My first reaction was "Harumph" being a fan of Robert Fagles' translation. I sit corrected. I'll be buying a copy of Emily Wilson's too:
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. Now goddess, child of Zeus,
tell the old story for our modern times.
Find the beginning.
"Complicated" is an interesting translation for πολύτροπον rather than the more literal "much-traveled." But then again, The Odyssey isn't some children's adventure story. It's a story about the brutal, strange, post-war Ancient Mediterranean and people lost, or without purpose, who have to constantly adapt to the challenges of that world while still staying true to their identity. It's all, well...complicated.
“One of the things I struggled with,” Wilson continued, sounding more exhilarated than frustrated as she began to unpack “polytropos,” the first description we get of Odysseus, “is of course this whole question of whether he is passive — the ‘much turning’ or ‘much turned’ — right? This was —”
“Treat me,” I interrupted, “as if I don’t know Greek,” as, in fact, I do not.
“The prefix poly,” Wilson said, laughing, “means ‘many’ or ‘multiple.’ Tropos means ‘turn.’ ‘Many’ or ‘multiple’ could suggest that he’s much turned, as if he is the one who has been put in the situation of having been to Troy, and back, and all around, gods and goddesses and monsters turning him off the straight course that, ideally, he’d like to be on. Or, it could be that he’s this untrustworthy kind of guy who is always going to get out of any situation by turning it to his advantage. It could be that he’s the turner.”
EDIT: And later in the article:
“If I was really going to be radical,” Wilson told me, returning to the very first line of the poem, “I would’ve said, polytropos means ‘straying,’ and andra” — “man,” the poem’s first word — “means ‘husband,’ because in fact andra does also mean ‘husband,’ and I could’ve said, ‘Tell me about a straying husband.’ And that’s a viable translation. That’s one of the things it says. But it would give an entirely different perspective and an entirely different setup for the poem. The fact that it’s possible to translate the same lines a hundred different times and all of them are defensible in entirely different ways? That tells you something.” But, Wilson added, with the firmness of someone making hard choices she believes in: “I want to be super responsible about my relationship to the Greek text. I want to be saying, after multiple different revisions: This is the best I can get toward the truth.”
Well, yes: I think that's the point (or at least, the debate). How do you translate such a multifaceted word when there is nothing with the same collection of meanings and implications in the target language? It's a brilliantly ideal word for its purpose in the original Greek, and impossible to capture in (say) English without footnotes.
I am a fan of contemporary localizations of old texts, since contexts change so much throughout the millenia.
Id think that in this globalized age much-traveled doeant have the same connotations of wisdom and adventure and loss as Homer’s word, and some other word might need to be used to bring it into context
I've never read Fagle. Mine is T.E. Lawrence's translation. I love the opening of that, but I think I'll enjoy Wilson's too:
O Divine Poesy
Goddess-Daughter of Zeus
sustain for me
this song of the various-minded man
who after he had plundered
the innermost citadel of hallowed Troy
was made to stray grievously
about the coasts of men
the sport of their customs good or bad
while his heart
through all the sea-faring
ached in an agony to redeem himself
and bring his company safe home
Vain hope - for them
for his fellows he strove in vain
their own witlessness cast them away
the fools
to destroy for meat
the oxen of the most exalted sun
wherefore the Sun-god blotted out
the day of their return
Make the tale live for us
in all its many bearings
O Muse
I had a class on The Odyssey (and other epics) last year, and for some reason it floored me.
A lot of things in this world are merely a knockoff of the original and authentic thing. And for someone hugely into stories, The Odyssey felt like this hugely authentic and original thing. Maybe it's me being pretentious, but it's all there: adventure & homecoming, cunning & humility, love & ignorance. Also, the themes are just melded into the core of the story in a way I haven't seen before. And the writing itself strikes an amazing balance between texture and structure.
The Odyssey is on the far side of the bell curve, it's unlike anything I've ever read. And I've only read one translation of it. Definitely going to be checking this one out.
