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Comment by Red_Tarsius | Hacker News Reader

I disagree about Emily Wilson's Odissey. She translated the first line of the poem as "Tell me about a complicated man". She almost went with "Tell me about a straying husband". Neither complicated nor straying husband appear in the original text. Pope's description (The man for wisdom’s various arts renown’d...) is closer to the epithets we are taught at school (ricco d'astuzie or dal multiforme ingegno). πολύτροπος means resourceful, of many skills, well-travelled.

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

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Wilson discusses her choices in the translation of that first line in great detail in this interview for the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/02/magazine/the-first-woman-...

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.)

Wilson's Twitter threads on how she decided to translate certain words, lines, passages, etc. were absolutely brilliant, really getting to the heart of what makes translation so subjective.

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.

This complaint seems odd. First complicated is obviously not in the original text, it's in Greek. I guess what you mean is "No words I would translate as complicated are in the text" but then your complaint just becomes a tautology. Saying Pope's version from the 1700s is more like what you were taught in school is similar, it's probably the version you or your teachers read so it shaped what you were taught. Essentially this comes down to saying it's different, but that doesn't make it bad.

The complaint - which I definetely share by the way - is that for all the critical acclaim it got, Emily Wilson's translation strays so far from the actual text, it is not really a translation anymore and is actually closer to being a new text inspired by the Odyssey. That's fine if that's what you are looking for but it doesn't make for a great translation.

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.

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I am not hand waving it. This line was commented ad nauseam when the book was released and is the one people who have no idea of neither what in the Greek text nor what’s in the translation like to discuss. As it’s far from being the most questionable part of the translation, I don’t see the point of centring discussion on it, especially when you consider it’s not an awful translation of the original. It’s not very close but you can find far worse later.

>This complaint seems odd. First complicated is obviously not in the original text, it's in Greek. I guess what you mean is "No words I would translate as complicated are in the text" but then your complaint just becomes a tautology.

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 "

It's not really a matter of opinion when everything is lost in translation. I know it can be hard to understand without a basic intro to ancient Greek, but it's like translating a reference to the "Titanic" with "some boat, I dunno".

C’mon, Pope clearly has the worst parse of πολύτροπος which I will remind you is “many paths”, Wilson takes this as a metaphor internal and external, many roads traveled, many roads within, not perfect, but it’s good. And Pope reads it like who he is, a Latinate schoolboy, and it’s beautiful but he carries so much of himself into that line.

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.

These were my first encounters with the stories first hand, and loved them.

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.

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