Exit Hector, again and again: How different translators reveal the ‘Iliad’ anew
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Recently we started a campaign of classical antiquity, and we're about 1/4 of the way through Thucydides. The plan from there is to continue where that book leaves off, so Xenophon, Plato, some of the plays, Aristotle, and then later Alexander, etc... until the fall of Western Rome.
If you're already into classics, or if you've always wanted to get started but you didn't know how, our group might be a good choice. It's a relaxed atmosphere, but we still manage to go pretty deep.
We've also been seeking to increase our membership because we want to get extra help with some of the projects for the site. Just stuff like help with producing ebooks for rare or hard to find stuff, etc... any kind of extra help though is voluntary of course.
Membership is open, with updated info posted on the site each week about the next meeting.
You shouldn't translate old works if your goal is to imbibe some modern new meaning into the work. Or if you do, do it as an explicit kitsch or panache and don't pretend it is a serious work.
Making a "feminist" translation of the Odyssey under the pretension that the original is a "patriarchal fantasy" is not a serious work and shouldn't be taken as such.
Have you read most of them, to be able to substantiate these statements?
Her introduction to the odyssey is actually a very interesting essay about the constraints and dynamics of translating ancient texts, it's definitely worth reading for its own sake.
A really interesting example of this and probably the one you're on a rant about is the "feminist" decision to use the word slave to describe the murdered house girls. Previous english translations used the word servant or maid. The original greek word is none of these, but they were slaves and an ancient greek would know that in this context. Every translator is making a decision about what information is communicated when they select a word there. And a selection is required, there's no perfectly neutral choice.
Why not?
Edit: Also unclear where you're quoting "feminist" and "patriarchal fantasy" from, as the article and this entire thread mention neither.
Edit: Am I correct in inferring that you're calling this translation absurd despite admitting you haven't read it?[1]
As I explained, no. mamonster presented the premise of a feminist translation. You asked what the problem with that would be, and I responded the premise of a feminist adaptation seems fine but a feminist translation does not. I have not argued that this translation is a feminist translation; I am responding to the same premise which you responded to when you asked "Why not?"
If you can ask "Why not?" to a premise disconnected from the article, then I can address the same premise.
And there's where the breakdown occurred - mamonster didn't present a premise of a feminist translation, they explicitly called this a feminist translation in both comments.
Anyway, I think we both understand each other now. If the NYTimes decides to let me past their captcha, I'll read the translation later and might give you my thoughts on it. Otherwise this conversation has taken an unproductive turn; I'm not amused by your attempt to rug-pull me.
No, I did not "humor and address [a] premise" because, again, that's not what OP did. In both comments, OP asserts that this is a feminist translation that should not be taken as a serious work. I asked OP, "Why not?" because I read the piece and disagreed with that assertion - I wanted to know, explicitly, if they were able to explain what about it they felt made it not "a serious work" and why "it shouldn't be taken as such". I wanted OP to defend their assertion made about this specific piece, and to elaborate on their perspective.
Because of that, I would imagine that it'd be clear to most people how your initial comment could've been read as arguing that this translation seems absurd, even if that's not where you were coming from.
If you think I'm wrong in reading OP's comments as an assertion rather than a premise, just look at how many other people responded in a way that suggests that they read it the same way I did.
>Otherwise this conversation has taken an unproductive turn...
Really? I genuinely thought that identifying where our disconnect occurred was productive.
>I'm not amused by your attempt to rug-pull me.
That's... not at all what I'm doing. All I've done was clarify our misunderstanding of one another, and your misunderstanding of OP's comments. It's OK to have accidentally misunderstood what someone was saying, there's no need to get personal here.
I hope you have a nice weekend.
Classicists from what I've seen are somewhat divided on the merits and results of Wilson's approach. But I've never seen one say she shouldn't have done it, or that it's not serious. The fuck kinda culture war goof are you on here man?
Lombardo start: 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.
Wilson start: 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.
You have 2 options to explain the above discrepancies: 1) One of the 2 translators has faulty Ancient Greek(the above 2 passages cannot be serious at the same time as translations of a literary work). 2) Modern Classics/modern readers don't care about the actual writing and only want the plot.
Just go read her translator's notes. She displays absolutely astonishing arrogance there that basically foreshadows that the whole book is basically an intender rewrite for modern sensibilities.