You might enjoy Ezra Pound's 'ABCs of Reading', which talks about reading the best examples available. The Odyssey and Illiad are certainly that. Also the Aeneid, the Divine Comedy, Beowulf...but sometimes there are acceptable translations and sometimes there aren't.
We are fortunate to have Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf which is always solid and occasionally makes you feel the raven's wings lowering over you. Guy Lee wrote a translation of Ovid's Amores which I unreservedly recommend. Clive James gave us the first translation of the Divine Comedy into English that catches the feel of the original. Urqhardt's Rabelais has been considered the English translation of choice for four hundred years.
But other works, like the Aeneid, languish. Fitzgerald's translation, unlike his Odyssey, is flat. CS Lewis translated a couple books fairly well, but I haven't seen the magic of the original in English yet.
Oddly, languages with smaller literary output, like Polish, often have better translations because translators are a much bigger deal, and certain translators have status equivalent to celebrity authors.
The structure was amazing, all the more so for it being transmitted by oral tradition. Things like Odysseus being "born", pangs and all, seven times before getting home. One of the places he departs from actually translates to "birth". Son mirroring the father. The architecture of the tale was fascinating.
The structure was amazing, all the more so for it being transmitted by oral tradition.
You want to read up on research into oral traditions and primarily-oral societies. Walter Ong is the usual starting point there.
Oral traditions aren't just accidentally memorable, or an artifact of people with specially-trained huge memories. Epics like the Iliad and Odyssey, and oral traditions of other societies, are truly impressive technology, though we never think of them that way. In literate societies, especially ones which have been literate for a long time, we think people would just have to rote-memorize this stuff, but really it's built with rhythms and patterns and structures and formulas, and you end up with works that are easy to learn, easy to recite and easy to reconstruct and even error-correct on the fly.
I am reminded me of the tongue-in-cheek comments on the invention of writing made by Plato in the Phaedrus dialogue:
"...but his great discovery was the use of letters. .... for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing"
It might be worthwhile to consider interpreting that Phaedrus passage more literally.
The thesis of Frances Yates' The Art of Memory is that you cannot properly understand ancient (or even more recent) scholarship without understanding memorization techniques. This is particularly true for Plato, for whom memorization arguably was the fundamental aspect of knowing.
I found Yates persuasive on this point: you can't really understand Plato's concept of the forms, and of his epistemology in general, without understanding the role and function of memory palaces. She makes a similar argument about Augustine's conceptualization of God, though it's attenuated as by Augustine's time the use of memory palaces had already entered a millennium long decline. By the time of the Renaissance artists were using exaggerated methods of memory palace construction--i.e. anchoring and "hiding" ideas in complex, elaborate visual works--without fully understanding the origin of those methods. Renaissance artists recognized aspects of the technique in earlier works without fully understanding the context. The arc of Yates' book is analyzing this historical progression--how memory palaces transformed from a fundamental utilitarian methodology that strongly influenced epistemology to a fragmented and esoteric body of concepts before being almost entirely forgotten altogether.
To understand how influential memory palaces might have been, consider how the technology of computers shapes our modern discussion about the mind and neurobiology. Even when our computer-mind analogies and metaphors are transparent, they still strongly influence how we generate and filter scientific ideas in both philosophy and biology. It can't be helped. Similarly, I found it very persuasive that Plato would naturally perceive and identify in the technology of memorization deeply intrinsic linkages between memorization, knowing, and reality.
I came across a book years ago whose thesis was something along the lines that the construction of epic was the beginning of what amounted to a cognitive revolution in humankind; and that before Homer (and presumably as a function of abstraction and mnemonic techniques that underlay the construction and performance of his works, and them similar works) that people weren't yet fully conscious. I lost track of the name of the book, but it was a tantalizing argument even if it seems batshit, on the surface [1].
Anyway, your comment was a beautiful bit of serendipity -- I never would have heard of the Yates book otherwise, which I just ordered. Thanks for taking the time.
