Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

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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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