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Comment by neaden | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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".

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