7 ms·
Exit Hector, again and again: How different translators reveal the ‘Iliad’ anew
- chasil 3y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20230629122951/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/28/books/review/iliad-translations.html https://web.archive.org/web/20230629122951/https://www.nytim...
- latch 3y agoAnother good example of this is the [English] bible. In the original Greek translation, "almah" was translated to 'young women' in most places, except two where it's translated to virginity. You also have the Latin influence that turned "fruit" into "apple"
- forgotmypw17 3y agoThis is why I'm fascinated with different translations and take the time to read my favorite passages in every translation I come across. The new meaning revealed is awesome. One of my favorite editions is "The Word: The Bible from 26 Translations", which has different translations of each verse printed together. It's a huge book, and I can only imagine how much work went into it. The credits are two pages long.
- madcaptenor 3y agoI'm just curious about the physical book there - how do you fit 26 Bible translations in one book?
- forgotmypw17 3y agoI don't have it with me at the moment, but it's small print on large sheets, and 2500 or 3500 pages, IIRC.
- prometheus76 3y agoI just found the first English translation of the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament which pre-dates the Masoretic Text) translated by Charles Thomson. It's quite lovely. A good one to add to your collection. Volume 1: https://archive.org/details/oldcovenantcommo01thom/page/n5/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/oldcovenantcommo01thom/page/n5/m... Volume 2: https://archive.org/details/oldcovenantcommo02thom/page/n3/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/oldcovenantcommo02thom/page/n3/m... I'll also point you to Brenton's translation of the Septuagint, which is also a good addition if you don't already have it. This particular version has the original Greek and the English translation in parallel: https://archive.org/details/septuagintversio1879bren/page/4/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/septuagintversio1879bren/page/4/...
- 2-718-281-828 3y agothat's interesting. any suggestions for books, blogs etc about specifically such aspects of the bible? i read the ot in german standard translation coined by luther and a modern (but conservative) translation of the nt by kammermayer. my disappointing take away was how dull and boring the bible is. i didn't find much inspiration in it. and i am spiritually inclined with an open mind towards christian mysticism. but of course the bible as we know it is a disfigured and violated excerpt of a larger partly secret canon. so to understand it better precisely stuff like apple/fruit or girl/virgin are relevant and also make it more interesting.
- metadaemon 3y agoI really like the /r/AcademicBiblical/ community on Reddit for these kinds of things. I'm also much more into the spiritual and mystical aspects of Christianity, which, IMO, were either obfuscated or intentionally removed. Couple this with the wide range of translations and you get a boring result.
- ecshafer 3y agoThe orthodox and coptic churches are much more mystical than the catholic church, and much much more than protestant denominations. Reading about the early Irish church is interesting, since it was very influential in the middle ages with many of the most famous saints, and it was a very mystical and ascetic branch of the faith.
- GloomyBoots 3y agoI can't say about German bibles, but the Norton Critical Edition KJV is great for literary study of the bible in English. It's hard to beat the KJV in terms of poetic quality (not to mention its massive influence on the development of the language itself), but even simple archaisms like separate second-person singular and plural pronouns preserve meaning lacking in more modern English translations. This edition has copious notes providing deep textual analysis. It's definitely a very slow read. Any recommendations on Christian (or not) mysticism? That's not something I've ever delved into at all.
- pravus 3y agoJames Tabor released a translation of Genesis that has me very interested because he states that he stays as true to the original Hebrew meaning as possible and it reads completely differently than everything I've ever known.
- lurquer 3y agoI do not believe you know what you are talking about. What version -- English or otherwise -- translates the Hebrew word for 'fruit' into 'apple'? It's translated generically as "fruit" in all English versions that I know of. Likewise, it's translated as a generic fruit in the Vulgate (Latin - 'fructus') and Septuagint (Greek - 'karpos'). As far as 'almah' is concerned, the word is generally used in the OT to represent a young unmarried woman. It is presumed that such a woman would be a virgin (shocking, I know.) The context of its use in Isaiah 7:14 is that of virginity, the Jews who translated the Hebrew passage into Greek (200 years before Christ) used the Greek term for virgin, and Matthew's Greek quote of the verse in the context of Mary's pregnancy also uses the Greek term for virgin. Quibbling over the word 'almah' is strange in light of the fact that Luke explicitly states Mary had never had sex (see Luke 1:34) and that, while espoused to Joseph, she had yet to do the deed. (Matt 1:18).
- mcpackieh 3y agoHave any translations of the Bible actually called the forbidden fruit an apple? I thought the association with apples was an invention of artists who might have been punning on the Latin words for evil and apple, but I haven't heard of any Bible that actually translates it to apple.
- sorokod 3y agoIt is literally "the fruit of the forbidden tree" in original Hebrew.
- mcpackieh 3y agoYes I know, I'm asking if any translated bible ever called it an apple. I don't think that happened. Artists chose to depict it as an apple, but that isn't an idea given to them by a mistranslated bible.
