"maverick polyphemos" was the best for me. Imagining john mccain mumbling about eating people had me rolling
Funny how few shits people give about it around here, considering that her Odyssey was the laughing stock of this board for years.
There's a joke in there about her being the lolcow of helios or something
I think she wrote it so that it could be assigned to american high schoolers, who are by and large functionally illiterate. Functionally illiterate adults can read it too with ease, making it a book that is very easy to sell to masses of people (who are mostly unconcerned with actual literary and poetical beauty). It's a genius marketing move, worthy of our wretched pseudo-culture.
I teach undergrad and can confirm that it's being taught in high schools. I teach it in our lit course sequence and get students who are almost convinced an elaborate joke was being played on them when they were reading an actual legitimate translation.
8 months ago
Anonymous
*I teach gayles, to clarify. They've been taught the Wilson in high school. Whoops
She appeared at least once on a book tour with one of the angry Black folks current at the time that advocated for abolishing the canon. When she was queried about whether or not she agreed that the canon should be abolished, she did, in fact agree with his sentiment. One can argue that she was intimidated into it, but she never made a countering statement afterwards. It appears that her extremely poor translations are an attempt to refute Homer through sullying his work.
homies will get offended at wanting to abolish the canon, feminism, and multiculturalism, then turn around and trash Bloom in the same breath
8 months ago
Anonymous
I am no expert on Bloom, but I would gladly trash him regarding any assault that he made on the canon. What inconsistency do you find in this?
8 months ago
Anonymous
Bloom is a defender of the canon. /misc/tards attack him simply because he's israeli. The point he was making is that /misc/tarda are cringe identitarians, they don't care about the canon.
8 months ago
Anonymous
>/pol/tarda are cringe identitarians
So are israelites. >CTRL+F ''jew'' >1 match found >(You)
Great. You homosexuals have to make everything about the israelites. Now, this is a israelite thread. Good job.
8 months ago
Anonymous
moron
8 months ago
Anonymous
So it begins. You guys are so predictable.
8 months ago
Anonymous
Thank you. You understand. Some of Bloom’s writings would get “holy based!”’s if written by some right wing twitter e-celeb. He literally spoke out against the dangers of multiculturalism, feminism, and abolishing the canon in the 90’s. He will always be seen as the champion of the canon, and the irony is that he may be the hero /misc/-ish anons want but they’re too dumb to realize it and blinded by their prejudice. Bloom is harder to cancel because he is israeli. He ain’t quite the same as those old dead white men. Anyway, I think it’s silly to argue about abolishing the canon or not. It is there, as I view the canon as majorly influential works. No matter how you twist yourself in a pretzel, you can’t argue that Shakespeare, Homer, Whitman, Montaigne, etc aren’t influential. People are perfectly entitled to have favorites that aren’t part of the canon. Most of my favorite books aren’t canonical but that doesn’t mean I don’t recognize what is influential or dislike them. Who cares what Emily Wilson says? At this point Emily Wilson threads are pseudo-/misc/ dog whistles
8 months ago
Anonymous
Agree 100%
8 months ago
Anonymous
>Who cares what Emily Wilson says?
Apparently, she is being taught in high school now. I forget, am I supposed to love her because she is not israeli?
8 months ago
Anonymous
You're supposed to hate her because she's a woman and a a liberal. As per the /misc/tard manual.
8 months ago
Anonymous
OK. Not because the passages of hers that I have seen are shit and because she believes in abolition of the canon? Got it.
8 months ago
Anonymous
Anyone should be laughed at for childish renditions (if they're pushed as adult oriented translations, that is). Plenty of males who would do this too.
There are respected female translators around here, I think. Probably a lot of anons who would recommend either Dorothy Sayers' or Edith Grossman's Dante.
8 months ago
Anonymous
Correct. But /misc/tards are identitarians. They don't care about quality or likeminded opinions if they come from a person of a group they dislike. That's why they dislike Bloom for being israeli despite fundamentally agreeing with him.
8 months ago
Anonymous
you're the only one bringing up /misc/, moron
8 months ago
Anonymous
I'm simply explaining their MO. Sorry that bothers you.
8 months ago
Anonymous
You are a weirdo.
8 months ago
Anonymous
ok
8 months ago
Anonymous
>You're supposed to hate her because she's a woman and a a liberal
8 months ago
Anonymous
Manuals are used for maximum effectiveness so this seems correct.
