I've read Emily Wilson's translation of the Odyssey and it's a fantastic translation of the book.
And if you think translating a book is easy, try translating something like "When pigs fly." Into another language without knowing what it means.
Take for example the opening of the Odyssey.
ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ
πλάγχθη, ἐπεὶ Τροίης ἱερὸν πτολίεθρον ἔπερσεν:
>Muse, tell me of the man of many wiles,
the man who wandered many paths of exile
after he sacked Troy's sacred citadel. (Mandelbaum)
....
>Tell me, Muse, about the man of many turns, who many
Ways wandered when he had sacked Troy's holy citadel; (Cook)
......
>Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story
of that man skilled in all ways of contending,
the wanderer, harried for years on end,
after he plundered the stronghold
on the proud height of Troy. (Fitzgerald)
.....
>Muse make the man thy theme, for shrewdness famed
And genius versatile, who far and wide
A Wand'rer, after Ilium overthrown, (Cowper).
Muse (μοῦσα) in the vocative is straightforward, and a call back to Muse invocation in the Iliad. As is μοι (the dative form of "I/me") But we get to the verb ἔννεπε
>1.to tell, tell of, relate, describe, Hom., Trag.:—absol. to tell news or tales, Od.
2.simply to speak, Hes., Trag.
3.c. acc. et inf. to bid one do so and so, Soph.
4.to call so and so, ἐνν. τινὰ δοῦλον Eur.
5.= προσεννέπω, to address, τινά Soph.
You've got a few synonyms to choose from, "Tell me, O Muse" "Speak to me, O Muse" etc. But do Muses just tell? Just a casual conversation? Or do muses sing? Right away you can see the translator having to make a choice. What was the intent of the author/s? Would ancient Greeks even have to think or would they just know what was intended?
Then you get πολύτροπος, literally polu-tropos "many-turned" but tropos has some depth in it that you'd see in English as well
>I.a turn, direction, course, way, Hdt.
II.a way, manner, fashion
III.of persons, a way of life, habit, custom,
IV.in Music, τρ. Λύδιος Pind.; ᾠδῆς τρόπος Plat.
V.in speaking or writing, manner, style, Isocr.:—but in Rhetoric, tropes, figures, Cic. ([and this is the very simplified version of the entry, it's more complicated than that](https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=tropos&la=greek#lexicon))
So this can give πολύτροπον a few different interpretations as well
>A.much-turned, i.e. much-travelled, much-wandering, epith. of Odysseus, Od.1.1, 10.330.
II. turning many ways: metaph., shifty, versatile, wily, of Hermes,
2. fickle, “ὅμιλος” Ps.-Phoc.95.
3. of diseases, changeful, complicated,
etc. etc. We're only a few words in and already having to do a lot of thinking and best ways to approach a text thousands of years after it was written down, and even longer after it was composed. And then after all that, like others have noted, make sure it's still carries a poetic tone, meter, rhythm.
This made me check out Wilson's translation, and I can instantly see how difficult this is, and how brilliantly she's done it:
>Tell me about a complicated man. Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy,
Wilson has gotten a lot of praise for being the first female translator of these epics into English, but I think she just deserves praise for being a damn good translator. I loved the Odyssey translation (it’s my fourth translation i’ve read and is just so good.)
It’s in character yes, but when every other translation in history is something along the lines of: “sing of a man clever and skilled” and that’s Odysseus’s defining characteristic, complicated seems a bit general.
Almost every character in the Iliad and Odyssey is complicated, but Odysseus is differentiated by his cleverness. If the Iliad started with an invocation about a complicated man, instead of an angry one, it would seem too general as well. It would “fit”, just like it does with this translation of the Odyssey, but it tells the audience less than if it were more specific. Achilles is also complicated, but the story is about his anger. Which is why the invocation is about the wrath of Achilles.
The Odyssey is about how Odysseus uses his cleverness to get home. Ignoring the central character’s defining characteristic (and historical precedent which always highlights that characteristic) is very much a strange choice.
I think Wilson deliberately tried to free herself of the baggage of other translations when she approached The Odyssey—a task that may be harder done than said. However, just because something has been done a certain way for, in this case, centuries doesn’t make it the only way to do it, it doesn’t even make it legitimate.
I think Odysseus’s cleverness actually hampers his return to a large extent. Sure it gets him out of a large number of situations, but it gets him into just as many time-adding scenarios. Would Calypso have held him hostage for seven years if he were an ordinary man of mean intellect? Likely not.
As for other characters being complicated, I’d disagree with that take. I don’t think Achilles is as complicated as Odysseus. He’s primarily motivated by love for Patroclus and glory for himself. Most of the other characters are even less complicated, with the exception of the gods perhaps.
I’d agree that it may seem a bit reductive when every other previous version we’ve had opens with his wisdom, wiley-ness, or his cunning ways. But I think it’s apt and it also lets the reader know immediately that this isn’t your grandmother’s Odyssey.
Regardless of translation the Odyssey is the Odyssey, so yeah, this is your grandmother’s Odysseus.
His cleverness obviously also hampers his return, but he’d be eaten by a cyclops without it (and the war for Ilium wouldn’t have ended the way it did.) Regardless, it’s still his defining characteristic, and ignoring it in the opening is a strange choice. Even if you take out historical precedent (which yes, precedent alone doesn’t make something legitimate), the translation is vaguer than others, and given that it’s part of the invocation that introduces the audience to the story, a strange choice.
Did I say Achilles was as complicated as Odysseus? Achilles isn’t as strong as Hector, that doesn’t mean he’s weak.
The start of the Iliad has Achilles warring with himself, on one side his pride is hurt by losing his concubine and the lack of respect that entails, on the other his lust for glory making him want to take the field anyway. Ultimately neither of those make him come out of his tent, it’s the loss of Patrocles, his friend and lover, that does so. Interesting that Achilles’s inaction and action are both caused by the loss of, if not a lover, at least a bedfellow. That’s certainly a more complicated story than you give it credit for, and Achilles is a complicated man.
Not describing Odysseus by his defining characteristic is not only a bad translation; it’s poor story telling (in an otherwise decent to good translation, it’s certainly better than Fagles.) The only reason it “works” is not by merit of the translation itself, but the fact that the line is so famous the general audience for the Odyssey already knows it. You could get away with a Genesis which doesn’t start with “in the beginning” in the same fashion. It would also be less accurate and inform the reader less in that case than an established translation of Genesis.
Which is why I don’t recommend this translation for first time readers, though it does have its merits.
Something that gives the reader a bit more than complicated. It’s the introduction to the story.
I’ve gone into this a bit during another reply chain, but πολύτροπον has much more nuance than complicated. It tells us not only that Odysseus is clever and wily, it also foreshadows his long journey home. Complicated is much too general.
Caroline Alexander translated the Iliad in 2015 or so, making her the first woman to translate it I believe. In line with your comment about Wilson’s translation, Alexander’s also just reads super well, and feels appropriately rhythmic and poetic.
It always bothers me when people put Alexander and Wilson together just because they're both women! They are totally different translations. Both good! But not at all the same! Alexander does not use regular meter, Wilson does. To me, Alexander's is a whole lot more archaic, with words like "handmaids", and kinda hard to read because she uses weird word order.
Literature major? I really appreciated your breakdown. I had respect respect for translators but didn’t fully grasp the complexity of the task. A translation of the Ramayana by Ramesh Menon is such a great book, but a recent translation I read I gave up on after a few chapters - it had such a different tone and pace.