For example, she literally herself admits that "Unlike many modern translators, I have avoided describing the Cyclops with words such as "savage", which carry with them the legacy of early modern and modern forms of colonialism - a legacy that is, of course , anachronistric in the world of The Odyssey".
This honestly reads like maybe you don't understand how translation works? I mean, you're clearly coming at this from the standpoint of "I have a culture war axe to grind and I'm gonna grind it", but here goes: languages don't map perfectly into each other. Even languages that exist in the same time, in the same physical locations, where many people are fluent in both languages. There are words in modern Spanish and German that you can't express in a single word in English, and those languages have massive overlap and lots of common roots. There are words in English that mean different things to different people. My 21 year old cousin and my 70 year old father would understand the sentence "I saw Bill Murray on the street today, no cap" in completely different ways.
All of those issues are massively compounded the farther you are from the context of the original text. A 50 year gap between living people in the same country and speaking the same language is enough to make communication confusing; a 3,500 year gap makes it nearly impossible. The article this thread is based on (that you are clearly commenting on without having read) displays 5 different ways that different translators approached the exact same passage in the Iliad over multiple centuries. Lombardo's translation, much like Wilson's, much like any translation, is a work of invention. It has to be, because we aren't Ancient Greeks and we are not operating in the same milieu as the original audience for this work.
You clearly don't like Wilson's work for personal/political reasons, but trying to generalize that to "she's a bad translator" because her translations are different from other translations is a silly complaint that reveals a fundamental shallowness in your understanding of the process of translation.
This is such an unserious critique. Whatever the merits of her translation per se she's clearly deeply embedded in and aware of the history of translations of this work. I think you just picked the first translation that felt "high poetry" or w/e to a contemporary reader with no understanding of its historical context in this tradition.
One of my favorite editions is "The Word: The Bible from 26 Translations", which has different translations of each verse printed together. It's a huge book, and I can only imagine how much work went into it. The credits are two pages long.
Volume 1: https://archive.org/details/oldcovenantcommo01thom/page/n5/m... Volume 2: https://archive.org/details/oldcovenantcommo02thom/page/n3/m...
I'll also point you to Brenton's translation of the Septuagint, which is also a good addition if you don't already have it. This particular version has the original Greek and the English translation in parallel:
https://archive.org/details/septuagintversio1879bren/page/4/...
i read the ot in german standard translation coined by luther and a modern (but conservative) translation of the nt by kammermayer.
my disappointing take away was how dull and boring the bible is. i didn't find much inspiration in it. and i am spiritually inclined with an open mind towards christian mysticism.
but of course the bible as we know it is a disfigured and violated excerpt of a larger partly secret canon. so to understand it better precisely stuff like apple/fruit or girl/virgin are relevant and also make it more interesting.
Any recommendations on Christian (or not) mysticism? That's not something I've ever delved into at all.
Read about hesychasm, read about orthodox monks living in deserts, read about Mount Athos.
The Philokalia is worth checking out.
What version -- English or otherwise -- translates the Hebrew word for 'fruit' into 'apple'?
It's translated generically as "fruit" in all English versions that I know of. Likewise, it's translated as a generic fruit in the Vulgate (Latin - 'fructus') and Septuagint (Greek - 'karpos').
As far as 'almah' is concerned, the word is generally used in the OT to represent a young unmarried woman. It is presumed that such a woman would be a virgin (shocking, I know.) The context of its use in Isaiah 7:14 is that of virginity, the Jews who translated the Hebrew passage into Greek (200 years before Christ) used the Greek term for virgin, and Matthew's Greek quote of the verse in the context of Mary's pregnancy also uses the Greek term for virgin. Quibbling over the word 'almah' is strange in light of the fact that Luke explicitly states Mary had never had sex (see Luke 1:34) and that, while espoused to Joseph, she had yet to do the deed. (Matt 1:18).
https://www.vatican.va/archive/bible/nova_vulgata/documents/...
and it uses only the word "fructu", i.e. fruit, presumably translating "carpo" from Greek. There is no other more specific word.
It doesn't describe the departure of Agamemnon's armies (or the role of his daughter Iphegenia), the fall of Troy due to the horse, the journey back, or the fates of those who returned.
It really only addresses the fate of two characters, Patroclus and Hector.
It's like an old Polaroid photo of the Grand Canyon - none of the major stories fit within it.
The Iliad and the Odyssey were considered the best from all those poems, so they were used in schools and they were preserved in much more copies than the others, which ensured their survival.