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Which Odyssey translation wins a blind reading test?
- al_borland 2mo agoStandard eBooks has a translation by William Cullen Bryant. I was hoping that would be in the rankings to see how it compared.
- acabal 2mo agoSE Editor-in-Chief here. We selected the William Cullen Bryant translation because we felt that, of the public domain translations, it was the one most accessible to modern readers. We also host his translation of the Iliad. Pope's is certainly very beautiful, but also very literary and written in a style of English that can be difficult for the average modern reader. I think that determination is well reflected in this survey. Maybe we'll do it too one day (our current collections policy declines alternate translations) - it's certainly deserving.
- boredhedgehog 2mo agoBut why Bryant over Butler?
- acabal 2mo agoButler's Odyssey and Iliad are prose translations, which we felt didn't fit the commonly understood image of those works as works of verse.
- oliculipolicula 2mo agoSorry this could be offensive didn't mean to be.. Any Greek speakers who studied Homer in school here can share what are your favourite English translations? Prefer Lattimore or Fitzgerald as being closer to original?
- tptacek 2mo agoDerek Thompson's Plain English podcast just had Emily Wilson on talking about comparisons between the translations, and quite a bit of the iconic lines of the Odyssey from the midcentury translations are kind of just made up. Like, "skilled in all ways of contending" from "man of many turns"; "the wanderer, harried for years on end" --- find that in the Greek?
- oliculipolicula 2mo agoYes, how would the average classicist or modern Greek translate polymetis? Polytropos? Into current day American vernacular Lattimore's "the man of many ways" sounds closer to the original than Wilson's "complicated man" but neither sounds made up
- AlanYx 2mo ago"wine dark sea" is the best example of this. It's a poetic/literary leap by Chapman and Pope that then became a functional convention in most subsequent translations. The alternative translations aren't any better though, at least in English.
- dash2 2mo agoThe original is οινοπα ποντον which indeed is very close to wine-dark sea. Literally "wine-faced" where -faced is a metaphor for "having the appearance of".
- AlanYx 2mo agoLiterally "wine-faced" or "wine-eyed", yes. The problem with the literal wine-faced/wine-eyed is it doesn't convey luminosity/depth to readers, so it kind of misses the point. The missing context is that ancient wine was often unfiltered and cloudy, and diluted before being served. "wine-looking" would be better for modern readers in terms of conveying the actual meaning, but again, it doesn't convey the actual idea Homer is getting at, and sounds awkward to repeat. It's fun to think about alternatives far from the text like "garnet-hued sea", "sapphire-hued sea", "burgundy sea", but they all miss on either hue or clarity. "Lee-dark sea" is probably the closest, and hits the wine idea.
- comrade1234 2mo agoAt this point I don't think I'll see the movie because I don't want it to ruin the good memories/scenes I have in my mind from the book I read a few years ago. Maybe someday but I think I'll reread the book before then. Also, there was too much data n the linked article. :)
- Ensorceled 2mo agoI'm curious, why do you think the movie will ruin your good memories?
- pelagicAustral 2mo agoCuriosity killed the cat
- asimpletune 2mo agoThe movie is not a retelling of Homer's Odyssey. It's a retelling of Odyssey's return home after the Trojan war. The movie will be much better if you go into it thinking that.
- suddenlybananas 2mo ago>It's a retelling of Odyssey's return home after the Trojan war I think Odyssey is a pretty cool guy. Eh kills siutors and doesnt afraid of anything.
- Chinjut 2mo agoHomer's original won a blind writing test.
- saaaaaam 2mo agoBadoom-tish
- Ekaros 2mo agoI actually doubt that. My understanding is that original was not written work but oral...
- dTal 2mo agoOver the weekend I learned that the new Odyssey film fails a blind watching test; a friend-of-a-friend is sightless, and reports that the entire second half of the film is unintelligible due its lack of dialogue, in favor of a wall of undifferentiated slaughter noises.
- branon 2mo agoI got Robert Fitzgerald, wish it would tell me which passages were by which authors after I finished though ah, it does, to an extent at least - about 2/3rds down the front page, ctrl+f for "opening"
- wavemode 2mo agohello fellow Robert Fitzgerald-ian I think it's fitting that a story that was originally an ancient poem, should sound ancient and poetic.
- potbelly83 2mo agoRobert Fitzgerald also here. Was drawn to the more poetic verses.
- npinsker 2mo ago“How much you enjoy the prose” doesn’t really seem like the metric by which we should rank these? I’d prefer to read whatever’s most faithful to the original, which isn’t measured here.
- headPoet 2mo agoIs there such thing as an original for a 3000 year old tale? The ancient Greek versions will be heavily edited and modified
- Ensorceled 2mo agoThey mean "a faithful translation" where "original" means whatever Greek version was chosen to be the source not "original" as in the first text from Homer.
- gbjcantab 2mo agoThere are at least two possible meanings of “faithful,” which are “translates the literal meaning most accurately” and “evokes the same feeling most poetically.” Given that it’s Homer and not Aristotle, the vibes-based approach is probably the right criterion. It’s a bit hard to express but, having read a lot of Homer in Greek, I can say that some of these translations absolutely fail to translate Homer even if there’s nothing inaccurate per se.
- elicash 2mo ago"Whatever’s most faithful to the original" would be done with research, not random folks blind ranking. I think it's to their credit they frame it in terms of preference and enjoyment because that is more accurate to what they are doing.
- JamesSwift 2mo agoTranslation = words + intent. Literal translation frequently loses the intent encoded into the chosen language, especially for creative writing. If I translate "youre a real piece of work" literally into another language, Ive likely lost the entire point of the phrase. Should we prefer that translation instead of one that either spells out the underhandedness of the comment in the other language? Or which replaces it with its own approximately similar idiom?
