War Music: Homer and His Iliad
literaryreview.co.uk
literaryreview.co.uk
It is without doubt one of the best poetic works of the past 100 years.
"Achilles saw his armour in that instant
And its ominous radiance flooded his heart.
Bright pads with toggles crossed behind the knees,
Bodice of fitted tungsten, pliable straps;
His shield as round and rich as moons in spring;
His sword's haft parked between sheaves of grey obsidian
From which a lucid blade stood out, leaf-shaped, adorned
With running spirals.
And for his head a welded cortex; yes,
Though it is noon, the helmet screams against the light;
Scratches the eye; so violent it can be seen
Across three thousand years."
The Caroline Alexander translation is much more "correct," but lacks Logue's spark of vitality and originality.
I'll give you the pages just before and after that part. Here: https://docdro.id/puR412w
This passage sounds a lot like the writing style of the ancient classics. I assume the reviewer chose it on purpose for that reason. I don't know that I need to read this book, but I appreciate that apparently it's a work of passion and enthusiasm.
Seeing someone explicitly assert the copyright status of a text pushing 3 millennia old is somehow very amusing to me
The new translations really bring these old poems to life, and listening to them is at least for me the best way to consume them.
For anyone interested in this, I found a couple of excerpts of Caroline Alexander's Iliad translation[0] that were published in The Guardian as well as an article by Emily Wilson (the Odyssey translator also mentioned above) about the engagement of female scholars and translators with the classics[1].
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/09/new-translatio...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jul/07/women-classics...
That's the first line and complicated tells us nothing about the protagonist. Everyone can be complicated, but only Odysseus is πολύτροπον. It's a quality of character few people possess.
Original comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25525457#25531307
The πολύτροπος thing is a complete red herring by the way. Her translation is questionnable but remains within the bound of what I would expect from a modern translator. I am more annoyed by everything she drops in the rest of the poem. Remarkably and annoyingly, the coverage when her translation was released spend far more time dwelling on her gender than on her actual work.
The parent's complaint is neither a tautology not odd in any way.
"Neither complicated nor straying husband appear in the original text" obviousy means "the meanings conveyed by those words are not the meanings found in the original text", not that the English words aren't in the original (I mean, duh!).
They translator is bizarrely translating a word that means "resourceful" to "complicated".
It's about Ulysses being like MacGyver, not like Dan Draper. It'anymore that Greek for fish ("ichthus") would make sense to translate as "
In one reading, πολύτροπος is turn in the Odyssey away from past stories, Odysseus as psychological composite, the previous song in the cycle is about μῆνιν and its manifestation as the hero Achilles, the traditional, singular hero.
If you want to see this shift between the composite and the singular in poetics discussed, read Aristophanes’ Frogs.
You're welcome to disagree, but I find her choices fascinating, and I loved her translation. (I read the Fagles translation in school and liked that one as well.)
That said, I disagreed with lots of her choices. Odysseus' "I could not do my exercise routine" (8.232) is a particularly egregious rendition of a line in Greek that says nothing more than "There were not sufficient supplies on the ship". There are many other examples.
I suppose it’s a matter of taste.
We’ve never been through classic texts at school, I think it’s a cultural thing if they are fundamental enough to be taught at school or not.
Probably depends a lot with what expectations you come to the poem. My expectation was that it would be a struggle, but was captivated from the start.
I’ve looked some older translations in english and the ’old style’ verses have been complete turn-offs. The ’simplified’ or more dynamic translations were what made them work for me.
And it’s not the specific turns of phrazes that matter as much as the whole. The stories of both Iliad and Odyssey totally kick ass, and are amazing portals to bronze age life.
But we can only read so many books. If we had to choose, would we just read a translation of the original Iliad instead of a book about it? This is why we should be thankful for a physical bookshelf, it allows us to skip these steps and just pick up the book.
I don't think we need to be too concerned with the particular translation of the Iliad, I think the older the better as long as one can still properly read it. I think a certain amount of reading into the poem is required regardless.
To be more precise, this book would do all of the reading into the poem that I want to do. I want to read into it myself and draw my own conclusions! (To the extent that it's possible).
In this case, I imagine that any book analyzing the Iliad is intended for readers who have already themselves read the Iliad at least once.