[HN Gopher] Advice on Reading Homer in Translation
___________________________________________________________________
Advice on Reading Homer in Translation
Author : Khaine
Score : 58 points
Date : 2024-09-17 10:59 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (talesoftimesforgotten.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (talesoftimesforgotten.com)
| cafard wrote:
| "Learning Ancient Greek, however, is an immensely challenging
| endeavor that requires many years of effortful study and practice
| and it is even more challenging (bordering on impossible) to do
| on one's own without a teacher."
|
| It is a lot of work. I would point out, though, that not everyone
| who went through the English public schools or the American St.
| Grottlesex world was really a wizard. Yet given enough
| encouragement (often delivered with a stick, to be sure, at least
| in England) quite a few of them learned Ancient Greek.
|
| I will take a moment to recommend NYRB's slim volume _War and the
| Iliad_. I think that Rachel Bespaloff 's essays are outstanding,
| and an infinitely more qualified judge, Robert Fitzgerald, though
| so also.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| > _...quite a few of them learned Ancient Greek_
|
| The english phrase "it's all greek to me" has very different
| connotations depending upon if either (a) one knows no one who
| knows any greek, or (b) one had some greek in school, and even
| if one never did well oneself, one knows others with some
| facility in the language; in the latter case it implies "may
| look incomprehensible, but can be mastered with some effort".
| frereubu wrote:
| This is a great run-down and mirrors my experience of reading
| Fagles, Fitzgerald and Wilson.
|
| My favourite though is Christopher Logue's version of the _Iliad_
| called _War Music_ -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Music_(poem). It was
| controversial because he didn't know ancient Greek and based his
| version on other translations, as well as taking liberties with
| the text and introducing anachronisms (one of my favourite lines
| is about the "camera" panning across the armies in front of
| Troy). It's the only version I've read where I could clearly hear
| the characters talk in my head - it was a bit like reading a play
| at points.
| mwenge wrote:
| If you'd like to give the Iliad a go in the original Greek you
| can try https://iliad.rocks
| loughnane wrote:
| that is super cool. thanks for sharing!
| anadem wrote:
| Yes! Many of the responses here are intellectual, missing
| something more earthy. In particular, hearing Lombardo
| reading from his translation of the Iliad [0] stirred me
| deeply. For sure I'm going to find a print of his version.
|
| 0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFAjkf6tk60
| canjobear wrote:
| Enjoy this audio version with meter, rhythm, and fully
| reconstructed pronunciation including pitch accent and
| digammas! https://hypotactic.com/my-reading-of-homer-work-in-
| progress/
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| wow, maybe it's just that I have as little greek as gaelic,
| but Homer's mad flow gave me the same vibes as
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Sf0htzbMKk&t=34s (composed
| ~2750 years later, and to be honest, these lads are not
| exactly under the aegis of Athena Glaukopis -- if anyone's,
| Dionysus Acratophorus)
| netfortius wrote:
| This stands true for almost any native, comprehensive early
| education language. Try to read Emil Cioran in French, and let me
| know if his aphorismes truly mean what you think they do, in
| their English or even Romanian (post him "departing" the latter,
| when writing) translations.
| loughnane wrote:
| I like what Alfred North Whitehead said about translation in "The
| Place of Classics in Education". Punchline is at the end.
|
| ...
|
| I have often noticed that, if in an assembly of great scholars
| the topic of translations be introduced, they function as to
| their emotions and sentiments in exactly the same way as do
| decent people in the presence of a nasty sex-problem. A
| mathematician has no scholastic respectability to lose, so I will
| face the question.
|
| It follows from the whole line of thought which I have been
| developing, that an exact appreciation of the meanings of Latin
| words, of the ways in which ideas are connected in grammatical
| constructions, and of the whole hang of a Latin sentence with its
| distribution of emphasis, forms the very backbone of the merits
| which I ascribe to the study of Latin. Accordingly any woolly
| vagueness of teaching, slurring over the niceties of language
| defeats the whole ideal which I have set before you. The use of a
| translation to enable the pupils to get away from the Latin as
| quickly as possible, or to avoid the stretch of mind in grappling
| with construction, is erroneous. Exactness, definiteness, and
| independent power of analysis are among the main prizes of the
| whole study.
|
| But we are still confronted with the inexorable problem of pace,
| and with the short four or five years of the whole course. Every
| poem is meant to be read within certain limits of time. The
| contrasts, and the images, and the transition of moods must
| correspond with the sway of rhythms in the human spirit. These
| have their periods, which refuse to be stretched beyond certain
| limits. You may take the noblest poetry in the world, and, if you
| stumble through it at snail's pace, it collapses from a work of
| art into a rubbish heap. Think of the child's mind as he pores
| over his work: he reads "'as when," then follows a pause with a
| reference to the dictionary, then he goes on-'"an eagle," then
| another reference to the dictionary, followed by a period of
| wonderment over the construction, and so on, and so on. Is that
| going to help him to the vision of Rome? Surely, surely, common
| sense dictates that you procure the best literary translation you
| can, the one which best preserves the charm and vigour of the
| original, and that you read it aloud at the right pace, and
| append such comments as will elucidate the comprehension. The
| attack on the Latin will then be fortified by the sense that it
| enshrines a living work of art.
