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The Odyssey by Homer, Translated by Samuel Butler
- shrubble 3y agoI liked the translations by Stanley Lombardo. I think however that the purpose of reading the Iliad and the Odyssey is at least partially so that you can read the Aeneid...
- devindotcom 3y agoLombardo is good, agreed.
- nanna 3y agoCheck out Emily Wilson's recent translation of The Odyssey for a great read in contemporary English. https://www.emilyrcwilson.com/the-odyssey https://www.emilyrcwilson.com/the-odyssey
- maw 3y agoAnd her translation of the Iliad comes out later this year. I've been looking forward to it ever since I found out she was working on it.
- madcaptenor 3y agoAs am I! I'm hoping for an audiobook (that's how I took in her translation of the Odyssey) but I'm not seeing any indication of that yet, so I may just have to read the thing with my eyes.
- acqq 3y agoI like to use these interactive pages: https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0136 https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1...
- herodotus 3y agoWarning: Do not read this translation! OK, that may be a bit harsh. But the danger is that a translation that is out-of-date or badly done will turn you off the book. Many classic books whose translations are now beyond copyright are available for free. But these translations are, generally speaking, poor. To really appreciate these books, find a translation that is up-to-date and that suits your reading style.
- cheeseomlit 3y agoI can't speak to the quality of this version or what is considered 'out-of-date', but I don't think a translation necessarily needs to be recent to be well done. I recently read the A. T. Murray translation of the Odyssey from 1919 and enjoyed it immensely. I can also heartily recommend the Lattimore translation of the Illiad from 1954, though the more recent Fagles translation is great too.
- bamfly 3y agoI wouldn't defend it as the best, but I'm personally a fan of TE Lawrence's 1932 translation, writing as TE Shaw. Odyssey only—he didn't translate the Iliad.
- bamfly 3y agoI read Butler's Iliad (mercifully, with the gods' names restored to Greek by an editor) and concur—avoid. It's often the case that there are multiple still-covered-by-copyright translations of ancient texts (and sometimes more-recent-than-ancient ones, as with e.g. almost anything Russian, or Jules Verne) that are better than anything PG has, by just about any standard of "better". Not their fault—that's just how it is. I'd definitely recommend anyone tackling these sorts of works shop for the best translation for their purposes—it can make a huge difference. Worth a trip to the library or a few dollars for a used copy, for something you'll spend hours with.
- allturtles 3y ago> I read Butler's Iliad (mercifully, with the gods' names restored to Greek by an editor) and concur—avoid. Any specific reasons why? > I'd definitely recommend anyone tackling these sorts of works shop for the best translation for their purposes—it can make a huge difference. Worth a trip to the library or a few dollars for a used copy, for something you'll spend hours with. I definitely agree with this. Shop around for the translation that you like best where possible (for less popular texts you may have no choice). There are a lot of different possible "value systems" for evaluating translation quality.
- foobarian 3y agoI can't wrap my head around the Romanized gods, having grown up on the Greek names. Speaking of, this youth edition is still my favorite version; the illustration is especially great. Unfortunately it seems it was never widely translated. https://www.amazon.it/Odissea-avventure-Ulisse-Miti-oro-ebook/dp/B0062ZYZ9O https://www.amazon.it/Odissea-avventure-Ulisse-Miti-oro-eboo...
- CalChris 3y agoThe Homeric Question [1] generally centers on whether the Iliad and the Odyssey were written by primarily one person (Unitarian) or by different people (Analytic). Butler has another theory, that the Odyssey was written by one person, a woman in Sicily, which he published in the The Authoress of the Odyssey [2]. Basically, Butler was describing the Odyssey as fan fiction, as a Mary Sue [3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeric_Question https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeric_Question [2] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Authoress_of_the_Odyssey https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Authoress_of_the_Odyssey [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Sue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Sue
- adrian_b 3y agoI find the theory that the Odyssey has not been composed by Homer (by "Homer" meaning the author of the Iliad), but by some woman belonging to his family, perhaps a daughter, granddaughter or niece, much more plausible than the alternatives. The Iliad and the Odyssey use very similar artificial poetic languages and vocabularies (though some words appear for the first time in the Odyssey and most of them are words that are expected to be more recent words). Even so there is a very noticeable difference in style between the two works, and the easiest way to describe this difference is to say that the Iliad seems masculine, while the Odyssey seems feminine, i.e. the former is like an action movie, which spends a lot of time with the description of matters interesting for males, e.g. about efficient ways of killing or maiming your opponents or of gaining glory on the battlefield, while the latter is like a chick flick, where the main interests are about love and romance, stories about powerful independent women, descriptions of various female skills, clothes, food and gardens, and it includes even feminist complaints about the lack of equality between sexes. It is very unlikely that we will ever know anything certain about the identity of the authors of the Homeric poems, but reading carefully the two texts, especially in original, gives the appearance of two closely related authors, but nevertheless of different sex.