8 months ago
Anonymous
If 90% of the world thought 2+2=5, it doesn’t make it true. She can say whatever she wants and it makes no difference. I’m not going to pretend I have any interest in her or followed her opinions, but part of me feels she is doing this for a certain type of publicity and brownie points. Anyway, overwhelming majority of people don’t know or don’t care about literature and that will never change. I don’t mind as reading is a solitary endeavor and I get enjoyment, and often knowledge, or I take something away. If the masses look down upon my reading hobby, or, what is more likely, don’t care, oh well. There are a couple dozens writers whose influence is strong and wide reaching. It is obvious to anyone in the know. No matter who says what, that will never change as the past can’t be erased. Since I’m here, obviously I like to share my experiences and hobby but I’ve long stopped caring what others think or say. This goes triply if it doesn’t affect me. I suggest taking a similar mindset. People can never abolish the canon, best they can do is use different books as influences, but at the end of the day, that new canon will be built upon the shoulders of THE canon
8 months ago
Anonymous
>If 90% of the world thought 2+2=5, it doesn’t make it true.
Correct, but if 90% of the world thought 2+2=5, how on earth would mathematics progress? This is the issue. It is harder to produce a classic in this climate.
8 months ago
Anonymous
By realizing that literature is dead and almost everything worth reading has already been written. It sucks but it is what it is
8 months ago
Anonymous
Literature is more alive than God.
8 months ago
Anonymous
I beg to differ. Overwhelming majority of books and writers worth reading have already been written. Literature has been dead for a couple decades and Emily Wilson has no bearing on that no matter what she says. Hell, if anything maybe getting younger people to “build their own canon” will revitalize the medium.
8 months ago
Anonymous
>Overwhelming majority of books and writers worth reading have already been written.
Majority? You don't know, you can't even know the total number of great books worth reading. It's an assessment you can only do after humanity is extinct, not before. This is just comfortable arrogance.
8 months ago
Anonymous
I can only speak for myself, but if I line was drawn in the sand at this exact moment in time, and I was given the choice of only being able to read one side of the line in time, either from this moment onwards, or everything in the past, I sure as hell know what one I’d pick
8 months ago
Anonymous
>You don't know, you can't even know the total number of great books worth reading
You are technically correct. Finding that truth on the matter would require a life study in order to come to a sharp conclusion. Then we have questions of weighting value based on publishing rates against value of the individual works. This is an unreasonable demand to place on an individual when anyone can look at the current state of affairs and make a reasonable assumption.
8 months ago
Anonymous
>maybe getting younger people to “build their own canon” will revitalize the medium.
Everyone has their own favorites already. Not sure what you mean.
8 months ago
Anonymous
I’m not sure exactly what the phrase means either hence the quotation marks. But some people clearly have an issue dividing what their favorites are and what is influential. I already said the canon cannot be rebuilt because the canon is influential works, and one cannot change the past
8 months ago
Jon Kolner
It is not either you support Bloom or you support that, mr reductive reasoning.
this is just meh, i dont really see the need for the hate or even where the energy for it comes from, sure its not as fancy but theres tons of other translations
For comparison, Samuel Butler's 1900 prose translation:
Then Athene said, "Yes, father stranger, I will show you the house you want, for Alcinous lives quite close to my own father. I will go before you and show the way, but say not a word as you go, and do not look at any man, nor ask him questions; for the people here cannot abide strangers, and do not like men who come from some other place. They are a sea-faring folk, and sail the seas by the grace of Poseidon in ships that glide along like thought, or as a bird in the air.
ok so how would you translate "ξεῖνε πάτερ" so that's it's five syllables to fit her iambic pentameter? athena is disguised as a young girl, wouldn't a young girl address an unknown man as mister? is she going to say father foreigner? that sounds totally unnatural and father stranger doesn't even fit the meter.
8 months ago
Anonymous
>ok so how would you translate "ξεῖνε πάτερ" so that's it's five syllables to fit her iambic pentameter?
strange Black person homosexual
8 months ago
Anonymous
Using Mr. that way makes it sound af if she is mocking him. Also, if the way you structured your verse forces you to sound silly, you are supposed to blot it out and write it in some other way; it's not as if her translation is particularly literal so it wouldn't even be hard.
πάτερ in this context is just a way to respectfully adress an older male, so she could just have left it untranslated or gone with something like sir or master.
8 months ago
Anonymous
I wouldnt bother, because there are several sufficient translations going as far back as the 1600s.
8 months ago
Anonymous
alien padre, of course
8 months ago
Anonymous
>doesn't even fit the meter.