|
| But someone objects that a translation is woefully inferior to
| the original. Of course it is, that is why the boy has to master
| the Latin original. When the original has been mastered, it can
| be given its proper pace. I plead for an initial sense of the
| unity of the whole, to be given by a translation at the right
| pace, and for a final appreciation of the full value of the whole
| to be given by the original at the right pace.
| pierrebai wrote:
| Ah, the old "if you do not spent your time, effort an interest
| where _I_ have chosen to spend them, then you are an inferior
| human being to me. "
|
| Everyone judges people who do less about subject X, Y, Z to be
| criminal, lazy slob, and everyone doing more to be inflexible
| annoying zealots.
|
| Woe those who are not me and do things differently, for they
| are worthless.
| loughnane wrote:
| > I would recommend... reading a plot summary or abridged
| retelling of the epic you are planning to read before you begin.
|
| Hard disagree. Maybe that way is wise if you're cramming for a
| test, but the experience of reading any book (or watching any
| movie) is richer if you go into it first on your own terms.
| Otherwise you're inevitably shaded by the secondary source.
|
| I read the Butler translations without knowing much more than
| Zeus and it was a delight.
| empath75 wrote:
| The ancient greeks when listening to Homer, would be quite
| familiar with the story already, having heard the stories over
| and over since they were children, and very few of them
| probably ever experienced the story from "the beginning', but
| rather heard snatches of it here and there from story tellers,
| and in fact, the story is optimized for _retelling_, rather
| than _telling_, and presumes the audience is familiar with the
| characters and events.
| loughnane wrote:
| You're right. Still, if anyone were to ask for my opinion I'd
| tell them that you only ever get one "first read", and that
| might as well be the book itself. If you can't make heads or
| tails of it (in this case that'll be rare), then sure, look
| at some secondary sources.
|
| Even if you don't struggle, the secondary sources are great
| to read through after the fact. Stuff that'll help you get
| even more out of it on a second reading.
|
| Thinking abo
| prewett wrote:
| I'm fairly familiar with the Greek gods, but the problem
| I've had with reading the Illiad is that it is not at all
| obvious why this is written. With The Odyssey it's clear:
| he's trying to get home. But everyone in the Illiad seems
| to do stupid things for unclear reasons and I just loose
| interest. I think I would be helped out a lot by finding
| some summary of the themes the poem is talking about. So I
| think it's good advice.
|
| Similarly, I'm currently reading through the Poetic Edda. I
| thought I had a decent grasp of Norse mythology, but I am
| clearly missing references left and right. (I know, because
| they are footnoted) I think reading the Prose Edda with its
| background first would probably have been helpful.
| coliveira wrote:
| Both Iliad and Odyssey are about the same thing: how the
| Gods determine the fate of humans, even the most powerful
| of them. They sometimes do stupid things because that's
| the desire of the Gods.
| alganet wrote:
| > our culture has trained us to take rhyme less seriously
|
| As I was reading this, I realized compositions with metric and
| rhyme are a good way of decreasing the chances of someone
| altering them.
|
| I'm thinking about the times before the printing press. Times
| when people copied books by hand, sometimes altering stuff during
| the process. I imagine altering a composition that has strict
| form is much harder than altering free text. Can't just insert or
| remove words freely (metric would change), can't just exchange a
| word by some other unrelated word (rhyme would change). Someone
| wanting to modify such works would need to be more than copyists.
| coliveira wrote:
| More than that, just as nowadays we can easily remember the
| lyrics of a famous song, the Greek remembered and recited parts
| of the Iliad and Odyssey. This is easier to do with poetry than
| with prose.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| > our culture has trained us to take rhyme less seriously
|
| I was surprised to learn this about Anglo culture (that rhyme
| is associated with childishness), as in Hungarian poetry all
| serious works (up to, say, the mid-20th century) are in rhyme.
| Sad and serious or happy and joking, rhyme is just expected. In
| fact, if something doesn't rhyme, then the average Hungarian
| would say it can't by definition be poetry (even if they know
| about "free" poems).
| nineplay wrote:
| I think there's enough mental barrier's to deciding to read The
| Iliad and The Odyssey without a learned professor adding more. If
| I'd read this article first I would have never bothered
| attempting to read either. That would have been a great personal
| tragedy.
