/lit/ - Literature

a) Compare yourself to others is wrong and thread everyone equally is right.
b) A mind without knowledge of Self is a mind that can't recognize the Self in others.

Chose one

>>11366086
But a great translation can be a work of art in and of itself, like Florio's Montaigne, Harrington's Orlando Furioso, Urquhart's Gargantua and Pantagruel and Pope's Iliad. If you can read the work in the original, do so, but if you can't, there's nothing wrong with reading translations, just as long as they're good. A good translation won't necessarily go for the literal, because what is literal in one language isn't always going to read well when translated, especially in the case of poetry. Urquhart's Gargantua and Pantagruel for example, like Popes Iliad, is so loosely translated as to be more of a paraphrase than a translation, but it's still considered to be one of the best translations of that work for the quality of its prose, and other translators like Frame and Screech come off as stiff and academic in comparison. You see this argument with the Fagles/Lattimore question too. As long as the shape and frame of the narrative is preserved, a translator can do what they want with the style as far as I'm concerned; it's going to get lost in translation anyway.