Like Emily gives a frick about meter lol her translation is a moronic rollercoaster
8 months ago
Anonymous
I see nothing wrong with 'stranger from afar' or some variation of such, like 'strange man from afar/abroad' if you wanted to directly stipulate 'man', or similar
8 months ago
Anonymous
You could unironically translate it to "Kind stranger, ... "
It's the way a child would adress a foreign man in a respectful way.
8 months ago
Anonymous
The meaning is "elder from afar"
8 months ago
Anonymous
Using Mr. that way makes it sound af if she is mocking him. Also, if the way you structured your verse forces you to sound silly, you are supposed to blot it out and write it in some other way; it's not as if her translation is particularly literal so it wouldn't even be hard.
πάτερ in this context is just a way to respectfully adress an older male, so she could just have left it untranslated or gone with something like sir or master.
idk, the BBC says "Mr Sunak" all the fricking time
what's the difference
8 months ago
Anonymous
Sunak is a name. "Mr Foreigner" sounds condescending.
8 months ago
Anonymous
many names are based on location
hamburger = someone from hamburg
foreigner = someone from a foreign land
what's your point
8 months ago
Anonymous
Nowadays when Mr. is not followed by the name of a person or the name of an office, like president or speaker, it is generally humorous
8 months ago
Anonymous
ok, Mr moron.
8 months ago
Anonymous
Your problem is that you think Homer wrote like a BBC journo
You have terminal brainrot
8 months ago
Anonymous
homer also didn't "write" like an 18th century englishman either
8 months ago
Anonymous
But in the 18th century writing poetry still meant distancing yourself from everyday speech. Of course Pope does not sound anywhere near as impossibly odd and archaic as Homer sounded to an ancient Greek but he is certainly closer than Wilson. Purposefully modernising Homer completely obfuscates the most evident part of his aesthetics.
8 months ago
Anonymous
Correct, all english translations lack in expression. They try capture the epicness differently than Homer in their foul language
8 months ago
Anonymous
I take it you can read and understand the subtleties of Homeric Greek, if not, shut the frick up.
I think she wrote it so that it could be assigned to american high schoolers, who are by and large functionally illiterate. Functionally illiterate adults can read it too with ease, making it a book that is very easy to sell to masses of people (who are mostly unconcerned with actual literary and poetical beauty). It's a genius marketing move, worthy of our wretched pseudo-culture.
>I will use my translation of a classic as a platform for modern political happenings
And they say Marxists didn't infiltrate into academia. They treat everything as a Trojan horse for their bs.
We all research the past because we're looking for the answers of the problems of our present, and the past always holds value exclusively in reference to the present, it is worthless by itself.
To her it's the soggy knee and pandering to third worlders, to chuds it's to learn at which historical crossroads did the west take the wrong turn. The sentiment is the same.
Will someone eventually start up a twitter 2.0 or will we be free from this type of AIDS?
8 months ago
Anonymous
Economic reality always asserts itself in the end.
This is bad news for socialism, which depends on other people's money. Socialism dies without subsidy.
8 months ago
Anonymous
Twitter's cofounder already started Bluesky (invite only so far)
>And they say Marxists didn't infiltrate into academia.
Right? they totally did, and this is coming from a guy who was left leaning going into college.
Went to what is essentially an Engineering school in the southern US, and my English / History classes were all like that. I distinctly remember being in a classroom with like 28 white girls when we started reading the Symposium, and one girl said (paraphrasing) “Do we have to read about dead white guys?”
Ancient Greeks, ancient fricking Greeks who existed before the modern conception of race / sexuality / etc. And she successfully boiled them down to “stale pale males” like we were talking about the Victorians are some shit. And whats worse the limp wristed professor basically agreed with her but added “its still important.”
Academia is no longer functional, unless you went for a pure STEM field. Or maybe Business where everyone’s an butthole any way so it all cancels out.
>And they say Marxists didn't infiltrate into academia.
Nobody says this. Universities were left-wing brainwashing machines even when I was there, in the late 1980s. Luckily I studied Maths and then Information Technology, which are pretty resistant to political bias.
>Luckily I studied Maths and then Information Technology, which are pretty resistant to political bias.
Nobody tell him. Let him dream and let it last.
>And they say Marxists didn't infiltrate into academia.
Ah geez dude, it's been so long since I read kapital, can you point to the specific volume and chapter where Marx talks about how we need to translate Homer's epics into bad prose and misrepresent the core themes?
>And they say Marxists didn't infiltrate into academia.
Nobody says this. Universities were left-wing brainwashing machines even when I was there, in the late 1980s. Luckily I studied Maths and then Information Technology, which are pretty resistant to political bias.
