/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.10934760]

I rembemer a picture that showed the difference between the translations of this, with an example of text. Eg Fitzgerald being poetic, Fagles somewhere in the middle and Lattimore being more strict.

does anyone have it?

[Anonymous No.10934765]

>>10934760
This? I'm still deciding myself, what do you think?

[Anonymous No.10934796]

Classics PhD here. I teach Latin / Greek to undergrads. I assign Latimore on the syllabus for the chapters we skip of the Odyssey and Fitzgerald for the Aeneid.

Read Pope to experience some beautiful English poetry; Lattimore / Fitzgerald to get closer to the Greek / Latin.

[Anonymous No.10934867]

>>10934796
not to go all "muh homework on you guys"
but..

Do you have any secondary literature to back up your claim about, for instance, Lattimore being closer to the orginal greek?

I'm writing a short review about Fagles translation due next week(which i found quite enjoyable, but i have literally 0 experience with greek literature), however, i need to find something to criticise it for, preferably backed up by some academic.

His translation being very "modernized" seems to be one of the thing i could touch upon, eg it's very good for your every - day man to pick up, but perheps not best when it comes to higher education?

[Anonymous No.10934879]

>>10934765
Hmm, i don't think it was exactly this one, but thank you, this helps!

i read fagles and it was ridiculously easy to read. There's also an audio version read by freakin Gandalf Ian Mckellen (torrent everywhere). If you're not too picky i'd go for that one, but we have a PHD prof. in this thread who perheps disagree

[Anonymous No.10935106]

>>10934867
You make a reasonable request. I'll copy and paste Pearcy's review (you can find it on Jstor if you want) of Fagles' text.

Also, not exactly what you are looking for, but of interest:
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/books/review/what-do-you-look-for-in-modern-translation.html

>>10934760
OP, this may be interesting to you:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_translations_of_Homer#Odyssey

[Anonymous No.10935118]

You can see below Pearcy is going to prefer Fagles as a work of translation; I prefer Lattimore as an aid to study (especially for Classics students). It may not be exactly the detail you are looking for, but it lays out the academic orthodoxy (i.e. Lattimore for students; Fitzgerald for fun; Fagels for the public)

>>10935106
Robert Fagles (tr.). Homer: The Iliad. Introduction and notes by Bernard
Knox. New York: Viking Penguin, 1990. Pp. xvi, 683. $35.00. ISBN
0-670-83510-2.

Sarpedon to Hector: "Beware the toils of war;/The mesh of the huge
dragnet sweeping up the world." In the waning days of 1990, Homer's story
of a great and uneasy expedition of forces from the west allied against an
eastern nation has suddenly acquired new importance. War may become
possible again. When it does, we shall need this Iliad very much.

Lattimore's was a scholar's Iliad, accurate and scrupulous in preserving the
formulas that define Homer for classicists after Parry. Fitzgerald's was a very
pretty poem for a world in which pretty poems mattered and war was either
unthinkable or distant and part-time. Fagles gives us a stark and terrible
poem, an Iliad about, as its first word announces, rage. He conveys, far better
than either Lattimore or Fitzgerald, the psychological experience of combat
and war.

Fagles uses a free version of Lattimore's line; six or five stresses are his
norm, but he will at times shrink to four or even three, to expand to seven.
His translation reads, on the whole, as well as Fitzgerald's, although there are
passages where I will continue to prefer the latter. Unlike either Fitzgerald or
Lattimore, Fagles translates the fact of different styles within the epic. His
Catalog of Ships is crude and Cyclopean; his Doloneia, slick and sinuous. His
is also a more dramatic Iliad than those of his immediate predecessors. Fagles
sharply delineates his characters and makes their motivations plain-plainer,
perhaps, than they are in Homer.

Occasionally something in translation or commentary jars the ear or
memory. Scarlett O'Chilles says to Patroclus (as Hector imagines) "Now don't come back to the hollow ships, you hear?" For Grote the historical age
of Greece began in 776 B.C., not 753; a slip of Knox's pen has confused the
traditional date of the founding of Rome with that of the Olympic Games.
But these and a few other quibbles do not weaken a final impression: here is
the best modern Iliad for us and our students, the dramatic poem of force we
need to show us the possibilities of civilization in our most horrible endeavor.
The Episcopal Academy, Merion, PA LEE T. PEARCY
CW85.1 (1991)

[Anonymous No.10935163]

>>10934867
What chapters do you skip in the Odyssey? this like a 101 Mythology class?