[1] I could be absolutely butchering this, but the hypothesis was, if not literally as I've represented it, something similarly incredible in scope and spirit.
Well also it doesn't have to be precisely the same story each time and in fact would often be changed around depending on the audience (emphasizing a local hero, for instance)
I remember reading this in high school and everyone gasped when the dog dies (spoiler alert for ~2500 year old story) yet took all the gory human deaths in the same chapter in stride.
The Odyssey seems original because the reason it is famous is that it is one of the oldest written version of stories that were told orally for generations.
I wasn't, having never read it. Anyway after the first 13 episodes Dragon Ball had little to do with Journey to the West other than sort of having an analogous cast of characters, most of whom eventually fell out of the spotlight.
I've always felt similarly about Lord of the Rings. It feels so authentic and real. Every other similar fantasy novel just reads as if everything in the story was made up for the purpose of telling the story, which of course it was. In LOTR it feels like historical fiction, like Tolkien designed everything about the world down to the finest detail then wrote a story in it without making anything new up.
You feel that way because that's exactly how it happened. Tolkien was a linguist first and foremost, and he created the languages used in the books for fun. Then he created the worlds and the lore for those places to exist. And only after all of that did he actually write stories set in these worlds and the languages in them.
It's genuinely magic to read. And I really don't feel like anyone has matched his authenticity in the fantasy genre.
I love C.S. Lewis, but the Chronicles feels very artificial. A new venue to preach his religious motives. Fun, and well done for sure. But not the same.
I also love the Steven R. Donaldson series The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. It's a moral journey just as LoTR and Narnia are, but it's a deeply personal struggle for a guy trying to manage his own mix of character successes and failures, rather than epic characters who each represent one idealized version of a human trait.
But as much as I love that series as well, I feel very much like the world was created for the story, and not at all that the world was created simply to create a world, and the story was created for it.
Tolkien really did it perfectly. I don't know that he ever intended to do what he did. It could be argued that it's not really correct to call him a master at his (or any) craft because he wasn't trying to do anything like what he did. There's a certain accidental quality to it. Which is perhaps what makes it so compelling.
Yeah there's some fiction where it seems the world only serves the plot, but LotR feels like it's taking one of infinite potential paths through the world created.
I always liked Samuel Butler's idea in The Authoress of the Odyssey that the Odyssey was written by a woman. I'm looking forward to Wilson's translation.
My favorite Iliad is Lattimore. I've tried others (Fagles, Green, Lombardo) and always come back to Lattimore. I remember when I first read it, my prof said we didn't have to read the Catalog of the Ships. I actually love that section now. It's like the opening credits.
My favorite Odyssey is Fitzgerald. Fagles is good too.
Now if you want a deeply bad translation, a fraud really, Mitchell is the worst. He leaves out chapters. Edward Luttwak ripped it apart.
I'm going to speak up for Stephen Mitchell's work. I spent a good hour in the bookshop comparing translations and his rang truest, read easiest and sounded more lyical in a way. It wasnt dry and accurate or academic that's for sure but it was in the common tongue. Also his missing chapters were included at the end as appendices and his reasons were given for that inclusion.
Lattimore's Illiad is incredible, it leaves some of those confusing words and phrases in (famously, the numerous characters who speak "winged words") and it reminds you this is the product of a civilization that isn't yours, who had very different values yet remain very human.
Interesting, "geflügelte Worte"(winged words) is a quite common expression in German (meaning, and I have to repeat myself here, "a commonly used expression of literary or historical origin"), but I never realized it originally came from the Illiad.
I figure there'll be a few for whom this is a pleasant surprise, so: if humor, wonderful old-timey music, and a healthy dash of the Odyssey sounds like an interesting combination, "O Brother Where Art Thou" is a great film.
> I struggled with this because there are those classicists. I partly just want to shake them and make them see that all translations are interpretations.