Curricula are political tools. They contain an implicit political framework. Very few professors will teach you something with absolutely no applications in up and coming markets. For example, Euclid's proofs are beautiful, but I never learnt them in primary, secondary, or tertiary education. I had to read it myself. It makes sense - these proofs give you great insight into mathematics and its history, but there are more readily profitable modes of proof you can learn. Your course list was probably primarily analysis and statistics, maybe some stuff on number theory to cover cryptography.
No one alive went to a nonpoliticised university; since the early 20th century the notion of academia has been bastardised into any study that will turn a profit.
>you're not a marxist unless you do exactly what marx said verbatim, also real marxism has never been tried and there are no real marxists
Actually good bait.
This lmao, it’s so funny to hear people complaints about how university are becoming “too political“ when the school system in general is almost entirely at the mercy of our economic system, as if the market is some kind of politics free, objective Tool of Reason.
8 months ago
Anonymous
>But anon, the market is always right! How could you possibly deny such a self-evident truth!
braindead leftist analysis. the turn to "practical" education in universities started in the 19th century to support the military. that's why we call them "civil engineers" today because originally the default kind of engineer was a military engineer. you can trace this back to german/prussian militarism. the vast majority of colleges and universities are non-profit, so the idea to turn a profit is odd indeed. elite universities like stanford, mit, and columbia were built with massive military spending. math majors are some of the laziest people you will find on campus hoping to cram their way through college without having to write any research papers or write any code. absolute crumb bums and you are no exception.
8 months ago
Anonymous
>braindead leftist analysis
Can you explain what you mean by leftist? I don't identify with any political movement so it's interesting you think I'm left-wing.
>started in the 19th century
Yeah, and it was the only option since the 20th century. The 19th century still had some liberal colleges floating about. Seems like you're trying to correct me on a technicality, only I didn't say anything false.
>majority are non-profit
What's that got to do with this discussion? Universities don't need to turn a profit to be complicit in pumping out economic units. The entire function of the modern university is to palm to someone else the employer's responsibility to train his employees.
>math majors are some of the laziest people you will find on campus
This is about the only true thing you said; work smarter not harder. I didn't have to cram though. Laziness is a virtue in this day and age where industry amounts to scamming people, gambling on the future, or otherwise pumping toxins into the air and ocean.
>write any code
Code shmode, I wrote code for fun during my studies to help me with solving problems that my professors never told us to solve. Sounds like a bunch of seethe over my having the luxury to read beyond assigned tasks. Sorry you picked a brainlet course that forced you to waste every precious minute on menial tasks to "prepare" you for the "workforce" lmaa
>can you point to the specific volume and chapter where Marx talks about how we need to translate Homer's epics into bad prose and misrepresent the core themes?
Marxist =/= Marxian
8 months ago
Anonymous
Now you're just inventing words to fit your specific worldview. Admit you've been propagandised and move on with life.
How do Greek dekinais justify themselves? Practically every "based and redpilled" author you can think of knew some Greek. What excuse do you have not to learn?
Loeb Classical library publishes Ancient Greek texts with prose translations into English on the oppposite page
Readily available in Burgerland and Bongland
Not sure about anyplace else though
Lol. It’s interesting how Oxford Classical Texts are so much more expensive than the average book (going by Amazon cost) because they figure if you can read Latin or Ancient Greek you are educated and have $$
8 months ago
Anonymous
There's also the dynamic pricing algorithm that Amazon uses. It figures out your tastes based on your past purchases, and bumps up the price for things it knows you want.
8 months ago
Anonymous
but you could just browse amazon on a different computer and put it in your cart before you log in? moreover, if the price ended up being higher than their competitors you would just shop somewhere else. really lame conspiracy theory, dude.
8 months ago
Anonymous
>really lame conspiracy theory,
lmgtfy
8 months ago
Anonymous
ahh yes "influencermarketinghub.com" the authority on amazon's pricing strategy...but suppose they are credible: >Amazon's dynamic pricing algorithms continuously evaluate, review, and update the prices of millions of its products multiple times a day, ensuring that they offer the most competitive prices to shoppers, ensuring retention and brand loyalty
the most "competitive prices" means the lowest prices. >https://sell.amazon.com/tools/automate-pricing
it's actually a way to force 3rd party sellers to compete with each other to have the lowest price to receive preferential placement in amazon search results. your conspiracy theory that they charge you more for stuff you want is completely wrong, of course.
8 months ago
Anonymous
Go to bed, Jeff. You got found out, it's over.
8 months ago
Anonymous
if amazon charged more, people would just go to target, walmart, or barnes and noble. amazon is not a monopoly no matter what biden's stooges at the ftc say.