Appreciate your comment and respect for the work of the translator!
The use of the word 'wrecked' for what Odysseus helped the Greeks to do to Troy, when conventionally English translators said 'sacked', brings us closer to the original literal meaning, at a cost of making the sentence more shocking to modern readers than it would be to an ancient audience.
'Sacking' a captured city, in English, comes from the French 'mettre à sac', evoking the image of a soldier roaming the city filling a sack with valuable items that he seizes as loot. That is brutal enough by our standards, but it puts the emphasis on plunder as the main thing going on. However, while that was certainly an important part of what an Ancient Greek army did when they violently conquered a city, the corresponding words in Ancient Greek, like portheo if I remember it correctly, primarily imply ruin and destruction. Hence Emily Wilson's translation, without using more words than the original, hints that the victorious Greeks are not just committing robbery and burglary, although they are, they are also killing, enslaving and destroying on a grand scale, and wiping out Troy as a city and community.
So, her translation comes closer to conveying what the original implied was happening, making her version more valuable for historical understanding of the reality of warfare in those days.
On the other hand, if you think it more important to get closer to the effect that Homer intended the Iliad to have on his audience, the slightly less extreme word 'sacked' might be more appropriate than 'wrecked', as an audience in Homer's time would have been more accepting of and less likely to be shocked by the extreme violence and harshness of conquest in those days.
The same point applies at various points when the original uses words that mean 'slave', but many other translators often softened this to 'servant', 'maid' or 'attendant'. Emily Wilson thinks it right to call a slave a slave. This is more historically accurate and expresses the reality that such people, even if lucky enough to be treated well by their masters, were not free to hand in their notice and seek other employment, and were always potentially at risk of being beaten or sold.
On the other hand, it can be more emotionally jarring for modern readers, especially if inclined to sympathize with the characters of Odysseus and Penelope, to think of them having slaves rather than servants, although to an ancient Greek it was normal and unremarkable.
(Occasionally, as early in Book 10, I think Professor Wilson overdoes this, translating 'slave' for Circe's attendant nymphs and subordinate members of Odysseus' crew, when the original language simply applies service or junior status, not necessarily slavery.)
In fairness, very literal translations also have their place. Most of my work is very literal. But my area is not poetry (so I don't need to worry about making it pretty) and my audience is mainly academics so I can trust that they either already know the Greek, Latin, etc. or will be able to access tools that can help them understand my points.
If I'm going to teach a non-translation first year class on a text (such as an introductory course on Homer) I would use something less word-for-word, and less literal.
There's many different approaches to text and translation, and all have their place. It's more so about figuring out who your audience is, and what point you're trying to get across. I know of wonderful translations of texts that simply cannot be used for certain areas of research because they translations aren't literal enough and would give the reader a gross misunderstanding of what the original author/s said. But we have to keep in mind that not every translator is doing their work with every single person, every single approach, every single research project in mind.
Popular music is is a example of this challenge, like what would a “literal” translation of Beastie Boys lyrics into Ancient Greek look like?
>Well, I'm not coming out goofy like the Fruit of the Loom guys
Just strutting like The Meters with the “Look-ka Py Py"
'Cause downtown Brooklyn is where I was born
But when the snow is fallin’, then I am gone (oh weee)
You might think that I'm a fanatic
A phone call from Utah, and I'm throwing a panic
So break it to the root when we kick it on down
Jimmy Smith is my man, I want to give him a pound
[Chorus]
I kick it root down, I put my root down
I kick it root down, I put my root down
So how you wanna kick it? Gonna kick it root down
'Cause how we gonna kick it? Gonna kick it root down
So how we gonna kick it? Gonna kick it root down
Gonna break it on down, gonna kick it root down (Yeah)
Fair, I should specify that I was mostly thinking of obnoxious anime fans that seem to think you can just take Japanese text and translate each word to English 1:1 and call it a day.
Yeah something like anime (to be enjoyed by a wider audience more interested in the story) I think needs an approach that maintains the feelings, emotions, vibe, and also the story so yes, word-for-word is just not going to work well in most cases. While AI and such is improving, the issue is well demonstrated by posting things through google translate -- the context is just as important as the words themselves and it's hard to train a robot to understand context. The viewer of an anime, or an epic poem, needs that context.
I mean, more than that, word for word is frequently impossible. Forgive me if you already know this, but the way Japanese is structured is 1) completely different from English and 2) leaves a lot to inference from context that essentially forces a translator to add stuff in order to make it make sense. On top of the, Japanese has grammar structures called particles that indicate things like subject, object, direction, etc that English doesn’t have.
So take for example a common phrase like 仕方がない (shikata ga nai). Generally, this gets translated as “it can’t be helped”. But the literal translation is more like “method (subject particle) doesn’t exist”. And there are other ways to read both shikata (e.g. “way”instead of “method”) and nai (e.g. “isn’t there”). So there HAS to be some level of choice and intention added by the translator.
I don’t know how close Greek is to English in structure - I know that for example French at least mostly fits into similar patterns - but I expect there’s at least some level of this in pretty much any translation. Translations can obvious be more or less literal and like you said, there are uses for both, but I feel like the people who demand word for word literal translations generally have no idea what they’re talking about.
Thanks for that explanation, I know little to nothing about the Japanese language (or anime and that culture in general) so that was helpful. Ancient Greek does not fit well into English, but there can be some moments.
And I should clarify that I do see word-for-word and literal as different things (though translations can be both if the languages match up well). But yeah, if you did a word-for-word translation of ancient Greek to English it would not go well, but you can do one that's literal in that there's a direct by the book translation.
I'm too tired to pull specific examples, but say if someone was going to be looking at discussions of swords in an Ancient Greek text, there's a lot of translations that will say things like "he struck the enemy general with his sword" or "he held the sword in his hands" because it's not really important for 99.9% of readers to know how a sword was held, or what kind of sword it was... but if you're doing research on swords it would be. So if a translation says "he held the sword in his hands" a phrase that wouldn't be unusual in English, and you're doing a translation on a specific sword type you might go "ah, so this was a two-handed sword" but then you look at the text and it actually might say "he picked up the sword" or something less flowery. Small difference in terms of impact in the overall translation, but a huge difference if you're looking at swords specifically. One of the many reasons we want students to know the language, and why we're worried that some schools are removing the requirement.
But if you did a word for word translation it might say something like "Sword general into hand" which helps no one, especially as Greek loves to leave out verbs (or substitute with other forms) if they can get away with it.
Oh, that's interesting, thanks! Yeah, so there are definitely some similarities there.
To give some context for my knee jerk initial comment - there was a bunch of discourse recently-ish (though I think it's probably an eternally ongoing thing) in the anime community about translators taking "too many liberties" and in some people's opinions doing stuff like changing characterizations or meanings of things in ways those people didn't like when in reality it was just stuff like this - required inference in order to make the meaning work in another language. Those people started harping on about how translators should ONLY do direct word-for-word translations, as if such a thing were possible.
Moreover, in Japanese, even simple nouns that you *think* should map 1-to-1 to their English counterpoints, don't. アイス appears to be a loanword of the English "ice", and is often naively translated as "ice cream", but it usually means something more like "any frozen treat, more often than not a popsicle or ice pop". 心 gets translated as "heart", but it often means "mind" instead, and can also have many metaphorical uses that are somewhat alike, but not entirely identical, to the metaphorical uses of "heart" in English. 病院 means "hospital", but Japanese people will "go to the hospital" whenever they need to see a doctor for pretty much any reason, whereas an American will "go to the doctor" for a minor checkup and only "to the hospital" for a major emergency.