- mrangle 3y agoI wouldn't be surprised. Devil's advocacy: Even if the Odyssey is arguably a relatively paler reflection of the Iliad in terms of mythological weight across the western corpus (ie: centrally important myths reflected within other myths), while still being a monster in its own right, it would be a monumental lifetime feat for one woman to acquire the deepest mythological and even religious (apocalyptic) knowledge it would have taken to write the Odyssey. It's still an incalculably skilled work. In all, I'd lean against the one woman theory. But it wouldn't surprise me either. Authors and artists often had advisors on classical subject matter that would have been mostly mastered by those with expensive educations. Homeric Question and historicity: No one who is a serious student of mythology thinks that there is a real controversy over whether or not works such as the Iliad fall into dichotomous categories of true or false. What these myths are meant to describe are archetypal repeating events. That is, they are both true and myth. As is the case for most long persevering myths. No one should allow a little bit of allegory to fool them.
- braymundo 3y agoI'm not familiar with the translation, but I strongly recommend Standard Ebooks for a great reading experience on any device: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/homer/the-odyssey/william-cullen-bryant https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/homer/the-odyssey/william-...
- metadaemon 3y agoAmazing! Thank you.
- frereubu 3y agoFor anyone who wants a "retelling" of the Iliad rather than a translation, I can't recommend highly enough War Music by the British poet Christopher Logue. It made me fall back in love with the classics. (I also read the Fagles and Wilson translations, both of which I enjoyed for different reasons). You can get a sense of it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Music_(poem) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Music_(poem) It rather reminds of The New Four Seasons by Nigel Kennedy - https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/oct/29/nigel-kennedy-the-new-four-seasons-cd-review-orchestra-of-life https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/oct/29/nigel-kennedy-... - and Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet, as they're all interestingly irreverent takes (at least in my view) on a classic.
- dash2 3y ago+1 to this and let me give a quote: Rat, pearl, onion, honey: these colours came before the sun lifted above the ocean bringing light alike to mortals and immortals. And through this falling brightness through the by now mosque, eucalyptus, utter blue, came Thetis, gliding across the azimuth, with armour the colour of moonlight laid on Her forearms, palms upturned towards the sun, hovering above the fleet, Her skyish face towards her son, Achilles...
- NoboruWataya 3y agoAt first glance I thought this was the same translation I read from Standard Ebooks, but in fact I believe that was by William Cullen Bryant.[0] Both translations use the Roman names of the deities rather than the Greek. I found this odd and more than a bit confusing, but from reading the preface to the Bryant translation it seems that this approach was chosen because the Roman names were, at the time, much more recognisable to the English-speaking public. This seems strange to me now--while the names of the Roman deities are familiar to us because of the planets, I think most people would be more familiar with Zeus and Poseidon as deities than Jupiter and Neptune. Bryant's defence of the approach is interesting: > In the Preface to my version of the Iliad, I gave very briefly my reason for preserving the names derived from the Latin, by which the deities of the Grecian mythology have hitherto been known to English readers —that is to say, Jupiter, Juno, Neptune, Pluto, Mars, Venus, and the rest, instead of Zeus, Herè, and the other names which are properly Greek. As the propriety of doing this is questioned by some persons of exact scholarship, I will state the argument a little more at large. The names I have employed have been given to the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece from the very beginnings of our language. Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and the rest, down to Proctor and Keats —a list whose chronology extends through six hundred years —have followed this usage, and we may even trace it back for centuries before either of them wrote. Our prose writers have done the same thing; the names of Latin derivation have been adopted by the earliest and latest translators of the New Testament. To each of the deities known by these names there is annexed in the mind of the English reader —and it is for the English reader that I have made this translation —a peculiar set of attributes. Speak of Juno and Diana, and the mere English reader understands you at once; but when he reads the names of Herè and Artemis, he looks into his classical dictionary. The names of Latin origin are naturalized; the others are aliens and strangers. The conjunction and itself, which has been handed down to us unchanged from our Saxon ancestors, holds not its place in our language by a firmer and more incontestable title than the names which we have hitherto given to the deities of ancient Greece. We derive this usage from the Latin authors —from Virgil, and Horace, and Ovid, and the prose writers of ancient Rome. Art as well as poetry knows these deities by the same names. We talk of the Venus de Medicis, the Venus of Milo, the Jupiter of Phidias, and never think of calling a statue of Mars a statue of Ares. > For my part, I am satisfied with the English language as it has been handed down to us. If the lines of my translation had bristled with the names of Zeus and Herè, and Poseidon and Ares, and Artemis and Demeter, I should feel that I had departed from the immemorial usage of the English tongue, that I had introduced obscurity where the meaning should have been plain, and that I had given just cause of complaint to the readers for whom I wrote. 0: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/homer/the-odyssey/william-cullen-bryant https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/homer/the-odyssey/william-...
