Which Odyssey translation wins a blind reading test?
homer.scrivium.com
homer.scrivium.com
ah, it does, to an extent at least - about 2/3rds down the front page, ctrl+f for "opening"
I think it's fitting that a story that was originally an ancient poem, should sound ancient and poetic.
I think it's to their credit they frame it in terms of preference and enjoyment because that is more accurate to what they are doing.
Plus style, plus, certainly in the case of the Odyssey, rhythm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre_(poetry) ). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odyssey#Narrative_and_language:
“The epic has 12109 lines composed in dactylic hexameter, sometimes called Homeric hexameter—a metre with six metrical feet. The form of hexameter is catalectic, meaning that it lacks an expected syllable in the last foot. Each line has between twelve and seventeen syllables and generally forms a grammatically complete sentence.”
The Emily Wilson translation begins with an extensive introduction covering the things you have to balance when doing a translation, translation choices, some faults or misleading choices she believes some other translations have made, why she made the choices she did and her reasoning and goals behind them, etc. It is well worth the read to help understand that there is no one way to be "faithful" to the original.
I've read Fagles and Wilson, so I am certainly no scholar on the subject.
At any rate Lattimore's translation of Odyssey is beautiful.
Prefer Lattimore or Fitzgerald as being closer to original?
Lattimore's "the man of many ways" sounds closer to the original than Wilson's "complicated man" but neither sounds made up
The alternative translations aren't any better though, at least in English.
"wine-looking" would be better for modern readers in terms of conveying the actual meaning, but again, it doesn't convey the actual idea Homer is getting at, and sounds awkward to repeat.
It's fun to think about alternatives far from the text like "garnet-hued sea", "sapphire-hued sea", "burgundy sea", but they all miss on either hue or clarity. "Lee-dark sea" is probably the closest, and hits the wine idea.
For the record I can still recite the first book of Homer in Greek so I have opinions.
But it’s like saying: “Any Texans who ate BBQ growing up, can you share your favorite fast food places? Prefer McDonald’s or BK as being closer to the original?”
(Emily Wilson’s version is great but doesn’t feel like Homer at all, when I read it.)
The burger analogy is just right! It might sound dumb but as somebody who can't afford a Texan childood from the shop... BK, which happens to be a childhood staple of mine.. makes me feel like I could make a sweet sauce that actual Texans could like. Not MacDonalds.
To bring the analogy back: It does seem like Nolan's adaptation would be not be popular with you or your schoolmates. But a screenplay based off Fagles' might have a chance
I mean, it is comparing burgers and briskets, but if we're going for which translation is the most "faithful" ...
Would these philologists complain about how the dialogue in the movie Iphigenia is not faithful lol
But I can tell you that a lot of local philologists don't like Nolan's interpretation of Odyssey because it didn't stayed loyal to the original text, and mainly to the how Odysseus himself is portrayed. The criticism focuses on the fact that Odysseus is portrayed more like a warrior and less than a cunning person. In the begging of Odyssey for example he's described as "πολύτροπος" (polytropos) which literally means a man of many ways.
I haven't seen the movie to have an opinion and to me it doesn't matter how he's portrayed. Sales of Homer's Odyssey have skyrocketed in Britain, which more or less says it all.
I updated it to reference the original.
>Emily Wilson argues that readers may mistake archaic language for authority or authenticity [..] Among translations published since 1960, it nearly disappears. Readers were not simply choosing the oldest-sounding English.
I don't think this necessarily follows, a translation written in 1960 can have a more contemporary English than one written in 1980.
That being said, I don't really understand why Wilson argues against an archaizing register---the poems themselves were archaizing. Homer or whatever bards actually composed it were writing about something that allegedly happened hundreds of years earlier and using language/style that was itself archaic at the time.
I think the archaic language is both an appeal and a barrier. The thing that got me into classics was a radio show of a standup doing comedy about classics[1] (I like roman/greek history, but more about buildings and things rather than culture.)
I like the poetic archaic english in excerpts.
BUT
a whole book if it, thats hard.
