing the wiki article, poetry is about the “aesthetic and rhythmic qualities of language” being used to evoke meaning, beyond the surface level.

This is captured well in the “proper” translation, and while it definitely suffers from the use of archaic words, it does express the situation in a much more interesting way than the alternative “love phat ass but gurl can’t move”.

The same logic applies to the masterpiece “I love big butts and I cannot lie”, which expresses the same affection for emphatic posteriors, but does so by making a distinctive use of the rhythmic characteristics of the language. Ie., MC Hammer is a proper poet (but the song is actually by Sir Mix-a-Lot, my mistake)

(Edit for typos and clarity)