8 months ago
Anonymous
Really? Can you game the system by searching schlock on your account but browsing what you really want while not signed in? I’m semi embarrassed to admit I like prince watching on Amazon. When I see books I want get below a certain price I’ll pull the trigger and feel I did good. It’s not like that $2-10 I saved even means anything to my wallet either
8 months ago
Anonymous
i always watch the price on protein powder. it's pretty volatile. you can get good discounts sometimes. probably because it takes up a lot of space in their warehouse and has an expiration date.
8 months ago
Anonymous
Any recs on a brand that's not adulterated crap?
8 months ago
Anonymous
Not him, but some of the big booksellers on ebay will jack their prices on an item once they see that someone has it loaded in their cart or saved in their watchlist. When I am shopping for books, I make physical notes on paper rather than leave the electronic evidence that I am interested.
8 months ago
Anonymous
That shipping is because I live in Japan, anywhere in the West will be much cheaper. There are plenty of options in the US and Europe
They are more expensive because they are specialty texts, printed in smaller batches and with a limited readership. If you buy used they really aren't that bad, I find Loeb and OCT routinely for $10-20. Teubner are expensive.
8 months ago
Anonymous
I agree that those factors play into it but there is definitely a certain prestige connected to a higher income bracket. As an aside, Japan is a weird place. I went for a week some years ago and random girls would come up to me to take pics with me. Making the peace sign and all. I wonder if they thought I was a celebrity? Some brute forced the pic. ‘‘Twas strange
This c**t's Odyssey was BTFO here:
https://kirkcenter.org/reviews/a-coat-of-varnish/
Excerpt:
Wilson also lapses into bizarre circumlocutions around the story of the Cyclops. Homer describes Polyphemus, who eats six of Odysseus’s men raw, as “athemistos”—literally something like “without a sense of divine right or wrong,” but “lawless” usually does the job in English. Lack of respect for themis, true right and wrong, is posited by Homer’s contemporary Hesiod as the cause of all human evil. Wilson, however, decides in her introduction that the story of the Cyclops is really a story about colonialism (“the Polyphemus episode seems to meditate uneasily on the processes of colonization”), and hence it is her duty to resist any tendency to dehumanize the sixty-foot-tall, one-eyed, flesh-eating son of the sea-god. She translates athemistos as “maverick,” an offense not only against sensibility, but also against the aesthetics of her poem—the word leaps off the page, wildly inappropriate to Wilson’s typical register. Needless to say I just about fell over laughing. And huperphialos, which she is happy to render “insolent” and “arrogant” when it comes to the suitors, she changes to “highminded” for Polyphemus. The sight of drunk Polyphemus vomiting up wine and chunks of human flesh in his cave was not enough to get Wilson to shy away from calling him “highminded.” I suppose ideology is not dead. She also uses the odd circumlocution “the Cyclopic people” for the Greek plural Cyclopes, which also jars. The shame of all this is that it subverts her own thesis: she claims the passage has some relevance to colonization. It’s much easier for a student to see the resonance between this episode and Kipling’s “lesser breeds without the Law” if athemistos is translated “lawless.” But as I have said, it is very hard to do any kind of close reading of Homer using Wilson’s translation alone. It simply is not faithful enough.
I made the mistake of reading the New Yorker article hyping this translation and worked myself up into a self-righteous misogynist wrath. Then I remembered I never finished the Iliad. I got about halfway through in college and fell behind and never finished because of other course deadlines. So I decided it was time to finish it. I started over from the beginning with Lattimore’s translation and am again about halfway through.
So I do have to credit this ‘daddy issues’ bong for inspiring me to read The Iliad. I just ain’t reading her translation.
She did a reading of sections of her translation of The Odessy and dressed up in costumes for each character (that picture is the dog). So basically female autism and this:
>woman writes thoroughly mediocre odyssey translation >uses her connections + a very clever agent / PR agency to drum up a press junket billing it as some vaguely FEMINIST ACCOMPLISHMENT (even though she's far from the first woman to translate homer, and among the worst) >right wingers smell astroturf and get mad but are too stupid to articulate it so they just go "FRICK... WOMEN?" most of the time >this paradoxically confirms FEMINISM is taking place to moron normies who want to be seen holding Homer (they just learned what homer is) >PR campaign successful.jpg >emily wilson's empty sad shitty life as a low tier academic now has something resembling meaning and eventfulness for a moment >moment fades >"I'LL... I'LL..... TRANSLATE THE ILIAD TOO? JUST AS BADLY? GET MY AGENT ON THE HORN, I NEED ANOTHER TEMPEST IN A TEAPOT BREWED"
Great job honey, you spent another several years translating another text that clearly brings you 1/100th the joy it brought to all those unknown workaday translators who simply did it out of love, all so that you could go deeper into a some termagant internet persona that doesn't bring joy into your life either. Now learn Sanskrit and spend 20 years making subpar translations of the Upanishads that nobody asked for too. Or you know, you could quit trying to be a "public intellectual" (momentarily blogged-about termagant) and go hug your kids and do something you actually enjoy.
