[HN Gopher] The Odyssey by Homer, Translated by Samuel Butler
___________________________________________________________________
The Odyssey by Homer, Translated by Samuel Butler
Author : agomez314
Score : 72 points
Date : 2023-07-17 13:45 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.gutenberg.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.gutenberg.org)
| KaiserPro wrote:
| Remember that each translation has its own style and twist. Some
| authors will be shits (for the illiad akeles having a wank over
| Penthesilea in one re-telling vs weeping over her death, vs
| Penthesilea wracked with grief committing suicide)
|
| For those who are short of time, and like a comedy angle:
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001brj5 Haynes blasts through
| it in 30 minutes.
|
| her books are also great as well
|
| illiad is here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000d7p2
| CalChris wrote:
| If you want a fun story about a truly bad translation of the
| _Iliad_ (and eventually the _Odyssey_ ), read Edward Luttwak's
| story about Stephen Mitchell.
|
| https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v34/n04/edward-luttwak/homer...
| nanna wrote:
| Check out Emily Wilson's recent translation of The Odyssey for a
| great read in contemporary English.
|
| https://www.emilyrcwilson.com/the-odyssey
| maw wrote:
| And her translation of the Iliad comes out later this year.
| I've been looking forward to it ever since I found out she was
| working on it.
| madcaptenor wrote:
| As am I! I'm hoping for an audiobook (that's how I took in
| her translation of the Odyssey) but I'm not seeing any
| indication of that yet, so I may just have to read the thing
| with my eyes.
| braymundo wrote:
| I'm not familiar with the translation, but I strongly recommend
| Standard Ebooks for a great reading experience on any device:
| https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/homer/the-odyssey/william-...
| metadaemon wrote:
| Amazing! Thank you.
| acqq wrote:
| I like to use these interactive pages:
|
| https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1...
| iso8859-1 wrote:
| Why do they mark Ithaca, New York as Homers native lands?
|
| https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/nebrowser?id=tgn%2C7013...
| dhosek wrote:
| Homer got his MFA from Syracuse. He studied under George
| Saunders.
| pborenstein wrote:
| Gift link to Emily Wilson's NYT Article "Exit Hector, Again and
| Again: How Different Translators Reveal the 'Iliad' Anew"
|
| Worth a read.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/28/books/review/iliad-transl...
| philshem wrote:
| Her Translator's Notes at the preface of her translation of the
| Odyssey are fascinating to read (as was her translation).
|
| https://dornsife.usc.edu/assets/sites/903/docs/wilson_emily_...
| dangitnotagain wrote:
| To throw a little shade on you translation nerds, I thought to
| mention a few things.
|
| Greeks were all illiterate at the time of the Homeric
| composition. They didn't start reading/writing again for about
| fifty years. Arguably, these stories made the Greeks reintroduce
| writing.
|
| There is the argument on who's that Homer anyway, and my
| conclusion (after studying the Epic cycle for some years) is that
| the Iliad was the composition of ~800 years of oral tradition.
| The Odyssey was produced in a short time afterwards. Homer had a
| school of acolytes who composed The Odyssey together. No one who
| has read The Odyssey more than three times will say with
| confidence that the whole composition is produced by one person.
| The narratives among the books are too different. It was a tomb
| for relating to the way Grecians once were ... before the Dorian
| invasion which hobbled them all back into illiteracy, and how
| they should live once more. Soon after these works came the
| "golden area" of philosophers.
|
| Oh yeah, the actual Trojan war occurred ~800 years before Homer
| composed the Iliad! Soon after this epic blood letting the
| Dorians (some illiterate inland tribal peoples) walked right over
| them, causing the gap between ancient and classical Greece.
| Perilous time for Humanity.
|
| The Epic cycle was actually a dozen or so comparable stories,
| only Homer's survived in full. Interesting side stories include
| that of Iphigenia, which explains Clytemnestra's betrayal more
| than the woman hating rhetoric spewed by Agamemnon (in hades) or
| other accounts.
| Mimmy wrote:
| I'd like to plug two podcasts by professional storyteller and
| contemporary bard Jeff Wright, who does a modern retelling of the
| two stories. [1][2]
|
| As another commenter mentioned, both the Iliad and the Odyssey
| were passed down via oral tradition. If you want to be "pure",
| the best way of consuming the stories are to hear them.
|
| Additionally, the stories were always meant to be told, retold,
| remixed, etc. It is very much in the spirit of the original
| stories for new bards to add their own spin to it. Don't be
| turned off by the fact that Jeff doesn't read verbatim a
| translation of the original texts. He adds a lot of extra context
| you wouldn't otherwise get from just reading the books (context
| that every other listener in Ancient Greece would have already
| had that we don't).