[Anonymous No.10935168]

>>10934867

>>10935118
Ah I realize in retrospect we were talking about the Odyssey and this was an Iliad translation review. The points mainly still stand.

Anyway, here's an excerpt from another review:

In forging this I looked over the many Odysseys that appeared in advance (and in the wake) of the summer film. Along with Fagles and Fitzgerald, I went back to the still sturdy Lattimore, the indispensable T. E. Lawrence, the unkillable Butler (released with the film and with Armand Assante on the cover), and others?the Rouse that I grew up
with, the Rieu that teachers still insist on imposing on seventh graders, the fairly new and somehow forgettable Mandelbaum, and an awfully reliable Norton Critical Edition, with Albert Cook's smart and speakable verse translation. Eliminating the inelegant (Mandelbaum) and the dull (Rieu), recommending one over another, Fagles over Fitzgerald, Fitzgerald over Lattimore, is hard, and so I won't even try. Perhaps nobody should.
(1999) BARBARESE

again these are all up on Jstor, assuming you are a college student and want to read them in full

[Anonymous No.10935187]

>>10935163
To clarify: these are language classes (Latin and Greek, respectively). We skip reading the entire epics in the original simply for want of time, but every student reads those skipped chapters (and most students read the entire work) in some modern translation.

I have never taught a Myth 101 class before, although I remember from my undergrad that we read excerpts from the Iliad (can't remember which books), the whole Odyssey, and excerpts from the Aeneid (probably book 1, 4, 6, and 12) all in English translation.

[Anonymous No.10935196]

>>10934796
What are your thoughts on Emily Wilson's translation?

[Anonymous No.10935219]

>>10934867
For someone much more critical of Fagles:
(1998) WILLET

To be a poet these days is to reject metered composition on the grounds that a desire for meter is a desire for jail and to affect a respect
for colloquial idiom without regard to stylistic propriety, since levels of style along with rhetoric are now things of the past. As a performer-poet,
Prof. Fagles follows both tendencies rigorously. He avoids both accentual- syllabic meter and strict stress meter while larding his verse with the wildest range of colloquial American English to be found in any translation of the
Odyssey. The consequences have been fatal for his version, which makes no advance over earlier ones and in many cases executes some notable retreats. One would like to say nothing but good about a labor that has consumed many years of a dedicated translator, but against the massive adulation lavished on the work, a little reality is in order.

The Russian poet Anna Akhmatova once said that in translating a long narrative poem, the choice of meter is everything. Here Prof. Fagles
faced three metrical examples in his predecessors: (1) a moderately strict five-beat accentual line that often strays into rough iambic pentameter (Fitzgerald), (2) a strict six-beat accentual line (Lattimore) and (3) a well-modulated strict trict iambic pentameter (Mandelbaum). It is clear that he chose Fitzgerald for his basic model, but unaccountably altered it. He worked (as he explains on p. 492) with a five- or six-beat line that tended more to six beats, but
gave himself the freedom to expand the line to seven beats or contract it to three beats in order to accent speech or action. This hotchpotch was supposed to produce "a tighter line more native to English verse" (492). But it produced, first and foremost, rhythmical bloat. Without making the slightest
effort at equirhythmics, he pads every book some 10-15 percent and, in the case of Book 4, a total of 106 lines. The expansions and contractions rarely achieve the expressive point he intended because the accentual meter is too vague and indeterminate to signal any expressive focus. The bloat is
exacerbated by the translator's constant habit of slight, incremental repetition. Repetition is a standard tool in translation, but in his hands it seems to be used promiscuously as a means of heightening the vapid rhythm

(later on, same review ... )
While Prof. Fagles knows his Greek, he also has a habit of mistranslating the Greek in many places for the sake of an aphorism or cliche. This is only an annoyance, but really quite unnecessary since none of the verbal
effects are worth the price.
...