- notyoutube 3y agoI'm close to the end of Peter Green's translation of the Iliad, and though hard to plough through at times, the style was not as drab and "old" as I would have expected; the difficulty was mostly due to scenes often being kind of long, essentially bullet point lists and/or with strange content -- i.e. content more than form. I'd be interested to know what people have to say about that translation, and the one of the Odyssey by Green too.
- devindotcom 3y agoAs always I think your best move if you want to read a work with many translations available is simply to read the first 2-3 pages (or some other short identical segment) and see which one feels best to you. I have read several and I value them all for different reasons. I love Pope but wouldn't read him for an "accurate" translation (he didn't know Greek!) and I like Butler's prose but it's a total transliteration, not poetry. My go-to recommendation is Lattimore (not Fagles, which I found dull), but now we have Emily Wilson in the mix too (with a great preface to boot). Taste them all and go with whichever is best for you - you can always read another later, but your first time for a classic should be enjoyable and natural. Only you can say which one you enjoy most.
- verisimi 3y agoMy, I get the impression that 'translations' are far more like a work of art in their own right, than, er, a translation!
- joshspankit 3y agoI think it would be much more deterministic/mechanical if we did translations of the words and didn’t touch grammar/structure, but that does not have mass-market appeal as the flow is disrupted and some words get denser.
- devindotcom 3y agoThis certainly is the case! Translation is a creative process, not merely transformative, let alone mechanical. Especially with classics, where much interpretation is needed. The very first line of the Odyssey is a perfect example - the word used to describe Odysseus famously has no direct translation, so everyone puts their own spin on it. Reading the amount of thought that goes into a translation is always interesting to me - for instance the introduction to a Sir Gawain and the Green Knight I have really helped me understand how the alliterative style worked and why the translation was done in a certain way (and why it was so hard).
- frereubu 3y agoThere's an enjoyably pessmimistic phrase in Italian - "traduttore, traditore" which translated(!) means "translator, traitor", emphasising the impossibility of an "accurate" translation. I love reading translations, but would love to have the time to learn languages to read the originals. (I tried learning German for WG Sebald, but found it very hard, figured his writing was going to be pretty hard in and of itself, know that he worked closely with his English translators, and given he taught in an English university for decades figured they were going to be very "good").
- CalChris 3y agoIf you want a fun story about a truly bad translation of the Iliad (and eventually the Odyssey), read Edward Luttwak's story about Stephen Mitchell. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v34/n04/edward-luttwak/homer-inc https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v34/n04/edward-luttwak/homer...
- AlleyTrotter 3y ago[dead]
- pborenstein 3y agoGift link to Emily Wilson's NYT Article "Exit Hector, Again and Again: How Different Translators Reveal the ‘Iliad’ Anew" Worth a read. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/28/books/review/iliad-translations.html?unlocked_article_code=CQFSQKIDlbNVi5umj-Nsj4tZBYVjAr-yrrkxGo1Qek6U-TRIKj43lCFLN0FACkG0uaPh8hOkhrCmyY6pBJDjFuca2ROBu_LmdAbBwL1S-uRSBxSHo6dSTlgkOA4t9WiLeaWUbVRS4EDq3TLXf4fySNGs7_MIfHDDoDWNIjGc1_CZg8fthABvzxKrXTVd4_vT2EszIRuNM4uUwz7hsXdTU6_ZBhDETkD3T_j5uXOHM59VdcFGTSbAx43Tdb7rQ834O29fd8ztwtUItsYoF3711aWcD9-mztHDgOX59hzk0qDtfbTpZCDkZK24xeUNFvl4F3X91zWTkPZ0Bc2obSM5sQ&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/28/books/review/iliad-transl...
- philshem 3y agoHer Translator’s Notes at the preface of her translation of the Odyssey are fascinating to read (as was her translation). https://dornsife.usc.edu/assets/sites/903/docs/wilson_emily_--_translators_note.pdf https://dornsife.usc.edu/assets/sites/903/docs/wilson_emily_...