|
| [1] Iliad / Trojan War:
| https://open.spotify.com/show/7w7RMunEMoAapudklkkVgE [2] Odyssey:
| https://open.spotify.com/show/5vyJGStvyCNkel5Mqxb4OA
| jheriko wrote:
| there are absolutely tons of better versions than this - although
| gutenberg is interesting, most of the content is ridiculously
| obsolete
| notyoutube wrote:
| I'm close to the end of Peter Green's translation of the Iliad,
| and though hard to plough through at times, the style was not as
| drab and "old" as I would have expected; the difficulty was
| mostly due to scenes often being kind of long, essentially bullet
| point lists and/or with strange content -- i.e. content more than
| form.
|
| I'd be interested to know what people have to say about that
| translation, and the one of the Odyssey by Green too.
| AlleyTrotter wrote:
| [dead]
| shrubble wrote:
| I liked the translations by Stanley Lombardo.
|
| I think however that the purpose of reading the Iliad and the
| Odyssey is at least partially so that you can read the Aeneid...
| devindotcom wrote:
| Lombardo is good, agreed.
| herodotus wrote:
| Warning: Do not read this translation!
|
| OK, that may be a bit harsh. But the danger is that a translation
| that is out-of-date or badly done will turn you off the book.
| Many classic books whose translations are now beyond copyright
| are available for free. But these translations are, generally
| speaking, poor. To really appreciate these books, find a
| translation that is up-to-date and that suits your reading style.
| jrumbut wrote:
| I quite like Emily Wilson's recent translation of the Odyssey.
| I just wish she had kept "winged words" in, but that's a very
| minor thing.
|
| For the Iliad, I have a preference for Richmond Lattimore. His
| is fairly true to the original and so it feels like an old
| story from far away, which I like. I think most people like
| Robert Fitzgerald better though?
| hexis wrote:
| And Emily Wilson has a translation of the Iliad releasing in
| the US later this year - https://www.amazon.com/Iliad-
| Homer/dp/1324001801
| thisisauserid wrote:
| In Emily Wilson's article comparing her excerpt with other
| famous translators, she conveniently leaves Lattimore out:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20230629122951/https://www.nyti
| m...
|
| I pulled my Lattimore off the shelf and compared them. I
| was unsurprised to find Wilson's iambic pentameter version
| over-simplified:
|
| "Strange woman! Come on now, you must not be too sad on my
| account."
|
| vs. Lattimore's: "Poor Andromache! Why does your heart
| sorrow so much for me?"
| InitialLastName wrote:
| Butler: "My own wife, do not take these things too
| bitterly to heart"
|
| It seems to me that most of the other translations I can
| find are closer to the Wilson translation. I don't know
| any version of Greek, but the name Andromache doesn't
| appear in that line (book 6 line 486) at all, and nobody
| else seems to interpret the line as a rhetorical
| question.
|
| All this just to say, maybe Wilson's is closer to the
| original text?
| thisisauserid wrote:
| Great points. It still seems odd to me that she left
| Lattimore out when he's so often praised (on HN anyway).
| dhosek wrote:
| I'm reading Wilson right now and was pleased to see that in
| at least one passage she let the winged words peek through.
| She's open in her introduction about varying how she renders
| the repetitive epithets and phrases in the poem, a practice
| that dates back at least to St Jerome who translated v (and)
| with around a dozen variations (et, atque, -que, come to mind
| off the top of my head) although digging into the Vulgate, my
| biggest takeaway is that Jerome was _wild_ (but in a good
| way).
| the__alchemist wrote:
| I'm a fan of the Fagles translation; I chose it after a good
| bit of comparison and skimming.
| megmogandog wrote:
| I also like Fagles, but when I said this to a classicist she
| made a face
| ttonkytonk wrote:
| >But these translations are, generally speaking, poor.
|
| I think that's an unfair characterization - Benjamin Jowett's
| translations of Plato's dialogues are decent and readable
| (these are readily available online). I also liked H.G. Dakyn's
| translations of Xenophon's _The Memorabilia_ and _The
| Symposium_ :
|
| https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1177/pg1177-images.html
|
| https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1181/pg1181-images.html
| megmogandog wrote:
| And Jowett's translations are explicitly not recommended for
| anyone trying to study Plato's thought, which is what most
| people read Plato for (the same goes for all public domain
| translations of philosophy). At least with outdated
| translations of literature you can argue for some kind of
| added value: people don't read Chapman's or Pope's Homer for
| their accuracy. But philosophy is another matter.
| [deleted]
| billfruit wrote:
| Why? Jowett's translation of Plato are highly readable and
| clear. He was a highly regarded academic in his time.
| ttonkytonk wrote:
| I'm sure there are better, more recent translations, but
| I've read _Plato: Complete Works_ (John Cooper) and a
| reasonable bit of Jowett 's translations, and in my
| (layman's) opinion, if newer translations aren't available,
| Jowett's will do just fine.