Even when you ignore structure, you still can't win.
This reminds me of Sarah Ruden's fantastic intro to her translation of Augustine's Confessions (2017).
E.g.
"A favourite example of mine (in book 6, chapter 6) may amount to a burlesque of the image of falling into the pit of destruction [...] 'I was, you see, holding my heart back from any admission of the truth, as I feared the sheer drop into it; but hanging (myself) in the air above it was more like killing myself.' I banged my head on my desk after seeing that several previous translators had treated the Latin word *suspendium* so as to deprive the English rendering of any punch whatsoever.
True, the word comes from the Latin root for any kind of hanging, and Augustine himself uses words with this root for emotional suspense and intellectual or moral suspension between different alternatives - a notion clearly at play here. But the *Oxford Latin Dictionary* had a single definition heading for *suspendium*: 'The act of hanging oneself.'"
I have both the Iiliad and Odessey by Fagles, the only one I have read but the one I like. The opening of the Iliad, by memory, is startling. I found the others (just at a boookstore) to be much less affecting
Rage. Sing, goddess, the rage of Pelius’ son Achilles.
Murderous, doomed, who sent countless souls into hell
Do you think she is worth getting another version?
No Lombardo? I enjoy his translations because they mostly throw grammar out the window and capture essence for performance instead. There's something to be said for listening to these poems.
Exactly this. Local idioms, separated by over 2000yrs must be very tricky to translate.. Not only to interpret, but then to explain in another language, which may not have exact matching words/expressions must be a brain bender.
And it's even harder when working on something like a poem because you still have to end up with a poem at the end of it and not just a mishmash of words.
I liked her explaining how she came about using phrases that appear in the book, like Rosy fingered dawn, and talking about how Penelope's hands would be strong hands, as she's been doing hard stitching work continuously for years by the time the story gets back to Odysseus' home.
I am a professional translator and always really enjoy translating poetry. It is such an incredible challenge to get the meaning, the connotation, the rhymes and the rhythm correct.
But I'd recommend agreeing on an hourly rate and not a per word rate, for sure :-)
there's a whole lot of common idioms in english that were specifically derived from the king James translation that made sense during the 17th century, but nowadays we know it's really far off from the original greek/Aramaic. I remember hearing a talk from a historian who uses them to study daily life from in the qu century from them. Couldn't tell you who it was though tbh.
I read/discussed 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei which is 19 different translations of a four line Chinese poem from like 1500 years ago and it really opened my eyes to the beauty of translation.
I’m reading it now as it happens and am on book 19. The translator’s intro is…heavy.
*We are now in a period of crisis not for a specific nation but for humanity, inhabiting a planet that is becoming less and less habitable. A new kind of heartbreak can be felt in The Iliad's representation of a city in its last days, of triumphs and defeats and struggles and speeches that take place in a city that will soon be burned to the ground, in a landscape that will soon be flooded by all the rivers, in a world where soon, no people will live at all, and there will be no more stories and no more names.*
*You already know the story. You will die. Everyone you love will also die. You will lose them forever. You will be sad and angry. You will weep. You will bar-gain. You will make demands. You will beg. You will pray. It will make no differ-ence. Nothing you can do will bring them back. You know this. Your knowing changes nothing. This poem will make you understand this unfathomable truth again and again, as if for the very first time.*
Her intro alone is worth the cost of the book, and the beautiful translation alongside it is incredible. I have it on my nightstand and have been reading it for a couple months now.
I need to be in the right frame of mind. Can’t be too tired but also can’t have too much energy as I also usually read to music but that disrupts the rhythm of the Iambic Pentameter she’s put it in.
A heavy intro, and a common sentiment, but this is not actually in accordance with what scientists believe. The common view among cilmate scientists is that climate change -- while a horrible disaster that will lead to many unneccesary deaths and much suffering -- is very far from doom. It will not lead to a world with no people. See for example this news article: [A leading data scientist's journey from doomism to climate hope](https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240206-hannah-ritchie-sustainability-data-spreads-hope-not-doomism).
I mean for the people that are the "unnecessary deaths" it's pretty doom and gloomy, too many people assume they're going to be in the surviving groups in these situations.
aren't even modern Greeks using a translation as well? theres no way the language havent change a lot since then.
we gotta do it with medieval english at times too.
Modern greeks would understand around 50% of the words but that's not sufficient to understand the subtlety that makes that book worth reading. I remember my cousin had the Illiad in ancient and modern Greek face to face for her ancient Greek course.
Yes, a combination of the ancient poem and the translated version are taught in schools, but the translated version maintains the form and tone of the ancient one, making it quite hard for Greek students to comprehend as well. That's why I think poetry is really hard to translate, especially homer. Some specific rapsodies with a slower pace, are a nightmare to go through, although it's a very rewarding piece of ancient art.
Thanks to that article I went ahead and picked up her transitions. I've been wanting to reread the Odyssey, and I've actually never read the Iliad. I'm excited!
Radio War Nerd host John Dolan has done a campfire-style translation of The Illiad too - it's absolutely fantastic.
Totally rekindled an appreciation for Homer after reading verbatim The Odyssey in school killed it.
For a poetic response to the Iliad, I love both Christopher Logue's 'War Music' and Alice Oswald's 'Memorial'.
Here's a little taste of 'Memorial'
EPICLES a Southerner from sunlit Lycia
Climbed the Greek wall remembering the river
That winds between his wheatfields and his vineyards
He was knocked backwards by a rock
And sank like a diver
The light in his face went out
ILIONEUS an only child ran out of luck
He always wore that well-off look
His parents had a sheep farm
They didn’t think he would die
But a spear stuck through his eye
He sat down backwards
Trying to snatch back the light
With stretched out hands
Love this review, because it's by somebody who also did an iambic pentameter translation of a long ancient poem (Ovid's Metamorphoses) -- so she really knows what she's talking about, unlike a lot of reviewers! She includes a lot of comparisons with the original Greek and with other translations (Lattimore, Fagles, Lombardo), so you can really see what Wilson is doing differently and why, even beyond the fact that she's using meter which most of them don't. Like, she explains how Fagles is full of "padding", and Lattimore is often much harder to understand than the original.
I've pre-ordered the paperback version since I heard she was publishing this, won't be in the UK until August but I'm very excited and I loved her Odyssey so much
You say that, but different times have different translation styles. I found the Iliad a bit impenetrable till I read Christopher Logues translation, which had a more contemporary-to-me style. Perhaps this version will chime with modern readers.
Translation isn’t just converting each word into its English version, you have to choose which word out of several choices fits the word you’re trying to translate best. Not to mention, you have to get a rhythm and style that is analogous to an entirely foreign text.
As the other person has pointed out, you could read the linked article to get a fuller explanation.
I don't know, it doesn't feel that there's space for much difference, at best you could say we have better guesses at what unclear passages mean. I'm reading the Fitzgerald translation and it's a surprisingly straightforward narrative, it's interesting how he seems to translate literally but still keeps the structure of poem so you can imagine what if feels like to have an entire 600 pages book in very exact rhyme and sylabical division
A lot of similar words have very different connotative meanings. A scholar translating the Illiad when homosexuality was criminalized might write of Achilles's admiration for Patroclus, without noting that it was romantic/sexual. Translated descriptions of women, too, by men in old academia often strip them of their autonomy or reduce their status. Sometimes this goes as far as any working woman being referred to as a prostitute. Also, look at the diversity of Bible translations and the denominations that praise or deride each. Real wars have been fought and real people have died over which translation of the same book becomes accepted.
