5 ms·

Translator's Note to the Odyssey

83 points by diodorus 9y ago

gowld 9y ago
> Impressive displays of rhetoric and linguistic force are a good way to seem important and invite a particular kind of admiration, but they tend to silence dissent and discourage deeper modes of engagement. An important lesson for those who advocate that a liberal education should focus on pretending to read Great Books.
- handojin 9y ago
  Hi. I'm not sure if you're being serious or ironic. Could you clarify before I respond?
- trowaybloway 9y ago
  conversely, rhetoric is a good way to show the topic is important to the speaker.
gowld 9y ago
This translation is a new translation of The Odyssey, released today, currently #1 Best Seller in Ancient & Classical Poetry, and paper format is sold out. https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0393089053 https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0393089053
- js2 9y ago
  Hard cover. Paper(back) not yet released.
  - khedoros1 9y ago
    I think they meant paper, as opposed to electronic.
dilap 9y ago
> The gendered metaphor of the "faithful" translation, whose worth is always secondary to that of a male-authored original... Huh? I mean, men can be faithful too, and women author originals.
- xelxebar 9y ago
  Here "original" is probably "The Odyssey", not a generic original work. I read that as Wilson highlighting the gender roles embedded in Homer's writing.
- lambdaphagy 9y ago
  Translational fidelity is, like, a heternormative patriarchal concept that we, reclaiming the title of ~woke linguistic sluts~, need to interrogate and disrupt.
- forapurpose 9y ago
  > men can be faithful too, and women author originals Both true, but in practice and looking at history, not just today, there have been few women authors and far more expectation for women to be faithful (and chaste). The prodigal son's return is a celebration, but a prodigal daughter? Look at Odysseus and Penelope: One roamed for 10 years, sleeping with sea nymphs and witches, and was celebrated for his genius and courage; the other was expected to wait faithfully - your spouse leaves for 20 years (including the war), you have no idea if they are alive and have no sign from them at all, and you just sit there waiting for their hoped-for return, spending 20 years of your life weaving and unweaving a veil - and she was celebrated for that. The 'unfaithful' female servants who slept with Penelope's suitors were summarily and cruelly executed.
  - AnimalMuppet 9y ago
    > The 'unfaithful' female servants who slept with Penelope's suitors were summarily and cruelly executed. In fairness, so were the suitors. (Though, also in fairness, not for sleeping with the servants.)
- youzicha 9y ago
js2 9y ago
Recent HN thread (3 days ago, 70 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15624881 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15624881
throw-away-8 9y ago
What would the things of Troy, be to you, Achaeans, without Helen? Insomnia. Homer. Taut canvas. Half the catalogue of ships is mine: that flight of cranes, long stretched-out line, that once rose, out of Hellas. To an alien land, like a phalanx of cranes – Foam of the gods on the heads of kings – Where do you sail? What would the things of Troy, be to you, Achaeans, without Helen? The sea, or Homer – all moves by love’s glow. Which should I hear? Now Homer is silent, and the Black Sea thundering its oratory, turbulent, and, surging, roars against my pillow.
Jun8 9y ago
If you are at all interested in poetry and its translation as well as AI (assumed since on HN) a great book to read is Hofstadter's Le Ton Beau De Marot: In Praise Of The Music Of Language wherein he offers 60+ translations of a playful poem by Clement Marot.
- riffraff 9y ago
  I posted the same comment before noticing yours. Notice the book does not only contains the translations, but mostly the author's musings on translating, as someone who speaks a few languages and has a deep love for them.
trowaybloway 9y ago
I'd prefer to learn the language to read it in the original form, but it's vice versa, people learn the language from translations of Homer. I wonder how much comparative analysis has gained or will from AI. Given a suitable model to start with, a huge probability tree of ontologies could be handled to reconstruct common ancestors in proto-languages. There were people here reporting interest in machine translation of some 30000 Sumerian clay-tablets, the other day. The pairing with semantic inference would be interesting, too, or the inverse, alike to deep dream generating adversarial reinforcement in pictures, extracting the principal components of a language to infer stages of it's development, like a sequenced Word Net. There might be some surprises in the ambiguity of metaphors.Especially in long living or quickly developing languages folk etymologies must be common, especially given religion, so a naive machine approach might even help next to manual translation (human in the loop ai).
- ubernostrum 9y ago
  I'd prefer to learn the language to read it in the original form, but it's vice versa, people learn the language from translations of Homer. Ancient Greek was not one language. Like any language, it had multiple dialects and evolved significantly over time. The big one is Ionic Greek, which was the source of the Greek of three time periods scholars care about: Homeric Greek, the language of Homer, named for him; Attic Greek, the language of the "golden age" of Athens; and Koiné Greek, the language of early Christian texts. An analogy I've heard a few times is to compare Homeric Greek to Chaucer's English; Attic to Shakespeare's English; and Koiné to modern vernacular. The usual approach is to teach Attic, since it has a large, well-understood corpus and offers the easiest path to either of the other two (in much the same way that it'd be easier to get to Chaucer if you started by learning Shakespearean English). That's how it was taught when I did Greek in college, for example; we started with simple contrived texts in Attic Greek, then moved into reading selections from Athenian figures like Plato and Aristophanes and Euripides. The very back of the book had short passages from Homer for truly ambitious students, but we didn't get into them.
  - StavrosK 9y ago
    I think that analogy is pretty apt, given that Koine is readily understandable by modern Greeks. Priests in churches today read the original passages from the third century BC in sermons.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
gkya 9y ago
Slightly off topic, but a serious annoyance of mine these days: wherever I encountered a news about this translation, the fact that the translator is a woman was about always more in focus than the translation itself. Can't we be done with this "first woman to..." thing already? Isn't this kind of belittling in that the actor being a woman is newsworthy? Why can't the titles just say "A new translation of Odyssey"? But look at them instead: https://imgur.com/T7AaGkg https://imgur.com/T7AaGkg
leephillips 9y ago
Thank you for submitting this and making me aware of this wonderful, quite wonderful, note. I want to read this translation now, on the strength of it.
B1FF_PSUVM 9y ago
So ... there were these toddlers who could use a bed time story ... and I filched liberally from the Odyssey, only trying to keep down the gore - escaping Polyphemus cave, but not poking him in the eye, etc ... Circe and the pigs, Aeolus and the winds, the lotus eaters, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis ... and they slept well. Thanks, Homer, old pal.