| cheeseomlit wrote:
| I can't speak to the quality of this version or what is
| considered 'out-of-date', but I don't think a translation
| necessarily needs to be recent to be well done. I recently read
| the A. T. Murray translation of the Odyssey from 1919 and
| enjoyed it immensely. I can also heartily recommend the
| Lattimore translation of the Illiad from 1954, though the more
| recent Fagles translation is great too.
| bamfly wrote:
| I wouldn't defend it as the _best_ , but I'm personally a fan
| of TE Lawrence's 1932 translation, writing as TE Shaw.
|
| Odyssey only--he didn't translate the Iliad.
| duped wrote:
| > To really appreciate these books, find a translation that is
| up-to-date
|
| On the contrary I think reading a 100 year old translation of a
| 2,800 year old story is enlightening on a different level
| number6 wrote:
| But if you need a translation for the translation...
| GloomyBoots wrote:
| You don't need a translation for hundred-year-old poetry.
| You might need a dictionary, mainly for archaisms (and I
| mean words that were already archaisms at the time). That
| said, I don't like this translation.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| You don't. You just need to work a bit harder.
| bamfly wrote:
| I read Butler's Iliad (mercifully, with the gods' names
| restored to Greek by an editor) and concur--avoid.
|
| It's often the case that there are _multiple_ still-covered-by-
| copyright translations of ancient texts (and sometimes more-
| recent-than-ancient ones, as with e.g. almost anything Russian,
| or Jules Verne) that are better than anything PG has, by just
| about any standard of "better". Not their fault--that's just
| how it is. I'd definitely recommend anyone tackling these sorts
| of works shop for the best translation for their purposes--it
| can make a huge difference. Worth a trip to the library or a
| few dollars for a used copy, for something you'll spend hours
| with.
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| Since we are talking which to avoid, just to add a
| translation suggestion, Peter Green's is highly regarded.
| allturtles wrote:
| > I read Butler's Iliad (mercifully, with the gods' names
| restored to Greek by an editor) and concur--avoid.
|
| Any specific reasons why?
|
| > I'd definitely recommend anyone tackling these sorts of
| works shop for the best translation for their purposes--it
| can make a huge difference. Worth a trip to the library or a
| few dollars for a used copy, for something you'll spend hours
| with.
|
| I definitely agree with this. Shop around for the translation
| that you like best where possible (for less popular texts you
| may have no choice). There are a lot of different possible
| "value systems" for evaluating translation quality.
| bamfly wrote:
| > Any specific reasons why?
|
| I don't think it reads very smoothly, and Butler adopts a
| kind of archaic tone (even for the time, I mean--not just
| that the translation is, itself, now old) that does more
| harm than good to the text. Not literal enough to justify
| the clunkiness, not distinctive and skilled and poetically-
| sublime enough to be a great English work in its own right
| (see: Pope) despite putting some effort into
| it[1]--basically, just a rougher read than other options,
| without much benefit to offset that. It's not _terrible_ ,
| I'm just not sure there's anything to recommend it--I'd say
| read a different Homer, and if you want to read Butler,
| read _Erewhon_ or one of his other novels.
|
| [1] For instance, from the link:
|
| "So saying she bound on her glittering golden sandals,
| imperishable, with which she can fly like the wind over
| land or sea; she grasped the redoubtable bronze-shod spear,
| so stout and sturdy and strong, [...]"
|
| He's _trying_ with all that alliteration and the meter, and
| at times it works quite well for the space of a few words,
| but the wider a view, if you will, one takes of it, and as
| one proceeds with the reading, the worse it looks--to my
| eye, anyway.
|
| [EDIT]
|
| Other Butler, for free.
|
| _Erewhon_ :
|
| https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/samuel-butler/erewhon
|
| _The Way of All Flesh_ :
|
| https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/samuel-butler/the-way-
| of-a...
|
| If you read and like _Erewhon_ , you'll probably also like
| the sequel _Erewhon Revisited_. Didn 't see it on Standard
| Ebooks, but I assume PG has it.
| dotancohen wrote:
| Seeing how we are reading, not reciting, these texts, I
| prefer to sacrifice meter for brevity and clarity. Have
| you any particular recommendations? I can read Greek and
| do speak a bit of the modern language (just from
| Duolingo) if that would be a consideration.
| bamfly wrote:
| Heh--my favorite prose Odyssey's kinda a bad one, from
| many perspectives, as it's an even less a literal
| rendering than most: TE Lawrence's 1932 translation
| (publishing as TE Shaw--you might find it under either
| name). It's not so far off it'd be at all fair to call it
| a retelling, but it's also less-close to the original
| than most translations. It's also guilty of some of the
| deliberate archaism in its language that I just accused
| Butler of, but is more to-my-taste regardless--I make no
| claim to consistency :-)
|
| I find it clean, unassuming, and to read at a nice
| modern-feeling (but not _too_ modern-feeling) clip
| without resorting to abridgment.