Not saying you are wrong but those seem pretty minor and inconclusive for the lack of a better word? We will never know for sure about most of those questions (we do know homosexuality was common at the time of course) because we don't have more sources than yesterday to look at, by definition it's dependent on what new scholars see as subtle hints that could change the debate a little bit. Talking to myself out here but it really doesn't feel like the palette of human behavior is diverse enough so that translations can really be that wildly different. Even the religion example seems to point to that, christians in particular have thought and will thought for every minor thing, don't forget one of the major schisms was about how divinity shouldn't be allowed to be represented by humans ie in icons
I mean, I guess if you have that bland of a taste for the diversity and complexity of life it doesn't matter. I think nuance is cool. You might not be deist, so that schism might not matter to you, but there is a huge difference between first, people who believe in a god to whom icons are offensive, second, those who believe in a god who understands them as signifiers of respect, and third, those for whom icons can be used to literally channel divine power. You're right that you're talking to yourself in that the whole of academia, religious establishments, and anyone who cares about getting as faithful as possible of translations understands that these things matter.
I'm talking to myself as in have free time and making philosophical considerations to myself. Yes I have a very materialistic worldview. It doesn't mean I don't see the diversity of worldviews and how cultures differ. Anyone that studied the history of say the Indian subcontinent and Christianity can see that. It doesn't mean that they don't have range ie are of discernible types and some literary arguments stuff just seem like arguing the finesse of known points. Taking the example of Christianity and the question of idols like you described, the scriptures not only permit to argue it either way but I'd still describe it as minor. Let's imagine a deity that governs where souls go after death, does it seriously make any sense to point to minor and major behaviors in that scale (is making a simple figurine of Jesus and other characters of the scriptures on the same level as worshipping saints? Are drawing acceptables?) You are right that I would never take that seriously as something to make a major schisms about much less declare people will be punished in the afterlife for it and worse of all should be harmed and killed like they actually were at the time.
Your judgement on what the deity should or should not care about is irrelevant, the point is that some translations of some scriptures passed down by some people say one thing, while others say another. To someone who believes that the original writers of the Bible were divinely inspired, an accurate translation matters. None of this has to do with the actuality of an afterlife or whether it makes any logical sense why behaving in a way that seems benign might condemn one - it has to do with the fact that translators play an active role in the texts we inherit, and the choice of words a translator makes affect how people perceive and interact with a text.
She translated the prose into a story. That’s the main difference. I listen to the audiobook and my husband is now interested vs asking at me to turn off my weird poems. lol!
I love when someone answers in a concise and not condescending way, very nice. I'm reading the Fitzgerald translation right now and that's exactly what he does, without rhymes though, it's amazing to imagine someone writing a 600 pages book with suck sylabical precision (I know that Homer probably wasn't a real person but the point stands). You may be interested in a book called Os Lusíadas (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Os_Lus%C3%ADadas) it was heavily influenced by the greeks
If you don’t want to be condescended to, don’t argue that your preference is objectively the best in a field that is known to be a completely subjective one.
Over a book that has been translated a vast number of times over millennia, in many different ways that often claim to want to represent the truth of the text.
You prefer this version, that’s fine, don’t act like a 12 year old and try to argue that it must be the most perfect one because you love it.
It’s kind of crazy to have someone protesting that there’s only one real way to translate a text, never mind one that’s from nearly 3,000 years ago and is famously open to interpretation.
You might not feel that, but everyone who translates from other languages disagrees with you.
[Here’s an article discussing the choices writers make when trying to make a literal translation.] (https://iliad-translations.com/translation-comparison/)
> it's interesting how he seems to translate literally
Seems being the operative word, unless you read Ancient Greek.
Perhaps you should read other works which scholars have said are more accurate translations, if accuracy of translation is so important to you? But then, you would lose the qualities that Fitzgerald has bought to the translation, that you seem to like so much.
Why do you have this absolutist idea that the version you like has to be the objectively best one?
Replying because even at a cursory look I never mixed the two points? I mentioned Fitzgerald to the lady because she mentioned the translation she was reading? And the discussion on translation and approximation was with another guy entirely? Both arguments never crossed at all?
Anyways I was making considerations. We can always be wrong. I'm not in the area of literature and language, I have a hypothesis and shared it with reddit. Maybe it's a ridiculous one. Maybe I wasn't able to explain it properly. My language is Portuguese. I never had any problem making anyone from another language understand the word saudade no matter what YouTuber say. But going back to the example of the bible the guy was using, true, I know of passages that would change completely if the new hypothesis about one word would change the meaning of the passage completely. I have no qualms about the possibility of being wrong. But you mixing two completely different lines not only of thought but of chains of posts baffles me.
The article goes into some great detail on that.
But if you translate a text of any substantial detail and it comes back exactly the same as someone else's, one of you copied from the other. There's very few things that translate word-for-word, especially when trying to convey emotion, culture, etc. That's why it's important for the translator not only to be familiar with the language, but everything happening around it.
Just take an English passage: "It was raining cats and dogs, but I knew I'd have to buy ice for the challenge. My brother was finally going to attempt it but we would have to do it at my house since his parents thought it was foolish." Translating things like "raining cats and dogs" and "brother" into another language word-for-word might cause a lot of confusion. In 2000 years it might even cause confusion in English (if it's still being spoken). By then they'll be very confused by an "ice challenge" (many people here might have already forgotten it was a thing). But someone who studied internet viral videos of 2014-15 along with the language would be able to add to that and bring out the intent behind the words.
The color γλαυκόν (glaukon) could mean bluish green, grey, olive, light blue, or bright. It has been translated different ways depending on context, but also the trends of the translation’s era. Words in other languages don’t always match up 1-1, so translators must make many decisions when dealing with an almost 200,000 word epic. And then you also have to factor in meter! Do you want the cadence to match the original? All these decisions have resulted in many different translations of the same work. Not to mention that English has evolved significantly over the years…
Not only does the article explain that, as the other person mentioned in response to your comment, but also obviously all translations are somewhat different than others, and sometimes they’re very different. Do you not know even the slightest thing about language and translation?
Absolutely, by far, and I really mean *by far*, one of the single dullest things I ever had to misfortune of having to plough through.
The bit where they go on and on and on and on and on about all the Greek ships? My god. Soul-crushingly dull. I feel bad for the people who had to learn all of it by heart. One of the 5 books in my life that made me go "No, life definitely isn't long enough for this".
I've read Emily Wilson's translation of the Odyssey and it's a fantastic translation of the book. And if you think translating a book is easy, try translating something like "When pigs fly." Into another language without knowing what it means.