>>"I'LL... I'LL..... TRANSLATE THE ILIAD TOO? JUST AS BADLY? GET MY AGENT ON THE HORN, I NEED ANOTHER TEMPEST IN A TEAPOT BREWED"
I don't mind this part. If you do one, you gotta do the other.
>you think she has kids?
I am pretty sure that that was his point. She could have. She may even reach for them in the night, and talk to them - all in vain. What a waste.
>you think she has kids?
I am pretty sure that that was his point. She could have. She may even reach for them in the night, and talk to them - all in vain. What a waste.
While we have yet another Odyssey / Iliad translation thread going, has anyone read the Caroline Alexander or Anthony Verity translations? How do they compare against the established versions like gayles and Lattimore? They are also fairly new translations, but there seem to be very few reviews online compared to Wilson's translation which took all the spotlight.
I read Verity. It's a prose translation but to me that does not matter. I found it very good and faithful to the cultural origins that the Odyssey has, in terms of how it reads and what type of atmosphre is present in the lines it really gives off the impression that you are reading a quasi-divine tale of gods and men, a respectful translation unlike this shit which does nothing but belittle the culture that gave birth and status to the Homeric poems.
Honestly, English is such a simplistic and ugly language, that making it like a 5 year old moron wrote it is the standard. It's not like English is a Romance language or Russian, Greek, etc.
>Honestly, English is such a simplistic and ugly language, that making it like a 5 year old moron wrote it is the standard. It's not like English is a Romance language or Russian, Greek, etc.
>Honestly
Honest comes from Old French "oneste/honeste" >Simplistic
Simple comes from old French, derived from the latin simplus >Language
Old french "langage", obviously from the latin "lingua" (tongue) >Standard
Again from old french >etc.
Self-explanatory
>Honestly, English is such a simplistic and ugly language, that making it like a 5 year old moron wrote it is the standard. It's not like English is a Romance language or Russian, Greek, etc.
>Honestly
Honest comes from Old French "oneste/honeste" >Simplistic
Simple comes from old French, derived from the latin simplus >Language
Old french "langage", obviously from the latin "lingua" (tongue) >Standard
Again from old french >etc.
Self-explanatory
You can speak English just using Latin words, like this sentence. It's more or less French.
>It's more or less French.
Aside from you know, being nothing like French in grammar or daily vocabulary.
An English speaker cannot read a paragraph of French and understand what is being said, not in any significant detail at least. Canada should be living proof that having some vocabulary overlap does NOT equal "being the same", Anglophone Canadians and boomer Quebeckers cannot communicate.
I'm increasingly convinced that these opinions are simply held by ESLs who lack the skill to express themselves fully in English and so they conclude it must be bad. I have encountered the same opinions about GSLs learning German.
On the subject of heretical translations of classics, I recently enjoyed the prose Iliad by the War Nerd, aside from the two or three Sopranos references he shoehorned in.
>Just a simple Lattimore chad myself >Frick the b***h will never read her stupid translation
Came here to post this. I've read Chapman's and Pope's translations, and Lattimore's is still better. What a legend he was, we shall not see his like again.
So anons must know that Homer can never be approximated in English translations, surely? Some may do certain parts well, while failing in others. In the English world, Homer takes on the roll of a storyteller. Many translators and poets have put their own spin and flavor using him as a guidebook. And frankly, if you cannot read Homer in the original, you should not be commenting on if a translation is accurate or not. Pure pseudery that would be and you should hang your head in shame
There's a difference between reading a flawed translation and reading a garbage translation.
Obviously the original will always be the best but not everyone has the time to learn Homeric Greek.
As a matter of fact Pope had known Greek since childhood and, as was common at the time, took many liberties in adapting the original to his style (like Andronicus before him, or Catullus with Callimachus). The difference is that his results are much prettier than Wilson's and that in his time the demented idea that one could study or even know Homer in translation did not exist (and add to that, of course, what I've already said about using everyday language).
I'm glancing over the Lattimore translation and it seems fricking ugly. His hexameters are a mouthful, there's a reason why that had been dropped as a metre for centuries!