| cxr wrote:
| On the other hand, sometimes newer translations do not justify
| the hype. I've put a _lot_ of time into discriminating between
| available translations of stuff that I 've read. People say,
| for example, you can't read _The Count of Monte Cristo_ unless
| it 's Buss's translation published by Penguin, or you can't
| read Garnett's Dostoyevsky. Well, okay, but when pressed about
| what the purportedly less faithful versions of Dumas get wrong,
| I've only ever heard mimetic regurgitation of nonspecific
| claims (on par with "don't read K&R; it's awful") or when
| someone actually articulates something concrete and
| falsifiable, it doesn't hold up--"That actually _was_ in the
| 19th century translation that I read, so... " And
| notwithstanding whether Pevear and Volokhonsky's _The Idiot_
| was done by folks with more reverence for the original, theirs
| is basically unreadable from where I 'm sitting.
|
| It's also worth pondering whether the newer translations are
| riding on the coattails of their denigrated forebears--"would
| this have been as well-received and become a staple in the
| English-speaking world if the newer, purportedly better
| translation had been the only game in town from the beginning?"
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Get bent. This was the first translation I read of the Odyssey,
| it took some work to read, and I loved it. This is how
| translations ought to be, in my view - as close to a
| transliteration as possible without being grammatically
| incomprehensible. If I need to consult a dictionary or
| reference material to supplement my understanding, that's just
| fine.
|
| The modern style of translations-as-rewrites that aim to meet
| readers in their comfort zones are terrible, the literary
| equivalent of shitty dub tracks on foreign video media.
| jxcl wrote:
| +1 to this for translations of Russian literature by Constance
| Garnett. She was prolific and her works are now out of
| copyright, but more recent translations will be more pleasant
| to read and generally be truer to the source material.
| Personally, I'm a fan of Pevear & Volokhonsky, but a cursory
| search will reveal a massive controversy over whether they're
| great or awful. I suspect this is true of most translators of
| for languages as well.
|
| When reading works in translation, the translator is just as
| important as the author of the source material. Do your
| research!
| bookofjoe wrote:
| Truth.
|
| >The [International Booker Prize] celebrates the vital work
| of translators, with the PS50,000 prize money divided equally
| between the author and the translator.
|
| https://thebookerprizes.com/the-international-booker-prize
| keiferski wrote:
| I disagree, strongly. Most modern translations try to be
| "accessible" which means they're written in a lukewarm, boring
| style that avoids difficult (but artistically relevant)
| language. This is especially true with Victorian-era English,
| which is criticized for being overly verbose today. Sometimes,
| maybe that's true. But if say, _Confessions of an English Opium
| Eater_ had been written in French and was only read as a
| contemporary translation, you 'd completely miss the beauty of
| De Quincey's writing.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_English_Opiu...
|
| https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/thomas-de-quincey/confessi...
| wk_end wrote:
| Everything is subjective, there's no bad opinions, but this
| comes close. To cast so wide a brush as to paint Lattimore,
| Fitzgerald, Fagles, Wilson, Mandelbaum, and other renowned
| modern translators as lukewarm and boring...
|
| If you have some particular fondness for Victorian English,
| sure, read what you enjoy; but antiquated language doesn't
| make anything intrinsically better, and it takes the average
| modern reader further away from the work itself. These works
| weren't composed in a language that was, for their audience,
| hundreds of years out-of-date.
|
| Moreover - particularly with ancient texts - older
| translators were typically writers first, scholars second. As
| pointed out elsewhere on this thread, Pope didn't even speak
| Greek when he "translated" the Iliad. The Butler translation
| here is prose. An approach to translation that takes fidelity
| seriously is a more modern invention.
| keiferski wrote:
| You're welcome to disagree with me, no problem. But is the
| passive aggressive side comment really necessary?
|
| I have found that modern translations inject a "modernness"
| into the language that isn't present in translations from a
| century or two ago. If that doesn't bother you, then sure,
| pick up a recent translation.
| MikeBVaughn wrote:
| 'I have found that modern translations inject a
| "modernness" into the language that isn't present in
| translations from a century or two ago.'
|
| I'm completely baffled by this criticism in the context
| of a translation of a 7th Century BC text, particularly
| in terms of the notion of making the text 'accessible' to
| a modern reader.
