The Odyssey by Homer, Translated by Samuel Butler
gutenberg.org
gutenberg.org
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.
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).
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").
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 But the danger is that a translation that is out-of-date or badly done will turn you off the book.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.
Odyssey only—he didn't translate the Iliad.
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.
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.
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.
I find it clean, unassuming, and to read at a nice modern-feeling (but not too modern-feeling) clip without resorting to abridgment.
When reading works in translation, the translator is just as important as the author of the source material. Do your research!
>The [International Booker Prize] celebrates the vital work of translators, with the £50,000 prize money divided equally between the author and the translator.
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?
https://web.archive.org/web/20230629122951/https://www.nytim...
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 Andromachē! Why does your heart sorrow so much for me?"
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?
δαιμονίη μή μοί τι λίην ἀκαχίζεο θυμῷ:
δαιμονίη is of disputed meaning, but basically a literal translation might run:
Possessed woman, don’t be so upset in your heart for me.
Here Lattimore doesn’t look so good.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
None of that is science in contemporary sense.
On the contrary I think reading a 100 year old translation of a 2,800 year old story is enlightening on a different level
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?"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_English_Opiu...
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/thomas-de-quincey/confessi...
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
"This is how translations ought to be, in my view - as close to a transliteration as possible without being grammatically incomprehensible."
Butler is emphatically not this, though - It's a prose adaptation of a poem, and thus in many ways quite far from a "transliteration" compared to e.g. Fagles, Lattimore, Fitzgerald, etc.
I'd argue that Butler's translations are absolutely "translation(s) aiming to meet readers in their comfort zones," by his own admission.
From the preface to Butler's Iliad:
> It follows that a translation should depart hardly at all from the modes of speech current in the translator's own times, inasmuch as nothing is readable, for long, which affects any other diction than that of the age in which it is written.
And later
> I very readily admit that Dr. Leaf has in the main kept more closely to the words of Homer, but I believe him to have lost more of the spirit of the original through his abandonment (no doubt deliberate) of all attempt at stately, and at the same time easy, musical, flow of language, than he has gained in adherence to the letter — to which, after all, neither he nor any man can adhere.
(Oddly, unlike the Odyssey, the PG text of the Iliad does not have Butler's preface. I had to track it down elsewhere. Source: https://ia600209.us.archive.org/10/items/cu31924026468417/cu...)
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.
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...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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeric_Question
[2] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Authoress_of_the_Odyssey
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.
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.
On the contrary, most of its stories relate to extremely tales and folklores - ie Polyphemus.
Have fun : https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientists-trace-...
Butler's theory is nice and all, but I would give significantly more weight to what ancient writers had to say about Homer.
https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1...
https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/nebrowser?id=tgn%2C7013...
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
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v34/n04/edward-luttwak/homer...
I admit this quote is out-of-context, you can read here J. L. Borges - The Homeric Versions: https://gwern.net/doc/borges/1932-borges-thehomericversions....
if you speak Spanish or Italian, there are new editions that are translations from Butler, plus Atwood's "Penelopiad" and more, very nice books:
Worth a read.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/28/books/review/iliad-transl...
https://dornsife.usc.edu/assets/sites/903/docs/wilson_emily_...
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
The gods and titans are made so puny and pathetic that Odysseus the mere mortal can outwit them and best them by strength. Odysseus blinded the son of Poseidon and lived at sea for years without being brutally struck down, Poseidon being so pathetic himself as to be held in check by Zeus.
That said, agreed that picking a readable translation is key.
I'd be interested to know what people have to say about that translation, and the one of the Odyssey by Green too.
I think however that the purpose of reading the Iliad and the Odyssey is at least partially so that you can read the Aeneid...
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, Herè, 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 Herè 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 Herè, 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-...
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.