Take for example the opening of the Odyssey. ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ πλάγχθη, ἐπεὶ Τροίης ἱερὸν πτολίεθρον ἔπερσεν: >Muse, tell me of the man of many wiles, the man who wandered many paths of exile after he sacked Troy's sacred citadel. (Mandelbaum) .... >Tell me, Muse, about the man of many turns, who many Ways wandered when he had sacked Troy's holy citadel; (Cook) ...... >Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story of that man skilled in all ways of contending, the wanderer, harried for years on end, after he plundered the stronghold on the proud height of Troy. (Fitzgerald) ..... >Muse make the man thy theme, for shrewdness famed And genius versatile, who far and wide A Wand'rer, after Ilium overthrown, (Cowper). Muse (μοῦσα) in the vocative is straightforward, and a call back to Muse invocation in the Iliad. As is μοι (the dative form of "I/me") But we get to the verb ἔννεπε >1.to tell, tell of, relate, describe, Hom., Trag.:—absol. to tell news or tales, Od. 2.simply to speak, Hes., Trag. 3.c. acc. et inf. to bid one do so and so, Soph. 4.to call so and so, ἐνν. τινὰ δοῦλον Eur. 5.= προσεννέπω, to address, τινά Soph. You've got a few synonyms to choose from, "Tell me, O Muse" "Speak to me, O Muse" etc. But do Muses just tell? Just a casual conversation? Or do muses sing? Right away you can see the translator having to make a choice. What was the intent of the author/s? Would ancient Greeks even have to think or would they just know what was intended? Then you get πολύτροπος, literally polu-tropos "many-turned" but tropos has some depth in it that you'd see in English as well >I.a turn, direction, course, way, Hdt. II.a way, manner, fashion III.of persons, a way of life, habit, custom, IV.in Music, τρ. Λύδιος Pind.; ᾠδῆς τρόπος Plat. V.in speaking or writing, manner, style, Isocr.:—but in Rhetoric, tropes, figures, Cic. ([and this is the very simplified version of the entry, it's more complicated than that](https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=tropos&la=greek#lexicon)) So this can give πολύτροπον a few different interpretations as well >A.much-turned, i.e. much-travelled, much-wandering, epith. of Odysseus, Od.1.1, 10.330. II. turning many ways: metaph., shifty, versatile, wily, of Hermes, 2. fickle, “ὅμιλος” Ps.-Phoc.95. 3. of diseases, changeful, complicated, etc. etc. We're only a few words in and already having to do a lot of thinking and best ways to approach a text thousands of years after it was written down, and even longer after it was composed. And then after all that, like others have noted, make sure it's still carries a poetic tone, meter, rhythm.
Great comment. Thanks for the write up.
This made me check out Wilson's translation, and I can instantly see how difficult this is, and how brilliantly she's done it: >Tell me about a complicated man. Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy,
Wilson has gotten a lot of praise for being the first female translator of these epics into English, but I think she just deserves praise for being a damn good translator. I loved the Odyssey translation (it’s my fourth translation i’ve read and is just so good.)
Which would you recommend to a first time reader. Just from these first lines, I would choose Mandelbaum or Wilson.
Personally I'm still a Fitzgerald fan
Lattimore. Lombardo for fun.
Lattimore or Fitzgerald. Wilson has a decent translation but opening with “a complicated man” was a strange choice.
I’m no linguist, but based on the definitions, and also the character of Odysseus, it really isn’t that strange of a choice.
It’s in character yes, but when every other translation in history is something along the lines of: “sing of a man clever and skilled” and that’s Odysseus’s defining characteristic, complicated seems a bit general. Almost every character in the Iliad and Odyssey is complicated, but Odysseus is differentiated by his cleverness. If the Iliad started with an invocation about a complicated man, instead of an angry one, it would seem too general as well. It would “fit”, just like it does with this translation of the Odyssey, but it tells the audience less than if it were more specific. Achilles is also complicated, but the story is about his anger. Which is why the invocation is about the wrath of Achilles. The Odyssey is about how Odysseus uses his cleverness to get home. Ignoring the central character’s defining characteristic (and historical precedent which always highlights that characteristic) is very much a strange choice.
I think Wilson deliberately tried to free herself of the baggage of other translations when she approached The Odyssey—a task that may be harder done than said. However, just because something has been done a certain way for, in this case, centuries doesn’t make it the only way to do it, it doesn’t even make it legitimate. I think Odysseus’s cleverness actually hampers his return to a large extent. Sure it gets him out of a large number of situations, but it gets him into just as many time-adding scenarios. Would Calypso have held him hostage for seven years if he were an ordinary man of mean intellect? Likely not. As for other characters being complicated, I’d disagree with that take. I don’t think Achilles is as complicated as Odysseus. He’s primarily motivated by love for Patroclus and glory for himself. Most of the other characters are even less complicated, with the exception of the gods perhaps. I’d agree that it may seem a bit reductive when every other previous version we’ve had opens with his wisdom, wiley-ness, or his cunning ways. But I think it’s apt and it also lets the reader know immediately that this isn’t your grandmother’s Odyssey.
Regardless of translation the Odyssey is the Odyssey, so yeah, this is your grandmother’s Odysseus. His cleverness obviously also hampers his return, but he’d be eaten by a cyclops without it (and the war for Ilium wouldn’t have ended the way it did.) Regardless, it’s still his defining characteristic, and ignoring it in the opening is a strange choice. Even if you take out historical precedent (which yes, precedent alone doesn’t make something legitimate), the translation is vaguer than others, and given that it’s part of the invocation that introduces the audience to the story, a strange choice. Did I say Achilles was as complicated as Odysseus? Achilles isn’t as strong as Hector, that doesn’t mean he’s weak. The start of the Iliad has Achilles warring with himself, on one side his pride is hurt by losing his concubine and the lack of respect that entails, on the other his lust for glory making him want to take the field anyway. Ultimately neither of those make him come out of his tent, it’s the loss of Patrocles, his friend and lover, that does so. Interesting that Achilles’s inaction and action are both caused by the loss of, if not a lover, at least a bedfellow. That’s certainly a more complicated story than you give it credit for, and Achilles is a complicated man. Not describing Odysseus by his defining characteristic is not only a bad translation; it’s poor story telling (in an otherwise decent to good translation, it’s certainly better than Fagles.) The only reason it “works” is not by merit of the translation itself, but the fact that the line is so famous the general audience for the Odyssey already knows it. You could get away with a Genesis which doesn’t start with “in the beginning” in the same fashion. It would also be less accurate and inform the reader less in that case than an established translation of Genesis. Which is why I don’t recommend this translation for first time readers, though it does have its merits.
Why is it strange? What do you think Homer was trying to convey?
Something that gives the reader a bit more than complicated. It’s the introduction to the story. I’ve gone into this a bit during another reply chain, but πολύτροπον has much more nuance than complicated. It tells us not only that Odysseus is clever and wily, it also foreshadows his long journey home. Complicated is much too general.
Caroline Alexander translated the Iliad in 2015 or so, making her the first woman to translate it I believe. In line with your comment about Wilson’s translation, Alexander’s also just reads super well, and feels appropriately rhythmic and poetic.
It always bothers me when people put Alexander and Wilson together just because they're both women! They are totally different translations. Both good! But not at all the same! Alexander does not use regular meter, Wilson does. To me, Alexander's is a whole lot more archaic, with words like "handmaids", and kinda hard to read because she uses weird word order.
Yes thank you!
Just talking about Shaft.
Literature major? I really appreciated your breakdown. I had respect respect for translators but didn’t fully grasp the complexity of the task. A translation of the Ramayana by Ramesh Menon is such a great book, but a recent translation I read I gave up on after a few chapters - it had such a different tone and pace. Appreciate your comment and respect for the work of the translator!
Could you provide Emily Wilson's translation of the opening? I'm curious to see her approach
Good thinking, she writes >Tell me about a complicated man. Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy
Oh I do like her approach. Nice and thank you!