|
| If anything I'd argue that Butler's prose translation
| does far more violence to the original text. The idea
| that e.g. Lattimore is more accessible than Butler is
| remarkably strange to me. In particular, you mention that
| contemporary translations tend to avoid 'difficult'
| language, which is flat wrong in the context of Lattimore
| - his syntactic constructions, because they need to fit
| the poetic meter he uses, are frequently quite complex
| and nested. Nor is the vocabulary particularly
| simplified; I think Butler is much more watered-down in
| this regard.*
|
| Can you elaborate on which 20th/21st century translations
| of Homer you are referring to?
|
| *(That is not to say there aren't any possible criticisms
| to be made of Lattimore in terms of anachronism - when
| Helen talks about her own conduct in the Iliad, Lattimore
| inserts some fairly harsh 20th-century gendered insults
| that are, as far as I can tell, in no way attested to by
| the original Greek)
| keiferski wrote:
| I was replying to the parent comment's broad message
| about avoiding old translations, not specifically Homer.
| MikeBVaughn wrote:
| Ah! Sorry. I misunderstood the scope of your initial 'I
| disagree.'
| keiferski wrote:
| No problem, I just realized now that my comment isn't as
| clear as it should be.
| hulitu wrote:
| > OK, that may be a bit harsh. But the danger is that a
| translation that is out-of-date or badly done will turn you off
| the book.
|
| There are a lot of "new translations" whose only purpose is to
| generate money for the "translator". They must be different
| from the old ones and most are generaly poor.
| noobdev9000 wrote:
| Are they bad, or are they bad because they don't torture the
| text to fit modern day sensibilities and npc iq?
| adrian_b wrote:
| My opinion is that any ancient writings are best read in a
| bilingual edition (like those of the Loeb collection), even
| when you do not know well or at all the original language.
|
| When you also have the original text, whenever there is a more
| interesting or obscure paragraph you can look to see what was
| really said, possibly with the help of a dictionary.
|
| Even when the translation is good, the translator cannot stop
| at each sentence and explain why certain English words have
| been chosen, which may be the closest to what was said, or they
| may be not, but the translator has thought that the chosen
| translation is easier to understand for an average reader.
|
| The older translations (and perhaps the future translations,
| taking into account the current trends) also avoided to
| translate whatever words were considered offensive when the
| translation was done.
| watwut wrote:
| > obscure paragraph you can look to see what was really said,
| possibly with the help of a dictionary
|
| I pretty much guarantee that unless the translation is
| completely atrocious, what you will gain from this will be
| even worst. Languages just don't work like that. Trying to
| fugure out nuance or meaning from word for word dictionary
| analysis just don't work.
| adrian_b wrote:
| If trying to figure the meaning from a dictionary may be
| difficult, trying to figure the exact meaning from almost
| any translation that I have ever seen is completely
| hopeless.
|
| For some of the ancient texts there are editions with
| commentaries, which include both the original text and an
| approximate translation for it and in which most of the
| less usual words and phrases are discussed in detail, to
| establish their most probable meaning.
|
| While such a commented edition may be the best tool, what
| they add over a bilingual edition and a dictionary is much
| less than the difference between the latter and an English-
| only edition.
|
| The English translations may be more acceptable for
| literary fiction (where for many people it matters more to
| be entertained than to know what the ancient author truly
| said), but they are particularly bad for any text that has
| any scientific value, e.g. Aristotle, Plato, Pliny,
| Herodotus and so on, because the translator normally lacks
| expertise in sciences and is unable to identify the
| appropriate English words.
|
| Even in Homer, there are many names of animals, plants and
| minerals, or even of colors, which are normally
| mistranslated into English.
| gloryjulio wrote:
| I agree. With the current technology this should be the way
| to go, and we should be able to lookup the the translation on
| the fly. A simple static translation is no longer enough
| devindotcom wrote:
| This is useful with something like the Canterbury Tales where
| an average reader can puzzle out the proto-English, but with
| Ancient Greek it's pretty useless. I love Loebs but I think
| their translations are very dry and academic, sometimes to
| good purpose (I love their Hesiod) but not always.
| digging wrote:
| Pretty impossible (in a static text) for an English speaker
| reading ancient Greek unless they're familiar with Greek or
| Cyrillic letters. Otherwise a block of text is just going to
| be totally inscrutable and having the "original" (which, to
| be clear, is _never_ going to look like an original
| inscription for ancient Greek) is not likely to add any
| value.
| adrian_b wrote:
| Much more people are familiar with the Greek letters (e.g.
| from mathematics or physics) than with the Greek language.
|
| Knowing the letters is enough to allow the use of a
| dictionary to find most words, i.e. most nouns. Searching
| for verbs in a dictionary can be more difficult without
| knowing the grammar, as it may not be obvious which is the
| dictionary form that corresponds to a verbal form in the
| text.