- KaiserPro 3y agoRemember that each translation has its own style and twist. Some authors will be shits (for the illiad akeles having a wank over Penthesilea in one re-telling vs weeping over her death, vs Penthesilea wracked with grief committing suicide) For those who are short of time, and like a comedy angle: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001brj5 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001brj5 Haynes blasts through it in 30 minutes. her books are also great as well illiad is here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000d7p2 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000d7p2
- dangitnotagain 3y agoTo throw a little shade on you translation nerds, I thought to mention a few things. Greeks were all illiterate at the time of the Homeric composition. They didn’t start reading/writing again for about fifty years. Arguably, these stories made the Greeks reintroduce writing. There is the argument on who’s that Homer anyway, and my conclusion (after studying the Epic cycle for some years) is that the Iliad was the composition of ~800 years of oral tradition. The Odyssey was produced in a short time afterwards. Homer had a school of acolytes who composed The Odyssey together. No one who has read The Odyssey more than three times will say with confidence that the whole composition is produced by one person. The narratives among the books are too different. It was a tomb for relating to the way Grecians once were … before the Dorian invasion which hobbled them all back into illiteracy, and how they should live once more. Soon after these works came the “golden area” of philosophers. Oh yeah, the actual Trojan war occurred ~800 years before Homer composed the Iliad! Soon after this epic blood letting the Dorians (some illiterate inland tribal peoples) walked right over them, causing the gap between ancient and classical Greece. Perilous time for Humanity. The Epic cycle was actually a dozen or so comparable stories, only Homer’s survived in full. Interesting side stories include that of Iphigenia, which explains Clytemnestra’s betrayal more than the woman hating rhetoric spewed by Agamemnon (in hades) or other accounts.
- jheriko 3y agothere are absolutely tons of better versions than this - although gutenberg is interesting, most of the content is ridiculously obsolete
- wackget 3y agoAny recommendations?
- Mimmy 3y agoI'd like to plug two podcasts by professional storyteller and contemporary bard Jeff Wright, who does a modern retelling of the two stories. [1][2] As another commenter mentioned, both the Iliad and the Odyssey were passed down via oral tradition. If you want to be "pure", the best way of consuming the stories are to hear them. Additionally, the stories were always meant to be told, retold, remixed, etc. It is very much in the spirit of the original stories for new bards to add their own spin to it. Don't be turned off by the fact that Jeff doesn't read verbatim a translation of the original texts. He adds a lot of extra context you wouldn't otherwise get from just reading the books (context that every other listener in Ancient Greece would have already had that we don't). [1] Iliad / Trojan War: https://open.spotify.com/show/7w7RMunEMoAapudklkkVgE https://open.spotify.com/show/7w7RMunEMoAapudklkkVgE [2] Odyssey: https://open.spotify.com/show/5vyJGStvyCNkel5Mqxb4OA https://open.spotify.com/show/5vyJGStvyCNkel5Mqxb4OA
- wackget 3y agoDo you need a working knowledge of Greek/Roman history to enjoy this? A few sentences in and I'm overwhelmed with names of gods I barely know anything about.
- DiscourseFan 3y agoPeople are saying don't read this translation or read that one or whatever. My opinion here is, there isn't really a "good" translation of the Odyssey, but there also isn't any bad ones either. It's a cool story, the themes and characterization is maintained in basically any translation you would read. The beauty of the meter, the style, the subtleties, is lost, and can't be recovered. It's just the same way that it is lost in any translation of Kalidasa, or any great classical author: its the same reason Shakespeare is great, because of those small details (speaking of Shakespeare, he parallels, or even eclipses any of the classical authors, but Sophocles and Homer are still great in their own way.)
- acyou 3y agoHaving first read Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose, I suspect that this and similar works have been twisted into unrecognizable states vs. their bases in the glories and depravities of antiquity, whilst under the custody of 2000 years of Christianity (regardless of which English translation we choose). The gods and titans are made so puny and pathetic that Odysseus the mere mortal can outwit them and best them by strength. Odysseus blinded the son of Poseidon and lived at sea for years without being brutally struck down, Poseidon being so pathetic himself as to be held in check by Zeus. That said, agreed that picking a readable translation is key.
- pallas_athena 3y ago>It is not impossible that Butler's unruffled version is the most faithful. I admit this quote is out-of-context, you can read here J. L. Borges - The Homeric Versions: https://gwern.net/doc/borges/1932-borges-thehomericversions.pdf https://gwern.net/doc/borges/1932-borges-thehomericversions.... if you speak Spanish or Italian, there are new editions that are translations from Butler, plus Atwood's "Penelopiad" and more, very nice books: https://blackiebooks.org/catalogo/odisea/ https://blackiebooks.org/catalogo/odisea/ https://blackie-edizioni.it/products/odissea https://blackie-edizioni.it/products/odissea