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Comment by gallerdude | Hacker News Reader

I had a class on The Odyssey (and other epics) last year, and for some reason it floored me.

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.

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You might enjoy Ezra Pound's 'ABCs of Reading', which talks about reading the best examples available. The Odyssey and Illiad are certainly that. Also the Aeneid, the Divine Comedy, Beowulf...but sometimes there are acceptable translations and sometimes there aren't.

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.

Which translation did you read?

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...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15627133

Fagles

The structure was amazing, all the more so for it being transmitted by oral tradition. Things like Odysseus being "born", pangs and all, seven times before getting home. One of the places he departs from actually translates to "birth". Son mirroring the father. The architecture of the tale was fascinating.

The structure was amazing, all the more so for it being transmitted by oral tradition.

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.

Well also it doesn't have to be precisely the same story each time and in fact would often be changed around depending on the audience (emphasizing a local hero, for instance)

I am reminded me of the tongue-in-cheek comments on the invention of writing made by Plato in the Phaedrus dialogue:

"...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"

It might be worthwhile to consider interpreting that Phaedrus passage more literally.

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.

I came across a book years ago whose thesis was something along the lines that the construction of epic was the beginning of what amounted to a cognitive revolution in humankind; and that before Homer (and presumably as a function of abstraction and mnemonic techniques that underlay the construction and performance of his works, and them similar works) that people weren't yet fully conscious. I lost track of the name of the book, but it was a tantalizing argument even if it seems batshit, on the surface [1].

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's The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes.

Thank you!

I remember reading this in high school and everyone gasped when the dog dies (spoiler alert for ~2500 year old story) yet took all the gory human deaths in the same chapter in stride.

Ever watch John Wick? The guy goes on a murder rampage for a dead dog (and as an audience member, I find myself oddly rooting for Wick).

It's a movie and he's the protagonist, I don't think it's very odd at all for you to root for him...

Well, me neither, but it's not like it's a different principle than is at work in the Odyssey.

Sure, but the dog was also a memento of the recently departed Mrs. Wick, so it wasn't just about puppicide.

Yes, well, that's the magic of getting to tell the story -- you get to decide which deaths your audience cares about.

The Odyssey seems original because the reason it is famous is that it is one of the oldest written version of stories that were told orally for generations.

Honestly it kind of reminds me of Dragon Ball or something like that.

You may be thinking of Journey to the West, which Dragon Ball was inspired by.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_to_the_West

I wasn't, having never read it. Anyway after the first 13 episodes Dragon Ball had little to do with Journey to the West other than sort of having an analogous cast of characters, most of whom eventually fell out of the spotlight.

I've always felt similarly about Lord of the Rings. It feels so authentic and real. Every other similar fantasy novel just reads as if everything in the story was made up for the purpose of telling the story, which of course it was. In LOTR it feels like historical fiction, like Tolkien designed everything about the world down to the finest detail then wrote a story in it without making anything new up.

Yeah there's some fiction where it seems the world only serves the plot, but LotR feels like it's taking one of infinite potential paths through the world created.

What really struck me, upon reading (ok, scanning) the Silmarillion, was the brevity of the mention of everything that happened in LoTR.

It drove home the scope of the fictional world that Tolkien created.

You feel that way because that's exactly how it happened. Tolkien was a linguist first and foremost, and he created the languages used in the books for fun. Then he created the worlds and the lore for those places to exist. And only after all of that did he actually write stories set in these worlds and the languages in them.

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.

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