|
| I have read many Greek and Latin bilingual books and I have
| always found the original text to be of great value. The
| English text is very useful for reading quickly in order to
| have a general idea about the content of the original text
| and for searching quickly things in which you are
| interested.
|
| Whenever you want to know anything certain about the
| content of the original text, the only way is to look at
| the original language. It does not matter if the original
| text looks like the original inscriptions. The original
| text may be shown in a one-to-one transliteration into
| Latin letters, without losing any information.
|
| On the other hand, I have never seen any reliable English
| translation, i.e. any translation where after seeing twice
| the same English word in the translation you may conclude
| that the Greek author used the same word in both cases or
| that the author meant the same thing in both places.
|
| Moreover, almost all translations that I have seen contain
| some anachronisms, i.e. modern words which do not really
| have any exact correspondent in the ancient languages, so
| when looking at the original you can see that the Greek or
| Latin words actually meant something else. Because of this,
| I have seen papers in which wrong conclusions were affirmed
| about what some ancient authors have said, due to the fact
| that some translations were accepted as being true
| literally, without checking the original words.
| dhosek wrote:
| Wiktionary is really good for this as it has entries
| linking back to the main text for conjugated verbs (and
| in the rare cases when it doesn't, full text search finds
| the verb thanks to the conjugation tables).
| digging wrote:
| > familiar with the Greek letters (e.g. from mathematics
| or physics)
|
| I think, if you've studied classics, you should know that
| seeing a few greek letters in a mathematical formula and
| mispronounced is nowhere near being able to parse a word
| written in Greek letters.
|
| > I have read many Greek and Latin bilingual books and I
| have always found the original text to be of great value.
|
| You've misunderstood, though. The latter is true _because
| of_ the former. The comment I replied to specifically
| referred to people who don 't know the language.
|
| > The original text may be shown in a one-to-one
| transliteration into Latin letters, without losing any
| information
|
| Not exactly true because our alphabet doesn't have
| standardized stress marks, aspiration marks, or even
| standardized 1:1 transliterations of the characters. But
| in general I think you're correct that transliterating it
| could be helpful.
|
| > On the other hand, I have never seen any reliable
| English translation, i.e. any translation where after
| seeing twice the same English word in the translation you
| may conclude that the Greek author used the same word in
| both cases or that the author meant the same thing in
| both places.
|
| I am pretty sure I have, but I don't have any references
| on hand.
|
| > Because of this, I have seen papers in which wrong
| conclusions were affirmed about what some ancient authors
| have said, due to the fact that some translations were
| accepted as being true literally, without checking the
| original words.
|
| You've definitely hit an important point here. Even
| without having studied classics very intensely, I can
| almost immediately spot bullshit peddlers when they
| reference "the Greeks" and quote some passage completely
| out of context. But most of the time, it's less about the
| translator's word choice and more about ignorance of the
| society in which the original was written. That's not
| something you're going to get anyway from laying the
| original text next to the translation.
| frereubu wrote:
| For anyone who wants a "retelling" of the Iliad rather than a
| translation, I can't recommend highly enough _War Music_ by the
| British poet Christopher Logue. It made me fall back in love with
| the classics. (I also read the Fagles and Wilson translations,
| both of which I enjoyed for different reasons). You can get a
| sense of it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Music_(poem)
|
| It rather reminds of _The New Four Seasons_ by Nigel Kennedy -
| https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/oct/29/nigel-kennedy-... -
| and Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet, as they're all interestingly
| irreverent takes (at least in my view) on a classic.
| dash2 wrote:
| +1 to this and let me give a quote: Rat,
| pearl, onion, honey: these colours came
| before the sun lifted above the ocean
| bringing light alike to mortals and immortals.
| And through this falling brightness through the by now
| mosque, eucalyptus, utter blue,
| came Thetis, gliding across the azimuth, with
| armour the colour of moonlight laid on Her forearms,
| palms upturned towards the sun,
| hovering above the fleet, Her skyish face towards her
| son, Achilles...
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| At first glance I thought this was the same translation I read
| from Standard Ebooks, but in fact I believe that was by William
| Cullen Bryant.[0] Both translations use the Roman names of the
| deities rather than the Greek. I found this odd and more than a
| bit confusing, but from reading the preface to the Bryant
| translation it seems that this approach was chosen because the
| Roman names were, at the time, much more recognisable to the
| English-speaking public. This seems strange to me now--while the
| names of the Roman deities are familiar to us because of the
| planets, I think most people would be more familiar with Zeus and
| Poseidon _as deities_ than Jupiter and Neptune.