- the__alchemist 2mo agoFagles. Maybe Wilson if you like plainer writing. Fagles narrated by Ian McKellen is peak.
- lordleft 2mo agoFagles was what I read when I first read the Iliad/Odysseus years ago, and I was happy to see him pop up as my revealed preference via the test. I'm also a big fan of Lombardo.
- jeffbee 2mo agoIt's pretty wild that 99% of participants came from Instagram, Facebook, or Tiktok. It never escaped that bubble? The other platforms, Reddit, YouTube, word of mouth only amounted to 1%?
- asimpletune 2mo agoI could be misremembering this but I think Lattimore and Lombardo were once good friends until they had a falling out. I think Lattimore was so bothered by Lombardo's translation of either the Iliad or Odyssey, that he set out to do his own translation of both. At any rate Lattimore's translation of Odyssey is beautiful.
- odyssey7 2mo agoIt was fun going through the comparisons. My results settled on Lattimore.
- adrian_b 2mo agoMy test ranked first Daniel Mendelsohn and second Emily Wilson. I was aware of Wilson's translation, but not of that of Mendelsohn. This has made me curious to read Mendelsohn's translation, but in general I do not like to read translations of ancient texts, because all coherent translations are far too distant from the original. To really convey the meaning of the original text you need a sequence of explanatory notes for each sentence, not a translated sentence that attempts to have a one-to-one correspondence between words. What I like to read are the bilingual editions, like those of the Loeb library, where you can read the original, but also compare it with a translation when in doubt, which is much faster than reaching for a dictionary. Moreover, the English text allows you to browse or search quickly for paragraphs in which you are particularly interested, and then you can take your time to read slowly the original in order to understand it.
- comrade1234 2mo agoWere those all poetry versions? Were any prose?
- asibahi 2mo agoI read the article and I still dont understand what a blind reading test is.
- vntok 2mo agoYou did not know who wrote each text sample you assessed, did you?
- RobLach 2mo agoUseful and interesting but it is not the primary purpose of a translation to read the most pleasantly.
- xyzsparetimexyz 2mo agoDifferent translations have different goals. I wouldn't read a translation that had boring prose.
- suddenlybananas 2mo ago>Do readers prefer archaic language? >Emily Wilson argues that readers may mistake archaic language for authority or authenticity [..] Among translations published since 1960, it nearly disappears. Readers were not simply choosing the oldest-sounding English. I don't think this necessarily follows, a translation written in 1960 can have a more contemporary English than one written in 1980. That being said, I don't really understand why Wilson argues against an archaizing register---the poems themselves were archaizing. Homer or whatever bards actually composed it were writing about something that allegedly happened hundreds of years earlier and using language/style that was itself archaic at the time.
- KaiserPro 2mo agoITs a hard call. I think the archaic language is both an appeal and a barrier. The thing that got me into classics was a radio show of a standup doing comedy about classics[1] (I like roman/greek history, but more about buildings and things rather than culture.) I like the poetic archaic english in excerpts. BUT a whole book if it, thats hard. [1]https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001brj5 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001brj5 I should add that had it been a long dry slog with serious people talking seriously about greek grammar, then I wouldn't have bothered. However because its a comedy, ostensibly, it stuck for me.
- suddenlybananas 2mo agoOh I totally agree there is a place for more accessible language, but my point is that Wilson argues that archaic language is no more faithful. Whether a translation should be faithful or not is another question. >“Mild stylistic archaism is often accepted without question in translations of ancient texts and can be presented as if it were a mark of authenticity. But of course, the English of the nineteenth or early twentieth century is no closer to Homeric Greek than the language of today. The use of a noncolloquial or archaizing linguistic register can blind readers to the real, inevitable, and vast gap between the Greek original and any modern translation.” However, I think this is mistaken if Homer himself was writing in an archaic style at the time (which seems to be the case looking at the literature). If he's writing in an archaic style, then a faithful English translation ought to try and capture that aspect of the poetry.
- tokai 2mo agoThe Italian Donald Duck one from the 90s is the best.
- faldor20 2mo agoI did this twice and got completely different results. Seems very dependent on which passages you happen to see. I found some hard because they don't seem to even conform to the description given. Particularly many of the lotus eater passages leave out the information the description stays they should be portraying.
- ZeroGravitas 2mo agoMaybe I'm less of a fan of epic ancient poetry translated from dead languages than the average man in the street but none of these make me interested in reading on.
- faldor20 2mo agoI enjoyed this but wanted to browse all the options. I made a site that has all the options for browsing and you can even play the game again selecting your favorite from all the options. https://odyssey.elidowling.com/ https://odyssey.elidowling.com/
- curo 2mo agoThis page embeds the exact payload of the original including campaignVersion: "v5", candidateSetVersion: "mendelsohn-2025", all eight private excerpts, contexts, profile copy, and internal IDs. And it doesn't cite the original. I.e., infringement.
- faldor20 2mo agoIt certainly does embed the original data, but that's a fair point. I made this in about 10 minutes for me and just thought others on this niche hackernews thread (who would have seen the original) might benefit. I updated it to reference the original.
- slowmovintarget 2mo agoFagles' translation of The Illiad worked best for me, but his translation of The Odyssey was very dry. I landed on Rieu's translation (I read Lattimore's too, but kept going back to Rieu.) According to the test, I should read Fitzgerald if I ever do a reread.
- TheCoelacanth 2mo agoAs the least "flowery" translation, I suspect Wilson would do a lot better if the test was repeated with longer passages. What seems good for a few lines can get very tedious after hundreds of pages.