|
| > I would recommend... reading a plot summary or abridged
| retelling of the epic you are planning to read before you begin.
|
| Terrible advice for a potential reader. I'm not a student and
| don't need assigned pre-work.
|
| I struggle with reading poetry, always have for whatever reason,
| and I suspect I'm not the only one. I'd tell anyone who was
| intimidated to read Samuel Butler's prose version and to heck
| with anyone who's worried about whatever may be lost in
| translation.
|
| The stories are wonderful. They're transporting. I've rarely felt
| so completely consumed by another world. I read The Aeneid when I
| was done because I wanted to keep that feeling alive.
|
| Try a few different translations - go to the library or download
| sample chapters from amazon. Decide what works best for you. Read
| them purely for pleasure because they are wonderful.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I read the Illiad in high school, but as far as I remember it
| was mostly just lists of so-and-so from such-and-such fought
| this other guy.
|
| Spoiler alert for thousand year old book: Then the hero gets
| killed by the invincible brat and dragged around the city a
| bunch of times (Hector, he's obviously the hero, normal guy
| defending his home against a bunch of jumped up god-empowered
| jerks, trying to prevent this silly Paris/Everybody else spat
| from inflicting itself on everybody else).
|
| Sad story.
| nineplay wrote:
| If it were a modern book we wouldn't talk about it in terms
| of story, we'd talk about it in terms of world building. A
| world where gods and goddesses exists and directly influence
| humanity. A world with great heroes and kings and warriors
| and battles. A world where everyone is pretty flawed and its
| frankly pretty hilarious - Achilles pouting and kicking his
| heels is one of the funniest plots in western literature.
|
| Any story anywhere can be stripped to 'x does y and then z'.
| jasode wrote:
| _> Terrible advice for a potential reader. _
|
| Your quotation left out the context of that advice which
| explains the reasoning. The paragraph before it states:
|
| _> , I would recommend familiarizing oneself with the main
| characters and the basic outline of the story. This may sound
| like strange advice, since readers of contemporary fiction are
| often accustomed to avoiding "spoilers," but developing prior
| knowledge of the characters and story actually brings one
| closer to the experience of ancient audiences, who, as I have
| said, would have already known the broad outlines of the myths
| the epics tell before they went to a performance of them._
|
| A rough analogy would be today's audiences already being
| familiar with comic superhero characters and stories like
| Superman, Wonder Woman, etc in DC Comics, or Spiderman, etc in
| the Marvel Universe -- _before watching any of the movies about
| them_. Sure, there might be a few in the audience who are
| totally oblivious to the background of the Superman mythology
| before the movie starts but for the most part, everybody is
| familiar with Clark Kent, kryptonite, and so on. (Cue up the
| famous Jay Leno skit of asking random people in the street, _"
| what is the chemical composition of salt?"_, and they don't
| know to answer _" sodium-chloride"_ ... but when he then asks
| _" what's the name of the rock that hurts Superman?"_ and they
| immediately say _" Oh, that's kryptonite!"_)
|
| The idea is to bring that level of cultural knowledge into the
| reader's brain before reading Iliad/Odyssey.
| burningion wrote:
| Just finished re-reading Emily Wilson's translation of the
| Odyssey a few weeks ago.
|
| If you haven't read the Odyssey before, I think her translation
| is accessible enough to just jump right in.
|
| My favorite part of the story is how central luck is to
| everything.
|
| The characters constantly accept the role of luck in what they
| do, and the potential of landing on the wrong side of it.
|
| Few modern stories give luck and randomness such prominence, and
| downplay our own ability to entirely control outcomes.
| coldpie wrote:
| > If you haven't read the Odyssey before, I think her
| translation is accessible enough to just jump right in.
|
| I keep checking, but it is continuously checked out at my local
| library :D One day I'll get lucky. (Yes, I know about holds; I
| don't like them; I don't like the sense of obligation, and I
| enjoy the hunt; yes, it's a quirk.)
| coliveira wrote:
| That's right, but from the Greeks' point of view it was not
| luck: it was the diving fate, determined by the Gods. The
| modern equivalent is religious people who believe that
| everything is determined by the Jewish god.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| Wouldn't the modern equivalent be scientific materialists who
| believe it _is_ determined by luck? The ancient greeks
| believed that fate and consequence were _determined_ by
| divine act, but not necessarily decided by them. You could
| after all find yourself a pawn in a power struggle between
| gods, or by being favored by one be used as a weapon against
| them by a rival or enemy. This is a really different
| conception of divine interference than what modern abrahamic
| religious people believe.
|
| The abrahamic religions all more or less believe god is
| benevolent and acting in our best interest within the
| constraint of allowing us also to act freely. This seems
| fairly different both from what ancient greeks believed about
| fate and modern secular beliefs about luck and coincidence.