|
| Bryant's defence of the approach is interesting:
|
| > In the Preface to my version of the Iliad, I gave very briefly
| my reason for preserving the names derived from the Latin, by
| which the deities of the Grecian mythology have hitherto been
| known to English readers --that is to say, Jupiter, Juno,
| Neptune, Pluto, Mars, Venus, and the rest, instead of Zeus, Here,
| and the other names which are properly Greek. As the propriety of
| doing this is questioned by some persons of exact scholarship, I
| will state the argument a little more at large. The names I have
| employed have been given to the gods and goddesses of ancient
| Greece from the very beginnings of our language. Chaucer,
| Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and the rest, down to Proctor and
| Keats --a list whose chronology extends through six hundred years
| --have followed this usage, and we may even trace it back for
| centuries before either of them wrote. Our prose writers have
| done the same thing; the names of Latin derivation have been
| adopted by the earliest and latest translators of the New
| Testament. To each of the deities known by these names there is
| annexed in the mind of the English reader --and it is for the
| English reader that I have made this translation --a peculiar set
| of attributes. Speak of Juno and Diana, and the mere English
| reader understands you at once; but when he reads the names of
| Here and Artemis, he looks into his classical dictionary. The
| names of Latin origin are naturalized; the others are aliens and
| strangers. The conjunction and itself, which has been handed down
| to us unchanged from our Saxon ancestors, holds not its place in
| our language by a firmer and more incontestable title than the
| names which we have hitherto given to the deities of ancient
| Greece. We derive this usage from the Latin authors --from
| Virgil, and Horace, and Ovid, and the prose writers of ancient
| Rome. Art as well as poetry knows these deities by the same
| names. We talk of the Venus de Medicis, the Venus of Milo, the
| Jupiter of Phidias, and never think of calling a statue of Mars a
| statue of Ares.
|
| > For my part, I am satisfied with the English language as it has
| been handed down to us. If the lines of my translation had
| bristled with the names of Zeus and Here, and Poseidon and Ares,
| and Artemis and Demeter, I should feel that I had departed from
| the immemorial usage of the English tongue, that I had introduced
| obscurity where the meaning should have been plain, and that I
| had given just cause of complaint to the readers for whom I
| wrote.
|
| 0: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/homer/the-
| odyssey/william-...
| adrian_b wrote:
| I find rather sad that the Romans themselves have reused the
| names of their traditional gods as names for the Greek gods.
|
| Because this unification of the Roman and Greek gods has
| happened a little earlier than the time from which we begin to
| have preserved Latin texts and because the Greek gods came with
| a huge number of stories attached to them, unlike the Roman
| gods, which previously were mentioned mostly in rituals and
| prayers, we have extremely little information about the
| traditional Roman gods.
|
| With the exception of Jupiter/Zeus, most of the Roman gods had
| been very different from the Greek gods who replaced them and
| it would have been interesting to know more about their
| original roles.
|
| For instance the Roman Mars was extremely unlikely the Greek
| Ares. Mars was a beloved god, the most important protector of
| the Romans, who defended them against various kinds of bad
| things, like a COVID pandemy or climate change. He was not a
| god of war, even if his protector role meant that he could also
| help the Romans in wars. On the other hand, the Greek Ares was
| a god of destruction who was feared and hated. The Greeks
| sacrificed to him mostly to avoid his anger, but when they
| wanted help in war they usually turned to other gods, e.g. to
| Athena, which is why in the Iliad Athena gives some good
| beatings to Ares.
| foobarian wrote:
| I can't wrap my head around the Romanized gods, having grown up
| on the Greek names. Speaking of, this youth edition is still my
| favorite version; the illustration is especially great.
| Unfortunately it seems it was never widely translated.
| https://www.amazon.it/Odissea-avventure-Ulisse-Miti-oro-eboo...
| devindotcom wrote:
| As always I think your best move if you want to read a work with
| many translations available is simply to read the first 2-3 pages
| (or some other short identical segment) and see which one feels
| best to you. I have read several and I value them all for
| different reasons.
|
| I love Pope but wouldn't read him for an "accurate" translation
| (he didn't know Greek!) and I like Butler's prose but it's a
| total transliteration, not poetry. My go-to recommendation is
| Lattimore (not Fagles, which I found dull), but now we have Emily
| Wilson in the mix too (with a great preface to boot).
|
| Taste them all and go with whichever is best for you - you can
| always read another later, but your first time for a classic
| should be enjoyable and natural. Only you can say which one you
| enjoy most.
| verisimi wrote:
| My, I get the impression that 'translations' are far more like
| a work of art in their own right, than, er, a translation!
| devindotcom wrote:
| This certainly is the case! Translation is a creative
| process, not merely transformative, let alone mechanical.
| Especially with classics, where much interpretation is
| needed. The very first line of the Odyssey is a perfect
| example - the word used to describe Odysseus famously has no
| direct translation, so everyone puts their own spin on it.