83 points by diodorus 9y ago

> Impressive displays of rhetoric and linguistic force are a good way to seem important and invite a particular kind of admiration, but they tend to silence dissent and discourage deeper modes of engagement. An important lesson for those who advocate that a liberal education should focus on pretending to read Great Books.

handojin 9y ago
Hi. I'm not sure if you're being serious or ironic. Could you clarify before I respond?
trowaybloway 9y ago
conversely, rhetoric is a good way to show the topic is important to the speaker.

gowld 9y ago

This translation is a new translation of The Odyssey, released today, currently #1 Best Seller in Ancient & Classical Poetry, and paper format is sold out. https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0393089053 https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0393089053

js2 9y ago
Hard cover. Paper(back) not yet released.
- khedoros1 9y ago
  I think they meant paper, as opposed to electronic.

dilap 9y ago

> The gendered metaphor of the "faithful" translation, whose worth is always secondary to that of a male-authored original... Huh? I mean, men can be faithful too, and women author originals.

xelxebar 9y ago
Here "original" is probably "The Odyssey", not a generic original work. I read that as Wilson highlighting the gender roles embedded in Homer's writing.
lambdaphagy 9y ago
Translational fidelity is, like, a heternormative patriarchal concept that we, reclaiming the title of ~woke linguistic sluts~, need to interrogate and disrupt.
forapurpose 9y ago
> men can be faithful too, and women author originals Both true, but in practice and looking at history, not just today, there have been few women authors and far more expectation for women to be faithful (and chaste). The prodigal son's return is a celebration, but a prodigal daughter? Look at Odysseus and Penelope: One roamed for 10 years, sleeping with sea nymphs and witches, and was celebrated for his genius and courage; the other was expected to wait faithfully - your spouse leaves for 20 years (including the war), you have no idea if they are alive and have no sign from them at all, and you just sit there waiting for their hoped-for return, spending 20 years of your life weaving and unweaving a veil - and she was celebrated for that. The 'unfaithful' female servants who slept with Penelope's suitors were summarily and cruelly executed.
- AnimalMuppet 9y ago
  > The 'unfaithful' female servants who slept with Penelope's suitors were summarily and cruelly executed. In fairness, so were the suitors. (Though, also in fairness, not for sleeping with the servants.)
youzicha 9y ago

