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I mean, I'll just let the prose speak for itself. Lombardo start: Speak, Memory Of the cunning hero, The wanderer, blown off course time and again After he plu

I mean, I'll just let the prose speak for itself. Lombardo start: Speak, Memory Of the cunning hero, The wanderer, blown off course time and again After he plundered Troy's sacred heights. Speak Of all the cities he saw, the minds he grasped, The suffering deep in his heart at sea As he struggled to survive and bring his men home But could not save them, hard as he tried— The fools—destroyed by their own recklessness When they ate the oxen of Hyperion the Sun, And that god snuffed out their day of return. Wilson start: Tell me about a complicated man. Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy, and where he went, and who he met, the pain he suffered in the storms at sea, and how he worked to save his life and bring his men back home. He failed to keep them safe; poor fools, they ate the Sun God’s cattle, and the god kept them from home. You have 2 options to explain the above discrepancies: 1) One of the 2 translators has faulty Ancient Greek(the above 2 passages cannot be serious at the same time as translations of a literary work). 2) Modern Classics/modern readers don't care about the actual writing and only want the plot. Just go read her translator's notes. She displays absolutely astonishing arrogance there that basically foreshadows that the whole book is basically an intender rewrite for modern sensibilities. For example, she literally herself admits that "Unlike many modern translators, I have avoided describing the Cyclops with words such as "savage", which carry with them the legacy of early modern and modern forms of colonialism - a legacy that is, of course , anachronistric in the world of The Odyssey".

trowawee 3y ago
> the above 2 passages cannot be serious at the same time as translations of a literary work This honestly reads like maybe you don't understand how translation works? I mean, you're clearly coming at this from the standpoint of "I have a culture war axe to grind and I'm gonna grind it", but here goes: languages don't map perfectly into each other. Even languages that exist in the same time, in the same physical locations, where many people are fluent in both languages. There are words in modern Spanish and German that you can't express in a single word in English, and those languages have massive overlap and lots of common roots. There are words in English that mean different things to different people. My 21 year old cousin and my 70 year old father would understand the sentence "I saw Bill Murray on the street today, no cap" in completely different ways. All of those issues are massively compounded the farther you are from the context of the original text. A 50 year gap between living people in the same country and speaking the same language is enough to make communication confusing; a 3,500 year gap makes it nearly impossible. The article this thread is based on (that you are clearly commenting on without having read) displays 5 different ways that different translators approached the exact same passage in the Iliad over multiple centuries. Lombardo's translation, much like Wilson's, much like any translation, is a work of invention. It has to be, because we aren't Ancient Greeks and we are not operating in the same milieu as the original audience for this work. You clearly don't like Wilson's work for personal/political reasons, but trying to generalize that to "she's a bad translator" because her translations are different from other translations is a silly complaint that reveals a fundamental shallowness in your understanding of the process of translation.
giraffe_lady 3y ago
Lombardo's translation that was widely hated at the time for exactly the same reasons you are saying Wilson's is bad? This is such an unserious critique. Whatever the merits of her translation per se she's clearly deeply embedded in and aware of the history of translations of this work. I think you just picked the first translation that felt "high poetry" or w/e to a contemporary reader with no understanding of its historical context in this tradition.

trowawee 3y ago

> the above 2 passages cannot be serious at the same time as translations of a literary work This honestly reads like maybe you don't understand how translation works? I mean, you're clearly coming at this from the standpoint of "I have a culture war axe to grind and I'm gonna grind it", but here goes: languages don't map perfectly into each other. Even languages that exist in the same time, in the same physical locations, where many people are fluent in both languages. There are words in modern Spanish and German that you can't express in a single word in English, and those languages have massive overlap and lots of common roots. There are words in English that mean different things to different people. My 21 year old cousin and my 70 year old father would understand the sentence "I saw Bill Murray on the street today, no cap" in completely different ways. All of those issues are massively compounded the farther you are from the context of the original text. A 50 year gap between living people in the same country and speaking the same language is enough to make communication confusing; a 3,500 year gap makes it nearly impossible. The article this thread is based on (that you are clearly commenting on without having read) displays 5 different ways that different translators approached the exact same passage in the Iliad over multiple centuries. Lombardo's translation, much like Wilson's, much like any translation, is a work of invention. It has to be, because we aren't Ancient Greeks and we are not operating in the same milieu as the original audience for this work. You clearly don't like Wilson's work for personal/political reasons, but trying to generalize that to "she's a bad translator" because her translations are different from other translations is a silly complaint that reveals a fundamental shallowness in your understanding of the process of translation.

giraffe_lady 3y ago

Lombardo's translation that was widely hated at the time for exactly the same reasons you are saying Wilson's is bad? This is such an unserious critique. Whatever the merits of her translation per se she's clearly deeply embedded in and aware of the history of translations of this work. I think you just picked the first translation that felt "high poetry" or w/e to a contemporary reader with no understanding of its historical context in this tradition.