More people on the internet will probably read Lord Derby's translation because it's free on Amazon. Which is good, because his blank verse is beautiful.
b8 is too boring these days
Funny how few shits people give about it around here, considering that her Odyssey was the laughing stock of this board for years.
I wasn't around for this. Elaborate?
Her Odyssey translation is shit and was mocked here. Pretty simple.
"maverick polyphemos" was the best for me. Imagining john mccain mumbling about eating people had me rolling
There's a joke in there about her being the lolcow of helios or something
I teach undergrad and can confirm that it's being taught in high schools. I teach it in our lit course sequence and get students who are almost convinced an elaborate joke was being played on them when they were reading an actual legitimate translation.
*I teach gayles, to clarify. They've been taught the Wilson in high school. Whoops
It sucks and she’s a run-of-the-mill feminist academic. This is a woman that started covering herself in tattoos in middle age.
The things that the lack of dick makes women do.
She appeared at least once on a book tour with one of the angry Black folks current at the time that advocated for abolishing the canon. When she was queried about whether or not she agreed that the canon should be abolished, she did, in fact agree with his sentiment. One can argue that she was intimidated into it, but she never made a countering statement afterwards. It appears that her extremely poor translations are an attempt to refute Homer through sullying his work.
homies will get offended at wanting to abolish the canon, feminism, and multiculturalism, then turn around and trash Bloom in the same breath
I am no expert on Bloom, but I would gladly trash him regarding any assault that he made on the canon. What inconsistency do you find in this?
Bloom is a defender of the canon. /misc/tards attack him simply because he's israeli. The point he was making is that /misc/tarda are cringe identitarians, they don't care about the canon.
>/pol/tarda are cringe identitarians
So are israelites.
>CTRL+F ''jew''
>1 match found
>(You)
Great. You homosexuals have to make everything about the israelites. Now, this is a israelite thread. Good job.
moron
So it begins. You guys are so predictable.
Thank you. You understand. Some of Bloom’s writings would get “holy based!”’s if written by some right wing twitter e-celeb. He literally spoke out against the dangers of multiculturalism, feminism, and abolishing the canon in the 90’s. He will always be seen as the champion of the canon, and the irony is that he may be the hero /misc/-ish anons want but they’re too dumb to realize it and blinded by their prejudice. Bloom is harder to cancel because he is israeli. He ain’t quite the same as those old dead white men. Anyway, I think it’s silly to argue about abolishing the canon or not. It is there, as I view the canon as majorly influential works. No matter how you twist yourself in a pretzel, you can’t argue that Shakespeare, Homer, Whitman, Montaigne, etc aren’t influential. People are perfectly entitled to have favorites that aren’t part of the canon. Most of my favorite books aren’t canonical but that doesn’t mean I don’t recognize what is influential or dislike them. Who cares what Emily Wilson says? At this point Emily Wilson threads are pseudo-/misc/ dog whistles
Agree 100%
>Who cares what Emily Wilson says?
Apparently, she is being taught in high school now. I forget, am I supposed to love her because she is not israeli?
You're supposed to hate her because she's a woman and a a liberal. As per the /misc/tard manual.
OK. Not because the passages of hers that I have seen are shit and because she believes in abolition of the canon? Got it.
Anyone should be laughed at for childish renditions (if they're pushed as adult oriented translations, that is). Plenty of males who would do this too.
There are respected female translators around here, I think. Probably a lot of anons who would recommend either Dorothy Sayers' or Edith Grossman's Dante.
Correct. But /misc/tards are identitarians. They don't care about quality or likeminded opinions if they come from a person of a group they dislike. That's why they dislike Bloom for being israeli despite fundamentally agreeing with him.
you're the only one bringing up /misc/, moron
I'm simply explaining their MO. Sorry that bothers you.
You are a weirdo.
ok
>You're supposed to hate her because she's a woman and a a liberal
Manuals are used for maximum effectiveness so this seems correct.
If 90% of the world thought 2+2=5, it doesn’t make it true. She can say whatever she wants and it makes no difference. I’m not going to pretend I have any interest in her or followed her opinions, but part of me feels she is doing this for a certain type of publicity and brownie points. Anyway, overwhelming majority of people don’t know or don’t care about literature and that will never change. I don’t mind as reading is a solitary endeavor and I get enjoyment, and often knowledge, or I take something away. If the masses look down upon my reading hobby, or, what is more likely, don’t care, oh well. There are a couple dozens writers whose influence is strong and wide reaching. It is obvious to anyone in the know. No matter who says what, that will never change as the past can’t be erased. Since I’m here, obviously I like to share my experiences and hobby but I’ve long stopped caring what others think or say. This goes triply if it doesn’t affect me. I suggest taking a similar mindset. People can never abolish the canon, best they can do is use different books as influences, but at the end of the day, that new canon will be built upon the shoulders of THE canon
>If 90% of the world thought 2+2=5, it doesn’t make it true.