js2 9y ago

Recent HN thread (3 days ago, 70 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15624881 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15624881

throw-away-8 9y ago

What would the things of Troy, be to you, Achaeans, without Helen? Insomnia. Homer. Taut canvas. Half the catalogue of ships is mine: that flight of cranes, long stretched-out line, that once rose, out of Hellas. To an alien land, like a phalanx of cranes – Foam of the gods on the heads of kings – Where do you sail? What would the things of Troy, be to you, Achaeans, without Helen? The sea, or Homer – all moves by love’s glow. Which should I hear? Now Homer is silent, and the Black Sea thundering its oratory, turbulent, and, surging, roars against my pillow.

Jun8 9y ago

If you are at all interested in poetry and its translation as well as AI (assumed since on HN) a great book to read is Hofstadter's Le Ton Beau De Marot: In Praise Of The Music Of Language wherein he offers 60+ translations of a playful poem by Clement Marot.

riffraff 9y ago
I posted the same comment before noticing yours. Notice the book does not only contains the translations, but mostly the author's musings on translating, as someone who speaks a few languages and has a deep love for them.

trowaybloway 9y ago

I'd prefer to learn the language to read it in the original form, but it's vice versa, people learn the language from translations of Homer. I wonder how much comparative analysis has gained or will from AI. Given a suitable model to start with, a huge probability tree of ontologies could be handled to reconstruct common ancestors in proto-languages. There were people here reporting interest in machine translation of some 30000 Sumerian clay-tablets, the other day. The pairing with semantic inference would be interesting, too, or the inverse, alike to deep dream generating adversarial reinforcement in pictures, extracting the principal components of a language to infer stages of it's development, like a sequenced Word Net. There might be some surprises in the ambiguity of metaphors.Especially in long living or quickly developing languages folk etymologies must be common, especially given religion, so a naive machine approach might even help next to manual translation (human in the loop ai).

ubernostrum 9y ago
I'd prefer to learn the language to read it in the original form, but it's vice versa, people learn the language from translations of Homer. Ancient Greek was not one language. Like any language, it had multiple dialects and evolved significantly over time. The big one is Ionic Greek, which was the source of the Greek of three time periods scholars care about: Homeric Greek, the language of Homer, named for him; Attic Greek, the language of the "golden age" of Athens; and Koiné Greek, the language of early Christian texts. An analogy I've heard a few times is to compare Homeric Greek to Chaucer's English; Attic to Shakespeare's English; and Koiné to modern vernacular. The usual approach is to teach Attic, since it has a large, well-understood corpus and offers the easiest path to either of the other two (in much the same way that it'd be easier to get to Chaucer if you started by learning Shakespearean English). That's how it was taught when I did Greek in college, for example; we started with simple contrived texts in Attic Greek, then moved into reading selections from Athenian figures like Plato and Aristophanes and Euripides. The very back of the book had short passages from Homer for truly ambitious students, but we didn't get into them.
- StavrosK 9y ago
  I think that analogy is pretty apt, given that Koine is readily understandable by modern Greeks. Priests in churches today read the original passages from the third century BC in sermons.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

gkya 9y ago

Slightly off topic, but a serious annoyance of mine these days: wherever I encountered a news about this translation, the fact that the translator is a woman was about always more in focus than the translation itself. Can't we be done with this "first woman to..." thing already? Isn't this kind of belittling in that the actor being a woman is newsworthy? Why can't the titles just say "A new translation of Odyssey"? But look at them instead: https://imgur.com/T7AaGkg https://imgur.com/T7AaGkg

leephillips 9y ago

Thank you for submitting this and making me aware of this wonderful, quite wonderful, note. I want to read this translation now, on the strength of it.

B1FF_PSUVM 9y ago

So ... there were these toddlers who could use a bed time story ... and I filched liberally from the Odyssey, only trying to keep down the gore - escaping Polyphemus cave, but not poking him in the eye, etc ... Circe and the pigs, Aeolus and the winds, the lotus eaters, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis ... and they slept well. Thanks, Homer, old pal.