The First Woman to Translate the ‘Odyssey’ into English
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Tell me about a complicated man.
Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost
when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy,
and where he went, and who he met, the pain
he suffered in the storms at sea, and how
he worked to save his life and bring his men
back home. He failed to keep them safe; poor fools,
they ate the Sun God’s cattle, and the god
kept them from home. Now goddess, child of Zeus,
tell the old story for our modern times.
Find the beginning. O Divine Poesy
Goddess-Daughter of Zeus
sustain for me
this song of the various-minded man
who after he had plundered
the innermost citadel of hallowed Troy
was made to stray grievously
about the coasts of men
the sport of their customs good or bad
while his heart
through all the sea-faring
ached in an agony to redeem himself
and bring his company safe home
Vain hope - for them
for his fellows he strove in vain
their own witlessness cast them away
the fools
to destroy for meat
the oxen of the most exalted sun
wherefore the Sun-god blotted out
the day of their return
Make the tale live for us
in all its many bearings
O Musehttps://www.theparisreview.org/poetry/6950/from-the-odyssey-...
Definitely excited to read he book as well.
Id think that in this globalized age much-traveled doeant have the same connotations of wisdom and adventure and loss as Homer’s word, and some other word might need to be used to bring it into context
“One of the things I struggled with,” Wilson continued, sounding more exhilarated than frustrated as she began to unpack “polytropos,” the first description we get of Odysseus, “is of course this whole question of whether he is passive — the ‘much turning’ or ‘much turned’ — right? This was —”
“Treat me,” I interrupted, “as if I don’t know Greek,” as, in fact, I do not.
“The prefix poly,” Wilson said, laughing, “means ‘many’ or ‘multiple.’ Tropos means ‘turn.’ ‘Many’ or ‘multiple’ could suggest that he’s much turned, as if he is the one who has been put in the situation of having been to Troy, and back, and all around, gods and goddesses and monsters turning him off the straight course that, ideally, he’d like to be on. Or, it could be that he’s this untrustworthy kind of guy who is always going to get out of any situation by turning it to his advantage. It could be that he’s the turner.”
EDIT: And later in the article:
“If I was really going to be radical,” Wilson told me, returning to the very first line of the poem, “I would’ve said, polytropos means ‘straying,’ and andra” — “man,” the poem’s first word — “means ‘husband,’ because in fact andra does also mean ‘husband,’ and I could’ve said, ‘Tell me about a straying husband.’ And that’s a viable translation. That’s one of the things it says. But it would give an entirely different perspective and an entirely different setup for the poem. The fact that it’s possible to translate the same lines a hundred different times and all of them are defensible in entirely different ways? That tells you something.” But, Wilson added, with the firmness of someone making hard choices she believes in: “I want to be super responsible about my relationship to the Greek text. I want to be saying, after multiple different revisions: This is the best I can get toward the truth.”
- http://www.wordreference.com/gren/%CF%80%CE%BF%CE%BB%CF%85%C...
Now goddess, child of Zeus,
tell the old story for our modern times.
A lot of things in this world are merely a knockoff of the original and authentic thing. And for someone hugely into stories, The Odyssey felt like this hugely authentic and original thing. Maybe it's me being pretentious, but it's all there: adventure & homecoming, cunning & humility, love & ignorance. Also, the themes are just melded into the core of the story in a way I haven't seen before. And the writing itself strikes an amazing balance between texture and structure.
The Odyssey is on the far side of the bell curve, it's unlike anything I've ever read. And I've only read one translation of it. Definitely going to be checking this one out.
The Chapman translation ( http://www.bartleby.com/111/chapman14.html ) is famous enough to have inspired Keats to write about it: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44481/on-first-lookin...
You want to read up on research into oral traditions and primarily-oral societies. Walter Ong is the usual starting point there.
Oral traditions aren't just accidentally memorable, or an artifact of people with specially-trained huge memories. Epics like the Iliad and Odyssey, and oral traditions of other societies, are truly impressive technology, though we never think of them that way. In literate societies, especially ones which have been literate for a long time, we think people would just have to rote-memorize this stuff, but really it's built with rhythms and patterns and structures and formulas, and you end up with works that are easy to learn, easy to recite and easy to reconstruct and even error-correct on the fly.
"...but his great discovery was the use of letters. .... for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing"
The thesis of Frances Yates' The Art of Memory is that you cannot properly understand ancient (or even more recent) scholarship without understanding memorization techniques. This is particularly true for Plato, for whom memorization arguably was the fundamental aspect of knowing.
I found Yates persuasive on this point: you can't really understand Plato's concept of the forms, and of his epistemology in general, without understanding the role and function of memory palaces. She makes a similar argument about Augustine's conceptualization of God, though it's attenuated as by Augustine's time the use of memory palaces had already entered a millennium long decline. By the time of the Renaissance artists were using exaggerated methods of memory palace construction--i.e. anchoring and "hiding" ideas in complex, elaborate visual works--without fully understanding the origin of those methods. Renaissance artists recognized aspects of the technique in earlier works without fully understanding the context. The arc of Yates' book is analyzing this historical progression--how memory palaces transformed from a fundamental utilitarian methodology that strongly influenced epistemology to a fragmented and esoteric body of concepts before being almost entirely forgotten altogether.