- adrian_b 3y agoI have checked right now the Latin Vulgate, https://www.vatican.va/archive/bible/nova_vulgata/documents/nova-vulgata_vt_genesis_lt.html https://www.vatican.va/archive/bible/nova_vulgata/documents/... and it uses only the word "fructu", i.e. fruit, presumably translating "carpo" from Greek. There is no other more specific word.
- cafard 3y agoDoes the on-line version give the book (6)? I was interested to see that the print version didn't.
- cafard 3y agoAnswering my own question: it does.
- LeonB 3y agoThis keeps happening
- chasil 3y agoMy first read of the Iliad surprised me with what it is not. It doesn't describe the departure of Agamemnon's armies (or the role of his daughter Iphegenia), the fall of Troy due to the horse, the journey back, or the fates of those who returned. It really only addresses the fate of two characters, Patroclus and Hector. It's like an old Polaroid photo of the Grand Canyon - none of the major stories fit within it.
- adrian_b 3y agoThere have been many other epic poems which described the rest of the war, but they have been lost and we know their content only from summaries or short quotations included in later texts. The Iliad and the Odyssey were considered the best from all those poems, so they were used in schools and they were preserved in much more copies than the others, which ensured their survival.
- chasil 3y agoActually, if you want the bigger picture of the Trojan war, Virgil's Aeneid and the plays of Aeschylus and Euripides will go much further.
- bitwize 3y agoTranslators sometimes put amazing spins on a work. When I read Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, it was a recent translation. The name of the dystopian global state in the novel is, translated literally from Russian, something like "unified state". However, instead of that phrase, to avoid confusion with the United States, to which Zamyatin was not alluding, the translator opted to translate it as "OneState", with the pascal casing and everything. He specifically cited marketing from the software industry as his inspiration for this convention. It worked. It perfectly conveyed the dry, false passion and excitement that citizens of OneState were expected to communicate -- like the fake smile on a North Korean schoolgirl greeting Western tourists.
- lukeasrodgers 3y agoI wish the author had addressed the two translation choices that strike me as most unexpected: “strange” instead of “dear” wife, and “destiny” instead of “fate”.
- mamonster 3y agoIf this is anything like her Odyssey work, this is a safe skip. Actually more like a necessary skip. You shouldn't translate old works if your goal is to imbibe some modern new meaning into the work. Or if you do, do it as an explicit kitsch or panache and don't pretend it is a serious work.
- zokier 3y agoAre you implying that old translations did not imbibe their own meanings to works?
- trowawee 3y agoHard to imagine a sillier complaint about a translation than "it tries to convey an ancient text to the people in the era when it is translated". It's like complaining that cooking a steak changes the nature of the meat. Yes, correct, that's literally the point.
- mamonster 3y agoI am implying that up until very recently translating Classics was thought to be a very serious job where the author certainly tried to give a new angle to the work(else why translate), but did not try to radically alter the meaning. You change the angle of the spotlight, or maybe the brigtness, you don't change the object at which the spotlight is pointing. Making a "feminist" translation of the Odyssey under the pretension that the original is a "patriarchal fantasy" is not a serious work and shouldn't be taken as such.
- roflyear 3y agoWho are you to judge what is serious or not? The Odyssey has been translated dozens of times. Have you read most of them, to be able to substantiate these statements?
- giraffe_lady 3y agoThis translator takes the task very seriously, and is taken seriously by other professionals in her domain of expertise. I don't know how to find a stronger signal of seriousness than that. Her introduction to the odyssey is actually a very interesting essay about the constraints and dynamics of translating ancient texts, it's definitely worth reading for its own sake. A really interesting example of this and probably the one you're on a rant about is the "feminist" decision to use the word slave to describe the murdered house girls. Previous english translations used the word servant or maid. The original greek word is none of these, but they were slaves and an ancient greek would know that in this context. Every translator is making a decision about what information is communicated when they select a word there. And a selection is required, there's no perfectly neutral choice.
- asimpletune 3y agoFor anyone who is interested, my friends and I have a small book club called "Public Works"[1], where we only read stuff that's in the public domain. Recently we started a campaign of classical antiquity, and we're about 1/4 of the way through Thucydides. The plan from there is to continue where that book leaves off, so Xenophon, Plato, some of the plays, Aristotle, and then later Alexander, etc... until the fall of Western Rome. If you're already into classics, or if you've always wanted to get started but you didn't know how, our group might be a good choice. It's a relaxed atmosphere, but we still manage to go pretty deep. We've also been seeking to increase our membership because we want to get extra help with some of the projects for the site. Just stuff like help with producing ebooks for rare or hard to find stuff, etc... any kind of extra help though is voluntary of course. Membership is open, with updated info posted on the site each week about the next meeting. [1] https://r33d.org/ https://r33d.org/