| coliveira wrote:
| The secular belief of luck is that nobody is determining
| anything: no gods, no divine providence, etc. So,
| completely unrelated to the Greek beliefs.
|
| As for modern religious people, everyone has a different
| version of what their god can do or not. Theologians may
| spend their whole lives trying to support one version of
| another.
| kridsdale3 wrote:
| Sounds like a TTRPG Live Play.
|
| "such and such would narratively be the best thing to do here"
|
| "natural one"
|
| "well fuck"
| qingcharles wrote:
| A good translation makes or breaks a book.
|
| If you're going to read a foreign book, _always_ research the
| translation first.
|
| IIRC, the primary copy of _Les Miserables_ (the one with the nice
| cover) is the public domain translation from 100 years ago, vs.
| the two more recent excellent Penguin translations (1982, 2015).
| mmooss wrote:
| I wonder what surviving ancient physical texts the modern
| translations are based on. Also, the Iliad and Odyssey were
| prominant books in ancient Greece so there may have been
| different editions and revisions then. How do you know which one
| you're looking at and what it represents?
| dmvdoug wrote:
| They'll usually tell you what critical edition the translation
| is based on.
|
| Translators almost always work off of critical editions rather
| than manuscript themselves, at least where we're talking about
| popular stuff like Homer or whatnot.
| blueyes wrote:
| Peter Green's translations of Homer are excellent but ommitted
| from this roundup:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Iliad-New-Translation-Peter-Green/dp/...
| md_ wrote:
| I can't say how it compares to other translations, but A. S.
| Kline's translations of both are available for free online and, I
| found, easy and fun to read:
| https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Greek/Odhome.php.
| sixo wrote:
| Advice for anyone reading the Iliad: read Simone Weil's essay
| "The Iliad, or the Poem of Force" first [1]. The essay was a
| profound experience on its own for me, in a way that came as a
| great relief in a world which seemed to lack all moral gravity.
| (Note, it was written in 1945.)
|
| And it conveys better than anything _why_ the epic was composed,
| why it survived to be written down (the Bronze Age Collapse and a
| whole dark age separated the era of the Trojan War from the era
| of Homer!) and why people have been reading it for almost three
| thousand years.
|
| [1] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/simone-weil-the-
| ilia...
| lukasb wrote:
| Absolutely worth reading, even if you have no intention of
| reading Homer.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| > _...failing everything else, there is always a god handy to
| advise him to be unreasonable._
|
| Even after a change of pantheon, the same pattern recurs: "
| _Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius._ "
|
| > _How soon this will happen is another question._
|
| On the greek calends?
| cafard wrote:
| I found it interesting, but I think that Weil is trying to yoke
| together the Greek epics and Christianity, both of which were
| profoundly important to her, but which really aren't compatible
| at the level she wants.
|
| NYRB brought out a small volume containing Weil's essay and
| also Rachel Bespaloff's essays on Homer. I think Bespaloff
| gives a better picture. And Herman Broch's afterword is worth
| reading.
| snakeboy wrote:
| It's only superficially relevant here, but I love the poem, so
| I'll share it anyway:
|
| _On First Looking into Chapman's Homer_ , John Keats
| Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold, And many
| goodly states and kingdoms seen; Round many western islands
| have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. Oft
| of one wide expanse had I been told That deep-brow'd Homer
| ruled as his demesne; Yet did I never breathe its pure
| serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
| Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new
| planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with
| eagle eyes He star'd at the Pacific--and all his men
| Look'd at each other with a wild surmise-- Silent, upon a
| peak in Darien.
| phreeza wrote:
| Did Cortez really land in Darien? I thought that was the site
| of the ill-fated Scottish attempt at setting up a colony.
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| who gives a shit
| farleykr wrote:
| Not a fan of discourse?
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| I'm sick, so forgive me. But also, like, its a poem. I
| mean, of all the things to nitpick, the historical
| accuracy of poetry is probably the most banal.
| sdeer wrote:
| It was Balboa who led the first European expedition across
| isthmus of Panama and saw the Pacific Ocean and claimed it
| (yes,the whole Ocean) for Spain. Cortez to my knowledge never
| set foot in Panama.
|
| The Scottish colony was much later.
| snakeboy wrote:
| True, but "stout Cortez" sounds better than "stout Balboa"
| ;)
| somat wrote:
| "Some version of the Iliad most likely became relatively fixed by
| around the second quarter of the seventh century BCE and a
| version of the Odyssey by the middle of the same century."
|
| So I suspect this is a clever literary sort of joke, I
| appreciated it as such. But I was not exactly sure and wanted to
| talk about it. The two time periods are the same right?
| avn2109 wrote:
| IMHO more likely that TFA's author is a product of the modern
| University system, which is to say strong on postmodern
| critical theory and light on arithmetic.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-09-17 23:01 UTC)