Emily Wilson to retranslate the Odyssey from scratch | Hacker News Reader

Emily Wilson to retranslate the Odyssey from scratch

theguardian.com

24 pointsmdp202117 comments

I haven't had the pleasure of reading Wilson's translation yet, but it's good to see that she's trying to improve her work. One of the major criticisms leveled against her is the overuse of the word "slave", which is very loaded in today's vocabulary. There were many different types of unfree work, and attitudes toward them would be very different from today. Grouping them all into slaves would definitely remove a lot of nuance. Really nice to see that she is working on this problem; I think she will be respected a lot more if she solves it.

I see that translators need to take some liberties when translating something from ancient Greek to modern English, but at what point does it become an interpretation instead of a translation.

Being Nolans "source" for the Odyssey which butchered the original story doesn't help either.

What's funny you can't sell Feta or Parmesan if it's not within some strict limits but you can butcher one of the most important text for the Geeks (or even the Word) and still call it the Odyssey.

> but at what point does it become an interpretation instead of a translation.

As someone with a degree in translation, all proper translations are interpretations. Even similar languages usually have enough differences that a by-the-word translation pushed by some as the only true translation sounds wrong and/or broken to the native ear.

Consider a simple statement: "I am bored." In french they "literally" say "I am boring myself." instead. And English in many respects is french-pidgin. It gets worse when the lingusitic distance widens as many languages store various information across different words and constructs.

We do not do literal. Never did literal. That's why you learn whole languages, not just the words.

to be fair thats a reflexive verb. I think its fair enough to correct those when translating, english has a bunch of verbs that have to be reflexive too - you can't say "we went to the festival and we enjoyed" on it's own, it needs a compliment - "we enjoyed ourselves" or "we enjoyed the atmosphere"

You also can't say "we went to the festival and we were enjoy" which is the form of your bored example earlier. Different verbs work differently in basically every language (even otherwise quite related ones), for no particular reason.

I do agree on the part that if you try to translate as a map of words/expressions/phrases to the other language you'll often run into trouble because either of the languages has more nuance for one concept than the other and you want to try and capture some of that nuance. I'm generally a "no untranslatable words" guy but you do at least have to expand words into several words occasionally, or vice versa sometimes, with good knowledge of the nuance in both languages

One of the fascinating things about these ancient stories is to see how they reflect the current culture of wherever and whenever they are recounted. For example, Alexander the Great has been recounted as a Greek hero, a Macedonian hero, or even a Muslim hero. Stories have always been malleable. Scribes would make small (and sometimes large) adjustments to stories, which over time could lead to entirely different plots. People recount stories from memory, and often make up details they can't recall.

I personally believe that stories like the Iliad and the Odyssey were more like a performance art. Someone would tell a story, while the audience would come with suggestions "he killed the Cyclops!" "the wine was poisonous!" "they hid among the sheep!", and they would change the story according to the mood of the room. Similar to how DnD works today. If this is true, there can't even be a definitive true original story. This opens up many cans of worms like "who decides the cannon? The author or the audience?".

Nolan's movie is in many ways a good adaptation (it's fun and engaging to modern viewers), while also being a great reflection of current Hollywood (casting, substitution of religious plot for natural plot).

Is this what is called piggybacking?

The story states that her retranslation predates the movie, and goes on to explain that it is common for translators to revisit their work, and also that the new version does not have a publication date and is about half done. The world will have well and truly forgotten about Nolan's Odyssey by the time V2 ships.

So no, I don't think it's fair to call this piggybacking.

Instant Classics podcast has an episode dedicated to an interview with Emily Wilson

Just a grift. Incredible timing. No different from a new Bible translation that comes out every year.

Emily saw major issues with her own translation and decided to make a new one. Do you think software should stay on one version forever even if the developers know it's full of bugs?

I think i would have seriously fucked up the first time if i had to completely rewrite it from scratch due to bugs.

In times like these I wish we had an objective AI translating these rather than ideologically possessed humans abusing other culture's history.

If the last 10 or so years taught me anything is that humans are extremely unreliable and corruptible.

There is no such thing as an objective translation, especially not across thousands of years.

AI's are also human made (and in the case of LLMS, trivially and obviously trained to be as human as possible), therefor there's no escape from your nightmare.

If they are trained to be as humanly as possible then that would be a good dream with an inevitable outcome :)

The problem isn't bias vs. objectivity. It's accountable bias vs. invisible bias. AI makes the second kind.

The thing is, if you really want to understand the objective story - first of all, just learn the Ancient Greek. English embeds within it abuse of another culture history.

Second of all it was an oral tradition, unreliable and corruptible are baked into the original tale.

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