[Anonymous No.10935235]

>>10935219
(Willet, con't)

It would be unfair to deny that this version has some powerful segments, such as Book 11 or Books 21-24. But the cumulative effect of all these
metrical and stylistic decisions has been to create specious dramatic- almost novelistic-effects at the price of speed, directness and simplicity. In most passages, his translation falls well below the accomplishment of his predecessors, particularly below Lattimore. And I doubt anyone would accuse this translator of showing no mercy to an empty line.

____

[Anonymous No.10935295]

wtf is this thread where is the shitposting

[Anonymous No.10935322]

>>10935106
>>10935118
>>10935168
>>10935187
>>10935219
thanks, this is exactly what i needed, much obliged

[Anonymous No.10935367]

>>10935196
I haven't read it yet, so no real thoughts. Can't find any academic reviews either, although the simple fact of its existence has been celebrated among my peers (being the first major woman's translation).

Here's a review from A. Quinn, studied classics at Georgetown and then a MPhil at Cambridge (i.e. she knows her shit). The review obviously reads differently from those above, being NPR and not a Classics journal, but still interesting.

https://www.npr.org/2017/12/02/567773373/emily-wilsons-odyssey-scrapes-the-barnacles-off-homers-hull

"Wilson dispenses gracefully with unnecessary archaisms and flourishes. If you read enough classics in translation, you may come away with the vague idea that much of the Greek literary canon took place in some idyllic part of pre-contemporary England, what with the harks and hails, thous and thees, woes and alases, fair maids and noble lords, and the puzzling fact that everyone's first initial seems to be O.

Wilson's project is basically a progressive one: to scrape away all the centuries of verbal and ideological buildup — the Christianizing (Homer predates Christianity), the nostalgia, the added sexism (the epics are sexist enough as they are), and the Victorian euphemisms — to reveal something fresh and clean. Why call them "handmaidens" when they were slaves? Why insist, as so many translators do, on 19th-century diction when that time had no more in common with Homer's than ours?

Though it's silly to ascribe too much to her gender rather than her skill, Wilson does have a certain double sensibility that often translates male grandeur with a female half-smile. The first book opens, "Tell me about a complicated man." Complicated is her translation for the Greek word polytropos — literally, "of many turns." Complicated means something folded together, something intricate, and layered, so it suits the meaning beautifully. But it also carries the faintest of eyerolls — he's complicated."

[Anonymous No.10935379]

>>10935295
all posting is shitposting

>>10935322
Sure. It was a nice distraction from my own work for a bit. As any classicist with literary aspirations, I would love to someday publish translation, but it's pretty fucking difficult to land a job stable enough to allow the effort. Give me a couple decades and you can shitpost all you want about my translated Catullus or something

[Anonymous No.10935382]

>>10935367
Thanks for the follow-up. That's actually the review that got me interested in reading it. I'm halfway through and enjoying the prose, but this being the first translation I've read I don't have a great reference point. I'll have to pick up a few others and compare.

[Anonymous No.10935485]

>>10935382
Sure. I'll say this though: I believe a capable and motivated student will be provided a lifetime of inspiration from just about any serious English translation of Homer. Engaging deeply with one text has been for thousands of years and likely will be for a few thousand more one of the best ways to sharpen a mind. I would say, unless you are really interested in translation studies or learning Homeric yourself, your time would be better spent more deeply engaging with one translation or moving on to other books you are interested in than in trying to compare translations of a work which you have very limited access to in the original. There are way too many great classics (and just books) out there to spend too much time comparing translations if that act in itself is not your end.

/lit/ has always been a bit more fixated on picking the "Best" translation for books than I think is really useful or healthy -- certainly a valid impulse, but carried out too eagerly here. Just pick one and dive the fuck in.

[Anonymous No.10935513]

>>10935485
Totally understandable. Wilson's translation sounded rad so I grabbed it. I'm enjoying it more than anticipated, which spurred my interest in the differences between translations and what that might add to my enjoyment after finishing this one. Expressing an interest in finding the "best" seems misguided.

[Anonymous No.10935622]

>>10935513
Sure. Do you study any other languages? If translation in the slightest interests you, you ought to be taking something.