What is a translation, that's the heart of the matter. Many people argue that translation is simply impossible, because the meaning of a text depends on its connexions to a whole cultural world, and if you take that text out of its cultural background and put it in another one, then it simply doesn't work anymore. It's like a transplant, but more complicated; if you do a heart transplant, at least all hearts are similar and connect to arteries in the same way; a translation is like trying to transplant an organ across species.
For instance, it seems most readers of classic Russian literature are of this opinion -- no other language renders Russian novels appropriately. (I don't read Russian so I wouldn't know.)
And yet, transplants do work. To pursue the transplant metaphor, they work when the organ performs the same function in the new organism as it did in the original one. So I don't think the translator's work is simply to "interpret" the source, if that word means "to understand deeply and then reproduce with one's own personality and artistic biais".
The task of the translator is to produce a text for a new audience, that produces an effect to that audience, as close as possible as the original text on the original audience.
There's this retired English teacher who translated the first book of the Harry Potter series in ancient Greek; it's different of course, since there are no native ancient Greek speakers left, and so his "audience" is unclear; but the description of the challenges he faced makes for a great and fun read:
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.
Of these things,
Speak, Immortal One,
And tell the tale once more in our time.
Seconded on Lombardo. I picked it up 17 years ago after seeing him on CSPAN discussing his translation with a panel including Christopher Hitchens. Thankfully still available:
This was so refreshing to read as someone who loves the classics and studied Latin in high school. I very much agree with Emily Wilson that translation is an active interpretation of the text, not some mechanical and uncreative process. Look forward to reading her new version; the excerpts in the article are striking.
I think it's just the fact that translations of classic Greek literature are largely the domain of the highest echelons of academia, which is still mostly men, and more so the higher up you go. (For example, the article mentions that common advice is to wait for tenure before attempting to publish classical translations.)
Surprised the article made no mention of the EV Rieu translation published by Penguin Books. I would have thought that was one of the, if not 'the', most well known one.
I recently read Fagles' translations of the big three (Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid), and the Odyssey is by far the most fun of all of them. They're all masterpieces but it's the one I most enjoyed reading.
Well, the first (Odysseyian) half of the Aeneid is a LOT of fun. In fact, the second (Iliadic) half after Dido dies is often skipped. To me, it's kind of like Romeo and Juliet; after Mercutio dies it's just a bunch of teen age yammering. Well, Aeneas just isn't that interesting (he's stoic!) and Dido is (or was). And then Turnus is no Hector.
Fact is Vergil died without completing it. He wasn't happy with it and wanted it burned. Augustus, who had heard chapters read and who was its sponsor, countermanded that order. He had it edited but it wasn't Vergil's hand. It's OK to be a little disappointed with the result.
BTW, Stanford iTunesU has a quite good 5 lecture podcast on the Aeneid by Susanna Braund. She knows everything.
This is a really interesting story and quite timely with some videogame fans complaining about choices made in translating Japanese videogames to English.
> Wilson, whose own translation appears this week, has produced the first English rendering of the poem by a woman.
Well, it goes without saying that it's the first that the author was aware of. However, given that the author admittedly doesn't know Greek, it rather seems that he lacks standing to make such a claim. Maybe Dr. Wilson told him, and he didn't want to quote her. I'd have qualified the statement, or provided a source, but then that's just how I am.
What, with Google? My point is that someone who doesn't know Greek likely doesn't know the field well enough. To know, for example, whether some woman decades ago translated the Odyssey into English. As part of an unfinished thesis, with an obscure adviser.
The Anglo-Saxons didn’t arrive in Britain until the 400s so nothing resembling English was spoken before then. This is very likely the first complete translation into English of the Odyssey by a woman.
I find it hard to find any support for your claim that ancient Roman women would have generally been literate in Greek. Why don't you enlighten me if it's so obvious? Am I being lectured to "learn some history" by a guy claiming a translation into English might have happened before any Angles arrived in Britain?
