Danger of new translations/books

[Anonymous No.19548389]

I want to get back to reading the ancient classics and about ancient history, but seeing all the publishing companies (Penguin for example) are owned by Vanguard-Blackrock (check yahoo finance) should I be concerned the translations are distortions? Where should I get my text from, just Gutenberg or public domain? I honestly preferred the penguin versions (I steal everything from libgen) because they were formatted better and the intros were good but I’m concerned about corruption of the text. Thoughts?

[Anonymous No.19548398]

i doubt blackrock is reaching through its ownership of equity to distort penguin classics translations

[Anonymous No.19548406]

>>19548389
Just learn the language

>>19548398
Cope

[Anonymous No.19548427]

>>19548406
There are too many to learn them all, I just need ideas for my own writings

[Anonymous No.19548496]

>>19548406
>noooo you have to be an absolute schizo at every opportunity!
Seriously though some modern translations may be good but when it comes to ancient literature I doubt you can top the classic translations

[Anonymous No.19548593]

>>19548389
are you fucking retarded? those companies are in the business of making money and diversifying their portfolios, not corrupting ancient works.

[Anonymous No.19548691]

Learn Coptic, Koine Greek, Latin, Aramaic, Ancient Hebrew

Spend a few years training to become an archaeologist

Travel to the Middle East and dig up ancient payrus manuscripts

Learn ancient history through the primary sources.

[Anonymous No.19548692]

Ancient classics will always be corrupted. The 1890 Gutenberg version of Epictetus's Discourses translates "Zeus" as "God" which does help the modern reader understand the stoic view of the divine, but also makes them seem more Christian than they were. You don't need to learn Greek or Latin, but learn the original terms used for key concepts like God, love, virtue, being or whatever they're talking about. Does anyone know of any translations with good footnotes for this kind of thing?

[Anonymous No.19548712]

>>19548389
Older translations are often worse than more modern ones though.

[Anonymous No.19548716]

>>19548593
>are you fucking retarded? those companies are in the business of making money and diversifying their portfolios, not corrupting ancient works.
I suppose OP is making the argument that it will be in their best financial interest to do just that, given changing social values.

[Anonymous No.19548751]

>>19548427
>I just need ideas for my own writings
Then you should not worry about any of this, you're not a philologist.

[Anonymous No.19548772]

>>19548389
Penguin does not really do woke shit in their main line, that's more like Norton (they published Emily Wilson's Odyssey).

[Anonymous No.19548796]

This obsession with corruption of the old texts is so retarded. I've seen people on here claim that "they" are both trying to make old texts repulsive and evil by stressing their racism, homophobia etc., AND that they're removing the parts that are racist and homophobic.
The truth is, people who have spent a decade or more studying an ancient or foreign language are not very likely to deform the text willingly, because the entire point of their studying was to get to the original real thing.
For the first case, the only example that I've seen in practice is Emily Wilson's Odyssey, which has garnered a fuckton of criticism. Search warosu archive and see for yourself, its interpretative decisions are fairly widely known. Stupid shit like stressing that the girls at Odysseus' court(?) were slaves, and such stuff. Academic cucks generally complimented it (not without dissident voices), but with some googling and checking what /lit/ says about it, you'll quickly figure out what's up.
For the latter approach, there are two cases that I have seen mentioned on this board. The first one was brought up by a retard who claimed that they removed Aristotle's criticism of homosexuality from the Nicomachean ethics on gutenberg.org. I compared the text with several different translations, and all the newer, widely available ones had it correctly. The one on Gutenberg didn't have it most likely because it was a victorian-era translation that wanted to hide any mention of homosexuality whatsoever. The other case was a translation of Divine Comedy not into English, but into Dutch or something, and absolutely everyone shat on it, because it removed Muhammad from Inferno.
In reality, the latter cases are historically more common, but not because of any modern leftist ideology. It was mainly stuff like >>19548692, or e.g. when I searched for some Roman poet in Russian, it turned out that all of his poems have been translated into Russian twice, but no physical edition actually contains all the poems, because the censorship (first in tsarist Russia and then in SSSR) forbade them from publishing the homoerotic ones.
So in 90% of cases the texts won't be "corrupted". They can, however, have other faults, such as unintended semantic or aesthetic failures, but that's a different topic.

[Anonymous No.19548858]

>>19548712
no cap? on god? frfr tho?

[Anonymous No.19550304]

>>19548858
Yeah, not only is it a case of having access to better resources and more manuscripts, but a lot of older translations are have had parts that offend Victorian sensibilities toned down. Iirc Benjamin jowlette is particularly bad for this and a lot of cheap copies use his because in public domain

[Anonymous No.19550449]

>>19548796
Yeah lol. The conspiratorial mindset gets tiresome.

[Anonymous No.19550485]

>>19550304
you frfr tho?

[Anonymous No.19550500]

>>19548712

[Anonymous No.19550739]

>>19550485
Yeah check out jowetts translation of Plato’s symposium it’ll give you a good laugh

[Anonymous No.19550757]

>>19548796
an obsessive quest of purity is typical of the pseudo-literary /pol/tard
his thirst never will be quenched, until he can go back in time and suckle on Plato's tit