To understand how influential memory palaces might have been, consider how the technology of computers shapes our modern discussion about the mind and neurobiology. Even when our computer-mind analogies and metaphors are transparent, they still strongly influence how we generate and filter scientific ideas in both philosophy and biology. It can't be helped. Similarly, I found it very persuasive that Plato would naturally perceive and identify in the technology of memorization deeply intrinsic linkages between memorization, knowing, and reality.
Anyway, your comment was a beautiful bit of serendipity -- I never would have heard of the Yates book otherwise, which I just ordered. Thanks for taking the time.
[1] I could be absolutely butchering this, but the hypothesis was, if not literally as I've represented it, something similarly incredible in scope and spirit.
It drove home the scope of the fictional world that Tolkien created.
It's genuinely magic to read. And I really don't feel like anyone has matched his authenticity in the fantasy genre.
I love C.S. Lewis, but the Chronicles feels very artificial. A new venue to preach his religious motives. Fun, and well done for sure. But not the same.
I also love the Steven R. Donaldson series The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. It's a moral journey just as LoTR and Narnia are, but it's a deeply personal struggle for a guy trying to manage his own mix of character successes and failures, rather than epic characters who each represent one idealized version of a human trait.
But as much as I love that series as well, I feel very much like the world was created for the story, and not at all that the world was created simply to create a world, and the story was created for it.
Tolkien really did it perfectly. I don't know that he ever intended to do what he did. It could be argued that it's not really correct to call him a master at his (or any) craft because he wasn't trying to do anything like what he did. There's a certain accidental quality to it. Which is perhaps what makes it so compelling.
We are fortunate to have Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf which is always solid and occasionally makes you feel the raven's wings lowering over you. Guy Lee wrote a translation of Ovid's Amores which I unreservedly recommend. Clive James gave us the first translation of the Divine Comedy into English that catches the feel of the original. Urqhardt's Rabelais has been considered the English translation of choice for four hundred years.
But other works, like the Aeneid, languish. Fitzgerald's translation, unlike his Odyssey, is flat. CS Lewis translated a couple books fairly well, but I haven't seen the magic of the original in English yet.
Oddly, languages with smaller literary output, like Polish, often have better translations because translators are a much bigger deal, and certain translators have status equivalent to celebrity authors.
https://www.kenyonreview.org/2013/09/authoress-odyssey/
My favorite Iliad is Lattimore. I've tried others (Fagles, Green, Lombardo) and always come back to Lattimore. I remember when I first read it, my prof said we didn't have to read the Catalog of the Ships. I actually love that section now. It's like the opening credits.
My favorite Odyssey is Fitzgerald. Fagles is good too.
Now if you want a deeply bad translation, a fraud really, Mitchell is the worst. He leaves out chapters. Edward Luttwak ripped it apart.
I tried to read Fagles' and kept going back to Lattimore's. For the Odyssey though, Fagles' translation was very good.
https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/930/robert-fagles-...
What is a translation, that's the heart of the matter. Many people argue that translation is simply impossible, because the meaning of a text depends on its connexions to a whole cultural world, and if you take that text out of its cultural background and put it in another one, then it simply doesn't work anymore. It's like a transplant, but more complicated; if you do a heart transplant, at least all hearts are similar and connect to arteries in the same way; a translation is like trying to transplant an organ across species.
For instance, it seems most readers of classic Russian literature are of this opinion -- no other language renders Russian novels appropriately. (I don't read Russian so I wouldn't know.)
And yet, transplants do work. To pursue the transplant metaphor, they work when the organ performs the same function in the new organism as it did in the original one. So I don't think the translator's work is simply to "interpret" the source, if that word means "to understand deeply and then reproduce with one's own personality and artistic biais".
The task of the translator is to produce a text for a new audience, that produces an effect to that audience, as close as possible as the original text on the original audience.
There's this retired English teacher who translated the first book of the Harry Potter series in ancient Greek; it's different of course, since there are no native ancient Greek speakers left, and so his "audience" is unclear; but the description of the challenges he faced makes for a great and fun read:
Speak, Memory –
Of the cunning hero
The wanderer, blown off course time and again
After he plundered Troy's sacred heights.
Speak
Of all the cities he saw, the minds he grasped,
The suffering deep in his heart at sea
As he struggled to survive and bring his men home
But could not save them, hard as he tried –
The fools – destroyed by their own recklessness
When they ate the oxen of Hyperion the Sun,
And that god snuffed out their day of return.
Of these things,
Speak, Immortal One,
And tell the tale once more in our time.
https://www.c-span.org/video/?160063-1/discussion-homers-ody...
A list of over 73 translations of the Odyssey into English.
https://www.nytimes3xbfgragh.onion/2017/11/02/magazine/the-f...
Fact is Vergil died without completing it. He wasn't happy with it and wanted it burned. Augustus, who had heard chapters read and who was its sponsor, countermanded that order. He had it edited but it wasn't Vergil's hand. It's OK to be a little disappointed with the result.
BTW, Stanford iTunesU has a quite good 5 lecture podcast on the Aeneid by Susanna Braund. She knows everything.
Well, it goes without saying that it's the first that the author was aware of. However, given that the author admittedly doesn't know Greek, it rather seems that he lacks standing to make such a claim. Maybe Dr. Wilson told him, and he didn't want to quote her. I'd have qualified the statement, or provided a source, but then that's just how I am.