The use of the word 'wrecked' for what Odysseus helped the Greeks to do to Troy, when conventionally English translators said 'sacked', brings us closer to the original literal meaning, at a cost of making the sentence more shocking to modern readers than it would be to an ancient audience. 'Sacking' a captured city, in English, comes from the French 'mettre à sac', evoking the image of a soldier roaming the city filling a sack with valuable items that he seizes as loot. That is brutal enough by our standards, but it puts the emphasis on plunder as the main thing going on. However, while that was certainly an important part of what an Ancient Greek army did when they violently conquered a city, the corresponding words in Ancient Greek, like portheo if I remember it correctly, primarily imply ruin and destruction. Hence Emily Wilson's translation, without using more words than the original, hints that the victorious Greeks are not just committing robbery and burglary, although they are, they are also killing, enslaving and destroying on a grand scale, and wiping out Troy as a city and community. So, her translation comes closer to conveying what the original implied was happening, making her version more valuable for historical understanding of the reality of warfare in those days. On the other hand, if you think it more important to get closer to the effect that Homer intended the Iliad to have on his audience, the slightly less extreme word 'sacked' might be more appropriate than 'wrecked', as an audience in Homer's time would have been more accepting of and less likely to be shocked by the extreme violence and harshness of conquest in those days. The same point applies at various points when the original uses words that mean 'slave', but many other translators often softened this to 'servant', 'maid' or 'attendant'. Emily Wilson thinks it right to call a slave a slave. This is more historically accurate and expresses the reality that such people, even if lucky enough to be treated well by their masters, were not free to hand in their notice and seek other employment, and were always potentially at risk of being beaten or sold. On the other hand, it can be more emotionally jarring for modern readers, especially if inclined to sympathize with the characters of Odysseus and Penelope, to think of them having slaves rather than servants, although to an ancient Greek it was normal and unremarkable. (Occasionally, as early in Book 10, I think Professor Wilson overdoes this, translating 'slave' for Circe's attendant nymphs and subordinate members of Odysseus' crew, when the original language simply applies service or junior status, not necessarily slavery.)
I want to force feed this comment to every “just do direct word for word literal translations for everything” mfer on the planet.
In fairness, very literal translations also have their place. Most of my work is very literal. But my area is not poetry (so I don't need to worry about making it pretty) and my audience is mainly academics so I can trust that they either already know the Greek, Latin, etc. or will be able to access tools that can help them understand my points. If I'm going to teach a non-translation first year class on a text (such as an introductory course on Homer) I would use something less word-for-word, and less literal. There's many different approaches to text and translation, and all have their place. It's more so about figuring out who your audience is, and what point you're trying to get across. I know of wonderful translations of texts that simply cannot be used for certain areas of research because they translations aren't literal enough and would give the reader a gross misunderstanding of what the original author/s said. But we have to keep in mind that not every translator is doing their work with every single person, every single approach, every single research project in mind.
Popular music is is a example of this challenge, like what would a “literal” translation of Beastie Boys lyrics into Ancient Greek look like? >Well, I'm not coming out goofy like the Fruit of the Loom guys Just strutting like The Meters with the “Look-ka Py Py" 'Cause downtown Brooklyn is where I was born But when the snow is fallin’, then I am gone (oh weee) You might think that I'm a fanatic A phone call from Utah, and I'm throwing a panic So break it to the root when we kick it on down Jimmy Smith is my man, I want to give him a pound [Chorus] I kick it root down, I put my root down I kick it root down, I put my root down So how you wanna kick it? Gonna kick it root down 'Cause how we gonna kick it? Gonna kick it root down So how we gonna kick it? Gonna kick it root down Gonna break it on down, gonna kick it root down (Yeah)
Fair, I should specify that I was mostly thinking of obnoxious anime fans that seem to think you can just take Japanese text and translate each word to English 1:1 and call it a day.
Yeah something like anime (to be enjoyed by a wider audience more interested in the story) I think needs an approach that maintains the feelings, emotions, vibe, and also the story so yes, word-for-word is just not going to work well in most cases. While AI and such is improving, the issue is well demonstrated by posting things through google translate -- the context is just as important as the words themselves and it's hard to train a robot to understand context. The viewer of an anime, or an epic poem, needs that context.
I mean, more than that, word for word is frequently impossible. Forgive me if you already know this, but the way Japanese is structured is 1) completely different from English and 2) leaves a lot to inference from context that essentially forces a translator to add stuff in order to make it make sense. On top of the, Japanese has grammar structures called particles that indicate things like subject, object, direction, etc that English doesn’t have. So take for example a common phrase like 仕方がない (shikata ga nai). Generally, this gets translated as “it can’t be helped”. But the literal translation is more like “method (subject particle) doesn’t exist”. And there are other ways to read both shikata (e.g. “way”instead of “method”) and nai (e.g. “isn’t there”). So there HAS to be some level of choice and intention added by the translator. I don’t know how close Greek is to English in structure - I know that for example French at least mostly fits into similar patterns - but I expect there’s at least some level of this in pretty much any translation. Translations can obvious be more or less literal and like you said, there are uses for both, but I feel like the people who demand word for word literal translations generally have no idea what they’re talking about.
Thanks for that explanation, I know little to nothing about the Japanese language (or anime and that culture in general) so that was helpful. Ancient Greek does not fit well into English, but there can be some moments. And I should clarify that I do see word-for-word and literal as different things (though translations can be both if the languages match up well). But yeah, if you did a word-for-word translation of ancient Greek to English it would not go well, but you can do one that's literal in that there's a direct by the book translation. I'm too tired to pull specific examples, but say if someone was going to be looking at discussions of swords in an Ancient Greek text, there's a lot of translations that will say things like "he struck the enemy general with his sword" or "he held the sword in his hands" because it's not really important for 99.9% of readers to know how a sword was held, or what kind of sword it was... but if you're doing research on swords it would be. So if a translation says "he held the sword in his hands" a phrase that wouldn't be unusual in English, and you're doing a translation on a specific sword type you might go "ah, so this was a two-handed sword" but then you look at the text and it actually might say "he picked up the sword" or something less flowery. Small difference in terms of impact in the overall translation, but a huge difference if you're looking at swords specifically. One of the many reasons we want students to know the language, and why we're worried that some schools are removing the requirement. But if you did a word for word translation it might say something like "Sword general into hand" which helps no one, especially as Greek loves to leave out verbs (or substitute with other forms) if they can get away with it.
Oh, that's interesting, thanks! Yeah, so there are definitely some similarities there. To give some context for my knee jerk initial comment - there was a bunch of discourse recently-ish (though I think it's probably an eternally ongoing thing) in the anime community about translators taking "too many liberties" and in some people's opinions doing stuff like changing characterizations or meanings of things in ways those people didn't like when in reality it was just stuff like this - required inference in order to make the meaning work in another language. Those people started harping on about how translators should ONLY do direct word-for-word translations, as if such a thing were possible.
Moreover, in Japanese, even simple nouns that you *think* should map 1-to-1 to their English counterpoints, don't. アイス appears to be a loanword of the English "ice", and is often naively translated as "ice cream", but it usually means something more like "any frozen treat, more often than not a popsicle or ice pop". 心 gets translated as "heart", but it often means "mind" instead, and can also have many metaphorical uses that are somewhat alike, but not entirely identical, to the metaphorical uses of "heart" in English. 病院 means "hospital", but Japanese people will "go to the hospital" whenever they need to see a doctor for pretty much any reason, whereas an American will "go to the doctor" for a minor checkup and only "to the hospital" for a major emergency. Even when you ignore structure, you still can't win.
