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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Derek Thompson's Plain English podcast just had Emily Wilson on talking about comparisons between the translations, and quite a bit of the iconic lines of the Odyssey from the midcentury translations are kind of just made up. Like, "skilled in all ways of contending" from "man of many turns"; "the wanderer, harried for years on end" --- find that in the Greek?

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"man of many turns" is at least a better translation than "complicated man" which feels to me like a bit of a travesty to translate polytropos into. Polytropos literally has the roots of "many" and "turn" in it, "complicated" is not there. Lattimore was a literalist and his translation's weird for that but more fair to the Greek than what I've seen of Wilson's translation. Wilson takes the Fagles approach, but modernizes it.

For the record I can still recite the first book of Homer in Greek so I have opinions.

She wasn't making an argument for the verisimilitude of her translation, just a comment about how detached the most popular English translations are from the source text; some of what's in those translations is literally invented, to fit a vibe.

Yes, every translation is an interpretation, none can capture what the original Homeric Greek means in English, all make some kinds of compromises. It is work noting that it is absolutely the case that some of what's Emily Wilson's translation is literally invented to fit a vibe - see "complicated man" which is not only not what the Greek says, but also violates the spirit of what the Greek says.

"wine dark sea" is the best example of this. It's a poetic/literary leap by Chapman and Pope that then became a functional convention in most subsequent translations.

The alternative translations aren't any better though, at least in English.

The original is οινοπα ποντον which indeed is very close to wine-dark sea. Literally "wine-faced" where -faced is a metaphor for "having the appearance of".

Literally "wine-faced" or "wine-eyed", yes. The problem with the literal wine-faced/wine-eyed is it doesn't convey luminosity/depth to readers, so it kind of misses the point. The missing context is that ancient wine was often unfiltered and cloudy, and diluted before being served.

"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.

Yes, how would the average classicist or modern Greek translate polymetis? Polytropos? Into current day American vernacular

Lattimore's "the man of many ways" sounds closer to the original than Wilson's "complicated man" but neither sounds made up

The Abundance guy has a literature podcast? The grift never ends...

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