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Comment by izacus | Hacker News Reader

This is the person who created one of the translations this movie is based on (arguably THE translation Nolan based it on), so they - literally as it goes - indeed have tried and done better.

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I knew of Emily Wilson and her credentials when I wrote my comment.

For what it’s worth, I think there’s a case to be made that Gareth Hinds‘ adaptation of The Odyssey was just as much of an influence.

Except the translation is not very good and dumbs down a lot of the language to fit the translator’s worldview.

I’d say Wilson did “try to do it herself,” and it’s not much better than the film. Hence this critical review is a bit unnecessary, frankly.

I say this as a subscriber to the LRB, which has at least one snarky put down review every issue.

There's no such thing as an "unnecessary" review, especially from people that are familiar with topics in a given media.

People are allowed to have opinions. Yes, you too.

It’s a magazine that I pay money for. I’m allowed to have an opinion on the reviews they include, and yes, some reviews are unnecessary in the sense that they are overly critical just for the sake of it.

I don’t think Wilson’s translation is very good, and ergo I think a snarky review putting down a film is a bit like the pot calling the kettle black.

Pretty much anyone worth listening to agrees that Wilson’s translation is excellent.

Do you have an opinion yourself? Because "anyone worth listening to" is not a comment with content.

Furthermore, it's simply not true. Lattimore is generally considered to be the most authentic translation. There are plenty of criticisms of the Wilson translation that aren't culture war complaints. You seem to have the impression that they are, which is factually wrong.

If you don't care about authenticity, well, the Wilson one doesn't win any aesthetic awards either. It translates polytropos, a notoriously complex and multi-faceted word, as complicated.

There are hundreds of such examples. Lattimore translates one line as "Troy's sacred citadel," whereas Wilson chooses "Holy town of Troy." It's dumbed down and artless.

And we haven't even gotten to the ideological choices of certain word translations, but I won't get to that here.

Wilson wrote in great and excruciating detail about why she chose “complicated” as the translation, yet you dismiss it as if if was some sort of casual, thoughtless decision: https://emily613.substack.com/p/on-complicated

Rest assured that she’s given more thought to every single word in that poem than almost anyone else alive.

Wilson’s translation is in my reading queue before I see the film, but whether I like it or not is completely irrelevant to the quality of the work, which is best assessed by the folks who actually study this stuff for a living.

I see nothing tangible in your comment other than “I think it’s artless and dumb,” which is not as convincing as you seem to think.

Translating the Odyssey is not some new thing. There are dozens of other translations in English, and yet pretty much all of them have put just as much or more effort into questions like these...and yet few are as artless and bland as "complicated."

If you actually spend some time looking into scholarly discussion of the translation... it's seen as quite deficient and indeed cuts out a lot of meaning in the original Greek.

Just give this a cursory scroll, for example:

https://casa-kvsa.org.za/legacy/AC63-Whitaker-18DEC2019.pdf

But you don't even need to do that. Just get a PDF of Fagles or Lattimore and compare lines word for word to Wilson.

And if you don't have an opinion yourself, and I'm guessing you haven't read any other translation, or perhaps even Wilsons? Which means you're just arguing with me because what... some culture war thing? There is such a weird obsession with defending this translation, ostensibly from people that haven't even read it or other translations. So absurd.

I have to steal part of the discussion at the Guardian for this - I have read neither translation but this is illuminating and unhelpfully makes me want to read both:

Compare the opening lines:

Fagles:

  Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns
  driven time and again off course, once he had plundered
  the hallowed heights of Troy.

Wilson:
Tell me about a complicated man. Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy,
The Wilson translation is TOO distilled/simplified for me. It reads something like Hemingway or a hard-boiled noir detective story.

The Fagles translation is much more lyrical without being overly pompous or florid, and the McKellen audio version (which is the way the story was first told, right?) is delightful. Reading along as McKellen tells the story is a joy.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/jul/16/a-voyage-of-di...

However, Wilson made her translation using strict iambic pentameter and matching line count to retain the pace of the original poem. That brings something new to the table. And IIRC her simplified language is supposed to better match the nature of the poem as rooted in oral tradition. It was never meant to be complex and florid — regular folks were enjoying this story as much as anyone else.

If anything, this emphasizes that no single translation will be the definitive one. (And to call Wilson’s “artless” is quite a stretch.)

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