|
| Reading the amount of thought that goes into a translation is
| always interesting to me - for instance the introduction to a
| Sir Gawain and the Green Knight I have really helped me
| understand how the alliterative style worked and why the
| translation was done in a certain way (and why it was so
| hard).
| frereubu wrote:
| There's an enjoyably pessmimistic phrase in Italian -
| "traduttore, traditore" which translated(!) means
| "translator, traitor", emphasising the impossibility of an
| "accurate" translation.
|
| I love reading translations, but would love to have the time
| to learn languages to read the originals. (I tried learning
| German for WG Sebald, but found it very hard, figured his
| writing was going to be pretty hard in and of itself, know
| that he worked closely with his English translators, and
| given he taught in an English university for decades figured
| they were going to be very "good").
| CalChris wrote:
| The Homeric Question [1] generally centers on whether the _Iliad_
| and the _Odyssey_ were written by primarily one person
| (Unitarian) or by different people (Analytic). Butler has another
| theory, that the _Odyssey_ was written by one person, a woman in
| Sicily, which he published in the _The Authoress of the Odyssey_
| [2]. Basically, Butler was describing the _Odyssey_ as fan
| fiction, as a _Mary Sue_ [3].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeric_Question
|
| [2] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Authoress_of_the_Odyssey
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Sue
| mrangle wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised.
|
| Devil's advocacy:
|
| Even if the Odyssey is arguably a relatively paler reflection
| of the Iliad in terms of mythological weight across the western
| corpus (ie: centrally important myths reflected within other
| myths), while still being a monster in its own right, it would
| be a monumental lifetime feat for one woman to acquire the
| deepest mythological and even religious (apocalyptic) knowledge
| it would have taken to write the Odyssey. It's still an
| incalculably skilled work.
|
| In all, I'd lean against the one woman theory. But it wouldn't
| surprise me either. Authors and artists often had advisors on
| classical subject matter that would have been mostly mastered
| by those with expensive educations.
|
| Homeric Question and historicity:
|
| No one who is a serious student of mythology thinks that there
| is a real controversy over whether or not works such as the
| Iliad fall into dichotomous categories of true or false. What
| these myths are meant to describe are archetypal repeating
| events. That is, they are both true and myth. As is the case
| for most long persevering myths. No one should allow a little
| bit of allegory to fool them.
| soufron wrote:
| I dont think the Odyssey is a pale reflection of the Iliad in
| terms of mythological weight.
|
| On the contrary, most of its stories relate to extremely
| tales and folklores - ie Polyphemus.
|
| Have fun :
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientists-
| trace-...
| rustymonday wrote:
| Ancient tradition unanimously ascribed the authorship of the
| Iliad and Odyssey to Homer. We know nothing about Homer, except
| that he likely lived around the area of Smyrna and that he may
| have been blind.
|
| Butler's theory is nice and all, but I would give significantly
| more weight to what ancient writers had to say about Homer.
| scientator wrote:
| There were all kinds of competing legends about Homer back in
| ancient times. Many cities claimed that he had once lived
| there. And there was even an ancient legend that both the
| Iliad and Odyssey were written by a woman named Phantasia,
| said to have been the daughter of Nicarchus who lived in
| Memphis. She supposedly left the texts of the two epic poems
| in the library of Memphis where Homer found them and then
| took credit for them as his own. This legend was brought to
| Samuel Butler's attention following the publication of his
| theory, but he insisted he hadn't been aware of it.
| adrian_b wrote:
| I find the theory that the Odyssey has not been composed by
| Homer (by "Homer" meaning the author of the Iliad), but by some
| woman belonging to his family, perhaps a daughter,
| granddaughter or niece, much more plausible than the
| alternatives.
|
| The Iliad and the Odyssey use very similar artificial poetic
| languages and vocabularies (though some words appear for the
| first time in the Odyssey and most of them are words that are
| expected to be more recent words).
|
| Even so there is a very noticeable difference in style between
| the two works, and the easiest way to describe this difference
| is to say that the Iliad seems masculine, while the Odyssey
| seems feminine, i.e. the former is like an action movie, which
| spends a lot of time with the description of matters
| interesting for males, e.g. about efficient ways of killing or
| maiming your opponents or of gaining glory on the battlefield,
| while the latter is like a chick flick, where the main
| interests are about love and romance, stories about powerful
| independent women, descriptions of various female skills,
| clothes, food and gardens, and it includes even feminist
| complaints about the lack of equality between sexes.
|
| It is very unlikely that we will ever know anything certain
| about the identity of the authors of the Homeric poems, but
| reading carefully the two texts, especially in original, gives
| the appearance of two closely related authors, but nevertheless
| of different sex.
| rustymonday wrote:
| There's a famous quip that the person who wrote the Iliad and
| the Odyssey was not Homer, but a different man with the same
| name.
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