[Anonymous No.10935664]

>>10935622
Not currently. In fits and starts I've been learning Japanese in hopes of visiting and not doing anything terribly embarrassing.

[Anonymous No.10937472]

>2018
>still giving Pope sole credit

[Anonymous No.10939156]

>>10934796
Can I be your friend?

[Anonymous No.10939186]

That picture is out of date since Emily Wilson crafted the greatest translation of the Odyssey of all time.

[Anonymous No.10939207]

>>10939186
Could you expand on your thoughts?

[Anonymous No.10939232]

>>10939207
She captures the beauty and enchantment of the ancient poem as well as the suspense and drama of its narrative. Her crisp and musical version is a cultural landmark. Armed with a sharp, scholarly rigour, she has produced a translation that exposes centuries of masculinist readings of the poem.

A woman’s voice: how beautiful to hear it.

[Anonymous No.10939904]

It's been years since I read it and I'm well out of humanities type stuff, but I read the Fagles of The Iliad and Lattimore of Odyssey

The Iliad was much more pleasant and Odyssey dry and turgid. So something to keep in mind if you're interested in faithfulness over readability and such.

At least I think it was Fagles Illiad I read anyway

[Anonymous No.10939924]

>>10939232
So she feminised the author. How is this good? Is Starting with the Greeks going to get #MeTooed?

[Anonymous No.10940008]

>>10939232
Fitzgerald
>Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story
>of that man skilled in all ways of contending
Wilson
>Tell me of a complicated man
Fitzgerald
>children and fools, they killed and feasted on
>the cattle of Lord Hêlios, the Sun,
>and he who moves all day through the heaven
>took from their eyes the dawn of their return
Wilson
>poor fools
>they ate the sun gods cattle
>and the god kept them from home
Wow! True greatness! THE Odyssey of our generation!

[Anonymous No.10940028]

>>10939924
Oh she did much worse then that, friend.
She removed the poetic verse and 'modernised' the dialogue so that it reads more like some article on buzz-feed then it does a foundational work of both Hellenistic culture and the western canon.
She also 'retranslated' (read: completely made up) stretches of dialogue and description to ensure that every male character is portrayed as negatively as possible.

This bastardisation of the work is nothing more then feminist revisionism of the most gross and offensive degree.
It almost does not even surprise me anymore that many tertiary education courses are now considering it the standard translation.

[Anonymous No.10940048]

>>10940028
Almost want to read through to see how extensive this actually is. Someone could write a good book on it.

[Anonymous No.10940558]

>>10935664
Pick up lingua latina. You may find yourself liking Latin more than you expect. If you're dedicated, you can read the Aeneid in the original by this time next year. For Greek, there aren't as many "intuitive learning" kind of textbooks, but if you are actually interested, respond.

>>10939156
Of course, mate.

>>10940028
8/10 bait you'll convince most people here since most people here hate reading

>>10940048
Someone absolutely would write a good book about it, if anything >>10940028 said was true. Picking apart the ideological leanings of authors is literally Classicists favorite hobby. Do you actually think that the people who love reading Greek so much they have decided to devote their entire lives to nothing but reading a dead language, who have memorized most of the epic, who argue endlessly about every detail of every word, who chant Homer at one another for fun, do you think such people would abide someone stealing the most famous book of their discipline, one of the most famous books of all time, and adding stretches of made up dialogue? Or do you think someone is being misogynist on 4chan? You tell me what's more likely.

[Anonymous No.10940607]

>>10940558
Lingua Latina looks great. Mind expanding on the Greek resources you mentioned?

[Anonymous No.10940699]

>>10940607
Sure. As you already know (from whatever you study more seriously), no plan / textbook is as important as your work ethic. Doing something consistently will make you good at it. Just like weightlifting, learning piano, etc. Most autodidacts fail; most attempts to learn language fail. Neither failure, I believe, is due to the program, but rather the person trying to learn. tldr learning is work and you have to try. Easy as that.

You are going to need a textbook first. I used Hanson and Quinn, but don't really suggest it. "Intensive courses" in general are rarely as effected as regular, year-long textbooks. Mastronarde is good. Athenaze is fine. Our school uses Athenaze.