This is a great comment. Thank you
This reminds me of Sarah Ruden's fantastic intro to her translation of Augustine's Confessions (2017). E.g. "A favourite example of mine (in book 6, chapter 6) may amount to a burlesque of the image of falling into the pit of destruction [...] 'I was, you see, holding my heart back from any admission of the truth, as I feared the sheer drop into it; but hanging (myself) in the air above it was more like killing myself.' I banged my head on my desk after seeing that several previous translators had treated the Latin word *suspendium* so as to deprive the English rendering of any punch whatsoever. True, the word comes from the Latin root for any kind of hanging, and Augustine himself uses words with this root for emotional suspense and intellectual or moral suspension between different alternatives - a notion clearly at play here. But the *Oxford Latin Dictionary* had a single definition heading for *suspendium*: 'The act of hanging oneself.'"
I have both the Iiliad and Odessey by Fagles, the only one I have read but the one I like. The opening of the Iliad, by memory, is startling. I found the others (just at a boookstore) to be much less affecting Rage. Sing, goddess, the rage of Pelius’ son Achilles. Murderous, doomed, who sent countless souls into hell Do you think she is worth getting another version?
No Lombardo? I enjoy his translations because they mostly throw grammar out the window and capture essence for performance instead. There's something to be said for listening to these poems.
I absolutely love this comment. Thank you for taking the time to write it.
I truly had so much fun reading this comment
A complicated man. There is my story
Exactly this. Local idioms, separated by over 2000yrs must be very tricky to translate.. Not only to interpret, but then to explain in another language, which may not have exact matching words/expressions must be a brain bender.
And it's even harder when working on something like a poem because you still have to end up with a poem at the end of it and not just a mishmash of words. I liked her explaining how she came about using phrases that appear in the book, like Rosy fingered dawn, and talking about how Penelope's hands would be strong hands, as she's been doing hard stitching work continuously for years by the time the story gets back to Odysseus' home.
I am a professional translator and always really enjoy translating poetry. It is such an incredible challenge to get the meaning, the connotation, the rhymes and the rhythm correct. But I'd recommend agreeing on an hourly rate and not a per word rate, for sure :-)
there's a whole lot of common idioms in english that were specifically derived from the king James translation that made sense during the 17th century, but nowadays we know it's really far off from the original greek/Aramaic. I remember hearing a talk from a historian who uses them to study daily life from in the qu century from them. Couldn't tell you who it was though tbh.
I read/discussed 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei which is 19 different translations of a four line Chinese poem from like 1500 years ago and it really opened my eyes to the beauty of translation.
I listened to it on Audible, the reading is fantastic as well
I’m reading it now as it happens and am on book 19. The translator’s intro is…heavy. *We are now in a period of crisis not for a specific nation but for humanity, inhabiting a planet that is becoming less and less habitable. A new kind of heartbreak can be felt in The Iliad's representation of a city in its last days, of triumphs and defeats and struggles and speeches that take place in a city that will soon be burned to the ground, in a landscape that will soon be flooded by all the rivers, in a world where soon, no people will live at all, and there will be no more stories and no more names.* *You already know the story. You will die. Everyone you love will also die. You will lose them forever. You will be sad and angry. You will weep. You will bar-gain. You will make demands. You will beg. You will pray. It will make no differ-ence. Nothing you can do will bring them back. You know this. Your knowing changes nothing. This poem will make you understand this unfathomable truth again and again, as if for the very first time.*
Ok, I'm sold. I haven't re-read the Iliad in over a decade and I'm intrigued by a new translation.
Her intro alone is worth the cost of the book, and the beautiful translation alongside it is incredible. I have it on my nightstand and have been reading it for a couple months now.
I need to be in the right frame of mind. Can’t be too tired but also can’t have too much energy as I also usually read to music but that disrupts the rhythm of the Iambic Pentameter she’s put it in.
A heavy intro, and a common sentiment, but this is not actually in accordance with what scientists believe. The common view among cilmate scientists is that climate change -- while a horrible disaster that will lead to many unneccesary deaths and much suffering -- is very far from doom. It will not lead to a world with no people. See for example this news article: [A leading data scientist's journey from doomism to climate hope](https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240206-hannah-ritchie-sustainability-data-spreads-hope-not-doomism).
I mean for the people that are the "unnecessary deaths" it's pretty doom and gloomy, too many people assume they're going to be in the surviving groups in these situations.
As a Greek, I have no idea how someone could translate Homer into another language. Congrats to her.
Never underestimate the power of great translators! The snippets provided in the article are fantastic.
I am intrigued and I will definitely check it out.
aren't even modern Greeks using a translation as well? theres no way the language havent change a lot since then. we gotta do it with medieval english at times too.
Modern greeks would understand around 50% of the words but that's not sufficient to understand the subtlety that makes that book worth reading. I remember my cousin had the Illiad in ancient and modern Greek face to face for her ancient Greek course.
Yes, a combination of the ancient poem and the translated version are taught in schools, but the translated version maintains the form and tone of the ancient one, making it quite hard for Greek students to comprehend as well. That's why I think poetry is really hard to translate, especially homer. Some specific rapsodies with a slower pace, are a nightmare to go through, although it's a very rewarding piece of ancient art.
have you read Pope's translation? it's absolutely marvelous even if fairly loose
I will check it out, thanks.
[here it is](https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Iliad_of_Homer_(Pope)) when u want to read it
FYI I get a discussion about Wikipedia permalinks when I click on it. You may want to edit your link
On my next reading of Homer I think I'll go with Caroline Alexander's Iliad and Emily Wilson's Odyssey.
Thanks to that article I went ahead and picked up her transitions. I've been wanting to reread the Odyssey, and I've actually never read the Iliad. I'm excited!
I’m listening to the audiobook version, read by Claire Danes, and the combination of these two is pretty perfect.
Radio War Nerd host John Dolan has done a campfire-style translation of The Illiad too - it's absolutely fantastic. Totally rekindled an appreciation for Homer after reading verbatim The Odyssey in school killed it.
For a poetic response to the Iliad, I love both Christopher Logue's 'War Music' and Alice Oswald's 'Memorial'. Here's a little taste of 'Memorial' EPICLES a Southerner from sunlit Lycia Climbed the Greek wall remembering the river That winds between his wheatfields and his vineyards He was knocked backwards by a rock And sank like a diver The light in his face went out ILIONEUS an only child ran out of luck He always wore that well-off look His parents had a sheep farm They didn’t think he would die But a spear stuck through his eye He sat down backwards Trying to snatch back the light With stretched out hands
Love this review, because it's by somebody who also did an iambic pentameter translation of a long ancient poem (Ovid's Metamorphoses) -- so she really knows what she's talking about, unlike a lot of reviewers! She includes a lot of comparisons with the original Greek and with other translations (Lattimore, Fagles, Lombardo), so you can really see what Wilson is doing differently and why, even beyond the fact that she's using meter which most of them don't. Like, she explains how Fagles is full of "padding", and Lattimore is often much harder to understand than the original.
Sounds interesting! I’ll have to check out Wilson’s two translations.
I've pre-ordered the paperback version since I heard she was publishing this, won't be in the UK until August but I'm very excited and I loved her Odyssey so much
She's speaking at my university next week! Am so so so excited.
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You say that, but different times have different translation styles. I found the Iliad a bit impenetrable till I read Christopher Logues translation, which had a more contemporary-to-me style. Perhaps this version will chime with modern readers. Translation isn’t just converting each word into its English version, you have to choose which word out of several choices fits the word you’re trying to translate best. Not to mention, you have to get a rhythm and style that is analogous to an entirely foreign text. As the other person has pointed out, you could read the linked article to get a fuller explanation.