[1]https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001brj5
I should add that had it been a long dry slog with serious people talking seriously about greek grammar, then I wouldn't have bothered. However because its a comedy, ostensibly, it stuck for me.
>“Mild stylistic archaism is often accepted without question in translations of ancient texts and can be presented as if it were a mark of authenticity. But of course, the English of the nineteenth or early twentieth century is no closer to Homeric Greek than the language of today. The use of a noncolloquial or archaizing linguistic register can blind readers to the real, inevitable, and vast gap between the Greek original and any modern translation.”
However, I think this is mistaken if Homer himself was writing in an archaic style at the time (which seems to be the case looking at the literature). If he's writing in an archaic style, then a faithful English translation ought to try and capture that aspect of the poetry.
Now that is a debate for the ages!
There is an argument that its was written in that style because that's how it was sung/spoken. In the same way that the king james bible was poetic, but not archaic (thats an assertion that I haven't got direct evidence to back up, apart from it was radical to not have it in latin.)
However to us the king james verse: "And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep." sounds majestic where as a more modern version: "Now the earth was without shape and empty, and darkness[h] was over the surface of the watery deep" doesn't
Now if we were to move to more secular texts, part of the appeal of brigerton, apart from the sex, is the funny language. But at the time it wasn't archaic.
The same with raymond chandler, his novels were fast rolling and hard hitting police procedurals, but now the language is the part that evokes the atmosphere.
I think I agree with wilson, largely. Culture has a half life, some of it shorter than others. Part of the reason that the greek myths have endured is because they have been re-interpreted so often. After all a lot of later interpretations are mashed together from the entire canon, so are not "accurate" in any sense of the word. Also they are myths. The interpretation of them says almost as much about us as it does the greeks. Like how scifi is almost always social commentary.
tldr: yeah we pretty much agree.
There is a lot of archaism in the content, though much of it is fake archaism that doesn't reflect actual history.
Everything I can see puts that development well after the poems' composition around 800-700 BCE, though perhaps before they had been fully written down.
If I understand correctly, it's a minority but not completely fringe opinion among historians that a major motivation for inventing the Greek alphabet in the first place may have so that they would be able to write down Homer.
When the The Odyssey was composed, widespread use of digamma sound was still a big thing.
I can easily believe that anachronistic language was added in the process of writing them down, but the original audience wasn't people reading in a book; it was people who were listening to a poem that had never been written down.
There is a huge amount of anacronistic content, but when it was first performed, language was relatively contemporary at the start.
How does that follow? When I read fantasy or legends, they tend to be written in contemporary language of the writer.
Why would a bard literally living from what listeners pay used words his listeners dont know?
This ballad was supposed to be part of oral tradition before being written. Remembering archaic language is harder then remembering something that flows.
What seems good for a few lines can get very tedious after hundreds of pages.
I found some hard because they don't seem to even conform to the description given. Particularly many of the lotus eater passages leave out the information the description stays they should be portraying.
Also, there was too much data n the linked article. :)
I think Odyssey is a pretty cool guy. Eh kills siutors and doesnt afraid of anything.
According to the test, I should read Fitzgerald if I ever do a reread.
I was aware of Wilson's translation, but not of that of Mendelsohn.
This has made me curious to read Mendelsohn's translation, but in general I do not like to read translations of ancient texts, because all coherent translations are far too distant from the original. To really convey the meaning of the original text you need a sequence of explanatory notes for each sentence, not a translated sentence that attempts to have a one-to-one correspondence between words.
What I like to read are the bilingual editions, like those of the Loeb library, where you can read the original, but also compare it with a translation when in doubt, which is much faster than reaching for a dictionary. Moreover, the English text allows you to browse or search quickly for paragraphs in which you are particularly interested, and then you can take your time to read slowly the original in order to understand it.
Pope's is certainly very beautiful, but also very literary and written in a style of English that can be difficult for the average modern reader. I think that determination is well reflected in this survey. Maybe we'll do it too one day (our current collections policy declines alternate translations) - it's certainly deserving.
Fagles narrated by Ian McKellen is peak.