If you don't know any inflected languages, it will be very hard to start with Cambridge's "Reading Greek," but if you do happen to know something like latin (i.e. case based grammar system), the Cambridge method is the closest thing to Osburg's Lingua Latina, and it consistently produces the best intermediate students.

If you are dedicated (20 mins - 1 hour a day), you can build a basic sense of Greek in half a year. Drill flashcards (anki or whatever), and test yourself.

After that, choose authors you are interested in and work through their texts. I would suggest Lysias, Herodotus, Xenophon, Plato, or (believe it or not) Homer to start, even though the latter is a different dialect. Geoffery Steadman has a series of free commentaries on his website designed to help undergrads and high school students reading for the first time. Pic related is a screenshot of his commentary. They are all modeled off of Pharr's Aeneid (1-6), bar none the best intro Aeneid textbook.

The entire Greek canon is online at perseus.tufts.edu Packard's Humanities Institute has an easily searchable Latin / Greek library, too. Philolog.us is the best free online dictionary. That should keep you busy for a while.

tldr
>nut up
>level 1 textbook (athenaze / mastronarde / hanson and Quinn
>level 1.5 reading book (like Cambridge series)
>level 2 easy authors with grammatical commentaries (Lysias, Herodotus, Xenophon, Plato, Homer -- use Steadman for free or search around for commentaries)
>level always practice vocab
>level 3 read whatever you want

[Anonymous No.10940712]

>>10940699
This is excellent. Thanks anon.

[Anonymous No.10941143]

>>10940712
Of course, mate. Good luck out there; make this board a better place. If you ever feel stuck, remember every day you study is a day closer you are to the Greek, the texts that have moved and inspired artists for thousands of years.
and you're that much better than the rest of /lit/. that's always nice

[Anonymous No.10942597]

FRESH AND ROSY FINGERED

[Anonymous No.10942659]

>>10940558
>For Greek, there aren't as many "intuitive learning" kind of textbooks, but if you are actually interested, respond.
Not that anon but do tell.

[Anonymous No.10942665]

>>10940558
>>10940699
Good shit.

[Anonymous No.10942735]

>>10935187

I'm in the middle of re-reading The Odyssey and would you say the second island Odysseus is skippable? A lot of what I read there just felt like filler.

[Anonymous No.10942805]

>>10940028
>She also 'retranslated' (read: completely made up) stretches of dialogue and description

post examples then

[Anonymous No.10942808]

>It's a Telemachos chapter

Why is he so boring?

[Anonymous No.10943443]

>>10942735
If you're reading in English, no reason to skip anything. Each book only takes a half an hour or so. Worst case scenario you get to spend more time with one of the greatest stories ever told.

>>10942805
There aren't any.

>>10942808
Because you aren't using your head / thinking about what your eyes are consuming. Quit reading passively

[Anonymous No.10943620]

>>10943443
>Because you aren't using your head / thinking about what your eyes are consuming. Quit reading passively
B-BUT /lit/ TOLD ME SUBVOCALIZATION IS BAD, FASTER MEANS GOODER


not that guy by the way just making a joke

[Anonymous No.10944672]

>>10941143
Why else would i frequent this Polynesian fish sauce enthusiast forum?

Lingua Latina arriving from Amazon tomorrow. Grabbed the workbook as well because why not. Looking forward to it.

[Anonymous No.10945391]

>think about getting the Fagles box set of The Iliad, The Odyssey and The Aeneid
>see this thread
>be in constant turmoil ever since

Will I ever choose? Pope's poetry seems divine, and all three of the other prosaic ones seem to do a fantastic job, why is it so hard to pick one?

[Anonymous No.10945408]

>>10945391
>Pope's
>>10937472

[Anonymous No.10945427]

>>10934760
All I remember is one talking about sinew of a bow being a nerve to fire a bow

[Anonymous No.10945429]

>>10945408
okay, Pope et al. Happy now?

[Anonymous No.10945974]

>>10944672
Atta kid. Don't get discouraged; learning a language is about as hard a thing as exists. Just remember every day you try, you get better. Soon you'll have intimate access to some of the most beautiful lit in the world.

>>10945391
Don't read Pope first. It will only alienate you further from the text.