The Odyssey, Homer

[Anonymous No.21861379]

I've started a hobbyist/amateur academic adventure into the Greeks. I finished The Iliad (tr. Fagles) well over two years ago but have been distracted by other tasks. now I'm back on track and ready to really dive in.
what is your favorite translation of The Odyssey? I have Fitzgerald in hand and enjoyed the little I've read so far. I'm considering Lattimore for the fidelity, but some passage comparisons between the two have not resulted in much daylight

[Anonymousn No.21861384]

ofc

[Anonymous No.21861426]

>>21861384
Care to elaborate, anon?

[Anonymous No.21861515]

boomp

[Anonymous No.21861612]

I just finished the Iliad and now I'm reading the Odyssey, am I missing out on much by using the E.V. Rieu Penguin translations?

[Anonymous No.21861621]

>>21861612
I haven't heard of Rieu. Here is a starting point to see if Rieu is indeed your preference: https://www.reddit.com/r/classics/comments/l7yl6h/every_modern_iliad_translation_compared/

[Melinda Huber No.21861640]

Rodney Merrill. Very faithful and in dactylic hexameter

If you want a taste of his translation style, here is his translation of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo

https://chs.harvard.edu/8-the-homeric-hymn-to-apollo-translated-by-rodney-merrill-2/<div class="xa23b"><span class="xa23t"></span><span class="xa23i"></span></div>

[Casey Herman No.21861647]

>>21861640
>dactylic hexameter
if you have time, can you link a good resource to better understand this and other poetic structures/meters/etc.?<div class="xa23b"><span class="xa23t"></span><span class="xa23i"></span></div>

[Anonymous No.21861665]

>>21861647
No. I will simply say that it is six measures per line in Greek, each measure is either a dactyls (long syllable followed by two short syllable) or a spondee (two long syllables). In English there is not quantative verse (quantative verse poetry sounds like Quran recitation or the call to prayer, it is what the Divine Comedy and ancient Latin and Greek and Persian poetry use but it is extinct now except among Arabs), it is qualitative, so instead of long and short syllables the translator uses stressed and unstressed, (example the world “power” stresses the first syllable but the second is unstressed which you can tell if you speak it)

[Anonymous No.21861701]

>>21861665
thanks anon. im watching some yt vids on this now

[Anonymous No.21861739]

I'm not usually one to shill the Barnes and Noble print editions, but the translation theirs has in poetic verse is really cool. I bought an academic copy online translated by Picard which was not in poetic verse and was left wishing I'd just bought the Barnes and Noble edition with the chipped mural of the sirens photographed on the cover

[Anonymous No.21861798]

>>21861739
The Barnes and Noble Beowulf (translated by McNamara) is also the very best translation available imo

[Anonymous No.21861812]

>>21861379
>he wasn't consistent with his translators
Oh well no going back now op

[Anonymous No.21861845]

>>21861798
I was surprised at how good barnes n nobles shakespeare was

[Anonymous No.21861890]

>>21861812
I always try to get different flavors - I do the same with the Russians, though I'm partial to P&V.
>>21861798
What makes McNamara superior IYO?

[Anonymous No.21862673]

>>21861890
P&V is almost always the best except for their Anna Karenina translation which is absolutely execrable and uses a much different approach than they normally do (their War and Peace translation is great tho) and turn much of the intensity and quirkiness of the novel into midwit prose (and this is actually their bestselling translation due to Oprah raving about it). Garnett by contrast has a nice Anna Karenina translation whereas with Dostoevsky she is far inferior to P&V but the best translation of Anna Karenina out there is Schwartz.

McNamara is much, much more faithful than other verse translations, Beowulf is poem that translators really feel free to jazz up. McNamara remains faithful and still manages to translate the poem into the same sort of poetry using prolific alliteration and the bifurcated parallelism of the lines which is accentuated by a pause.

[Anonymous No.21862837]

>>21862673
I think you're putting too much love onto "literal" translations. Even with P+V from the top of my head describing the Underground Man as "wicked" instead of "spiteful" is just foolish. As for Beowulf I can actually read Old English and I'll not shift from Tolkien for capturing the essence of the poem while also keeping the structure.

[Anonymous No.21862967]

>>21861426
What's there to elaborate? We have threads to shit on her translation every week. Extremely simplistic and soulless, written in iambic verse using short words for ease of consumption. Feels the opposite of grandiose and epic.
Wiki lists English translations
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_translations_of_Homer
I like Fagles and Lattimore for their fluffy poetics, and also Samuel Butler (1900). Rodney Merrill is probably the best out of the new ones. But I haven't checked that many of them (including Rieu), Wikipedia excerpts don't count - have to open the whole book and read/compare some.

[Anonymous No.21863600]

>>21861384
I genuinely don't get how her translation even got accepted

[Yusuf Reis !!WJh3Qmu5nf/ No.21863618]

>>21862837
It's not foolish at all, you read that article and so think so, but in fact it is a perfect translation. The Underground Man wants to be wicked just like the the sort of men who want to be psychopaths but are just shut ins. But he admits to himself he is really and insignificant nothing and he is not truly evil because that would suggest he is significant. That article is bad. It also faults P&V for using "crooks" instead of "swindlers" in Gogol but crook is phonetically much closer to the Russian monosyllable which is used as an expletive. The character reiterating it is genuinely outraged and hostile, not simply calling people rascals. The P&V is awful for Anna Karenina precisely because they do for idiomatic instead of literal and it comes off as common midwit English instead of the heightened emotional and quirky way of talking Tolstoy uses in the book, for example in their version Levin feels "fear" from Kitty whereas in Garnett and Schwartz it is "terror". But with their other work they are literal, and this is especially important in Dostoevsky since he uses exaggerated and over the top depictions to achieve what is called in Russian literature "defamiliarization", that is, to make something normally familiar feel uncanny and weird, and show what we take for granted as "normal" is due to our being used to it. But if we look at it from another angle, it is extremely weird and nonsensical. Kafka, influenced by Dostoevsky, would exaggerate this effect even more to achieve his brilliant work

[Yusuf Reis !!WJh3Qmu5nf/ No.21863648]

>>21862837
As for your support of Tolkien's translation, you most likely won't shift because you haven't read McNamara's translation, not because you read it and judged Tolkien superior.

Also, in support of my emphasis on a translation being literal, I find concurrence in both Goethe and Nabokov. Goethe said Shakespeare ought to be given a literal translation into German because it is better to preserve the soul of Shakespeare than the body, and Nabokov excoriated translators who jazzed up their translations to appeal to mediocre taste, hence why he strived for a very literal translation of Eugene Oregon and A Hero of Our Time, and even went so far as to say no other English rendering of these works was in fact a translation but a pseudo-translation, a remake, a jazz variation on them

[Anonymous No.21863676]

>>21861379
Lattimore is the best if you're just looking to have a litgasm and enjoy something that resembles meter, but there's no point in shooting for fidelity and then not getting a translation with has the original Greek for a line-by-line comparison. The Loeb Classical Library is always readily available for that, and then you'll at least have the "real" Iliad to compare all of your other translations with, which is really the only way to get any "daylight", as you say.