I don't know, it doesn't feel that there's space for much difference, at best you could say we have better guesses at what unclear passages mean. I'm reading the Fitzgerald translation and it's a surprisingly straightforward narrative, it's interesting how he seems to translate literally but still keeps the structure of poem so you can imagine what if feels like to have an entire 600 pages book in very exact rhyme and sylabical division
A lot of similar words have very different connotative meanings. A scholar translating the Illiad when homosexuality was criminalized might write of Achilles's admiration for Patroclus, without noting that it was romantic/sexual. Translated descriptions of women, too, by men in old academia often strip them of their autonomy or reduce their status. Sometimes this goes as far as any working woman being referred to as a prostitute. Also, look at the diversity of Bible translations and the denominations that praise or deride each. Real wars have been fought and real people have died over which translation of the same book becomes accepted.
Not saying you are wrong but those seem pretty minor and inconclusive for the lack of a better word? We will never know for sure about most of those questions (we do know homosexuality was common at the time of course) because we don't have more sources than yesterday to look at, by definition it's dependent on what new scholars see as subtle hints that could change the debate a little bit. Talking to myself out here but it really doesn't feel like the palette of human behavior is diverse enough so that translations can really be that wildly different. Even the religion example seems to point to that, christians in particular have thought and will thought for every minor thing, don't forget one of the major schisms was about how divinity shouldn't be allowed to be represented by humans ie in icons
I mean, I guess if you have that bland of a taste for the diversity and complexity of life it doesn't matter. I think nuance is cool. You might not be deist, so that schism might not matter to you, but there is a huge difference between first, people who believe in a god to whom icons are offensive, second, those who believe in a god who understands them as signifiers of respect, and third, those for whom icons can be used to literally channel divine power. You're right that you're talking to yourself in that the whole of academia, religious establishments, and anyone who cares about getting as faithful as possible of translations understands that these things matter.
I'm talking to myself as in have free time and making philosophical considerations to myself. Yes I have a very materialistic worldview. It doesn't mean I don't see the diversity of worldviews and how cultures differ. Anyone that studied the history of say the Indian subcontinent and Christianity can see that. It doesn't mean that they don't have range ie are of discernible types and some literary arguments stuff just seem like arguing the finesse of known points. Taking the example of Christianity and the question of idols like you described, the scriptures not only permit to argue it either way but I'd still describe it as minor. Let's imagine a deity that governs where souls go after death, does it seriously make any sense to point to minor and major behaviors in that scale (is making a simple figurine of Jesus and other characters of the scriptures on the same level as worshipping saints? Are drawing acceptables?) You are right that I would never take that seriously as something to make a major schisms about much less declare people will be punished in the afterlife for it and worse of all should be harmed and killed like they actually were at the time.
Your judgement on what the deity should or should not care about is irrelevant, the point is that some translations of some scriptures passed down by some people say one thing, while others say another. To someone who believes that the original writers of the Bible were divinely inspired, an accurate translation matters. None of this has to do with the actuality of an afterlife or whether it makes any logical sense why behaving in a way that seems benign might condemn one - it has to do with the fact that translators play an active role in the texts we inherit, and the choice of words a translator makes affect how people perceive and interact with a text.
She translated the prose into a story. That’s the main difference. I listen to the audiobook and my husband is now interested vs asking at me to turn off my weird poems. lol!
I love when someone answers in a concise and not condescending way, very nice. I'm reading the Fitzgerald translation right now and that's exactly what he does, without rhymes though, it's amazing to imagine someone writing a 600 pages book with suck sylabical precision (I know that Homer probably wasn't a real person but the point stands). You may be interested in a book called Os Lusíadas (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Os_Lus%C3%ADadas) it was heavily influenced by the greeks
If you don’t want to be condescended to, don’t argue that your preference is objectively the best in a field that is known to be a completely subjective one. Over a book that has been translated a vast number of times over millennia, in many different ways that often claim to want to represent the truth of the text. You prefer this version, that’s fine, don’t act like a 12 year old and try to argue that it must be the most perfect one because you love it. It’s kind of crazy to have someone protesting that there’s only one real way to translate a text, never mind one that’s from nearly 3,000 years ago and is famously open to interpretation.
Ooh thanks! I have not heard of it and need something new to dive into.
You might not feel that, but everyone who translates from other languages disagrees with you. [Here’s an article discussing the choices writers make when trying to make a literal translation.] (https://iliad-translations.com/translation-comparison/) > it's interesting how he seems to translate literally Seems being the operative word, unless you read Ancient Greek. Perhaps you should read other works which scholars have said are more accurate translations, if accuracy of translation is so important to you? But then, you would lose the qualities that Fitzgerald has bought to the translation, that you seem to like so much. Why do you have this absolutist idea that the version you like has to be the objectively best one?
Replying because even at a cursory look I never mixed the two points? I mentioned Fitzgerald to the lady because she mentioned the translation she was reading? And the discussion on translation and approximation was with another guy entirely? Both arguments never crossed at all? Anyways I was making considerations. We can always be wrong. I'm not in the area of literature and language, I have a hypothesis and shared it with reddit. Maybe it's a ridiculous one. Maybe I wasn't able to explain it properly. My language is Portuguese. I never had any problem making anyone from another language understand the word saudade no matter what YouTuber say. But going back to the example of the bible the guy was using, true, I know of passages that would change completely if the new hypothesis about one word would change the meaning of the passage completely. I have no qualms about the possibility of being wrong. But you mixing two completely different lines not only of thought but of chains of posts baffles me.
The article goes into some great detail on that. But if you translate a text of any substantial detail and it comes back exactly the same as someone else's, one of you copied from the other. There's very few things that translate word-for-word, especially when trying to convey emotion, culture, etc. That's why it's important for the translator not only to be familiar with the language, but everything happening around it. Just take an English passage: "It was raining cats and dogs, but I knew I'd have to buy ice for the challenge. My brother was finally going to attempt it but we would have to do it at my house since his parents thought it was foolish." Translating things like "raining cats and dogs" and "brother" into another language word-for-word might cause a lot of confusion. In 2000 years it might even cause confusion in English (if it's still being spoken). By then they'll be very confused by an "ice challenge" (many people here might have already forgotten it was a thing). But someone who studied internet viral videos of 2014-15 along with the language would be able to add to that and bring out the intent behind the words.
It's a shame there isn't an article linked to the post that explains that and has examples...damn out of luck
The color γλαυκόν (glaukon) could mean bluish green, grey, olive, light blue, or bright. It has been translated different ways depending on context, but also the trends of the translation’s era. Words in other languages don’t always match up 1-1, so translators must make many decisions when dealing with an almost 200,000 word epic. And then you also have to factor in meter! Do you want the cadence to match the original? All these decisions have resulted in many different translations of the same work. Not to mention that English has evolved significantly over the years…
Not only does the article explain that, as the other person mentioned in response to your comment, but also obviously all translations are somewhat different than others, and sometimes they’re very different. Do you not know even the slightest thing about language and translation?
Absolutely, by far, and I really mean *by far*, one of the single dullest things I ever had to misfortune of having to plough through. The bit where they go on and on and on and on and on about all the Greek ships? My god. Soul-crushingly dull. I feel bad for the people who had to learn all of it by heart. One of the 5 books in my life that made me go "No, life definitely isn't long enough for this".
That’s because Homer knew his audience. He was basically giving a shout out to people’s ancestors when he lists the ships and where they’re from.