Correct, but if 90% of the world thought 2+2=5, how on earth would mathematics progress? This is the issue. It is harder to produce a classic in this climate.
By realizing that literature is dead and almost everything worth reading has already been written. It sucks but it is what it is
Literature is more alive than God.
I beg to differ. Overwhelming majority of books and writers worth reading have already been written. Literature has been dead for a couple decades and Emily Wilson has no bearing on that no matter what she says. Hell, if anything maybe getting younger people to “build their own canon” will revitalize the medium.
>Overwhelming majority of books and writers worth reading have already been written.
Majority? You don't know, you can't even know the total number of great books worth reading. It's an assessment you can only do after humanity is extinct, not before. This is just comfortable arrogance.
I can only speak for myself, but if I line was drawn in the sand at this exact moment in time, and I was given the choice of only being able to read one side of the line in time, either from this moment onwards, or everything in the past, I sure as hell know what one I’d pick
>You don't know, you can't even know the total number of great books worth reading
You are technically correct. Finding that truth on the matter would require a life study in order to come to a sharp conclusion. Then we have questions of weighting value based on publishing rates against value of the individual works. This is an unreasonable demand to place on an individual when anyone can look at the current state of affairs and make a reasonable assumption.
>maybe getting younger people to “build their own canon” will revitalize the medium.
Everyone has their own favorites already. Not sure what you mean.
I’m not sure exactly what the phrase means either hence the quotation marks. But some people clearly have an issue dividing what their favorites are and what is influential. I already said the canon cannot be rebuilt because the canon is influential works, and one cannot change the past
It is not either you support Bloom or you support that, mr reductive reasoning.
>homies
don't
this is just meh, i dont really see the need for the hate or even where the energy for it comes from, sure its not as fancy but theres tons of other translations
Gimmicks by definition get old the second time
Tell me about a complicated chud.
Their ships go very fast.
>Mr Foreginer
For comparison, Samuel Butler's 1900 prose translation:
Then Athene said, "Yes, father stranger, I will show you the house you want, for Alcinous lives quite close to my own father. I will go before you and show the way, but say not a word as you go, and do not look at any man, nor ask him questions; for the people here cannot abide strangers, and do not like men who come from some other place. They are a sea-faring folk, and sail the seas by the grace of Poseidon in ships that glide along like thought, or as a bird in the air.
do you actually think "father stranger" is better?
Yes. "Mr Foreigner" sounds silly and patronizing.
ok so how would you translate "ξεῖνε πάτερ" so that's it's five syllables to fit her iambic pentameter? athena is disguised as a young girl, wouldn't a young girl address an unknown man as mister? is she going to say father foreigner? that sounds totally unnatural and father stranger doesn't even fit the meter.
>ok so how would you translate "ξεῖνε πάτερ" so that's it's five syllables to fit her iambic pentameter?
strange Black person homosexual
Using Mr. that way makes it sound af if she is mocking him. Also, if the way you structured your verse forces you to sound silly, you are supposed to blot it out and write it in some other way; it's not as if her translation is particularly literal so it wouldn't even be hard.
πάτερ in this context is just a way to respectfully adress an older male, so she could just have left it untranslated or gone with something like sir or master.
I wouldnt bother, because there are several sufficient translations going as far back as the 1600s.
alien padre, of course
>doesn't even fit the meter.
Like Emily gives a frick about meter lol her translation is a moronic rollercoaster
I see nothing wrong with 'stranger from afar' or some variation of such, like 'strange man from afar/abroad' if you wanted to directly stipulate 'man', or similar
You could unironically translate it to "Kind stranger, ... "
It's the way a child would adress a foreign man in a respectful way.
The meaning is "elder from afar"
idk, the BBC says "Mr Sunak" all the fricking time
what's the difference
Sunak is a name. "Mr Foreigner" sounds condescending.
many names are based on location
hamburger = someone from hamburg
foreigner = someone from a foreign land
what's your point
Nowadays when Mr. is not followed by the name of a person or the name of an office, like president or speaker, it is generally humorous
ok, Mr moron.
Your problem is that you think Homer wrote like a BBC journo
You have terminal brainrot
homer also didn't "write" like an 18th century englishman either
But in the 18th century writing poetry still meant distancing yourself from everyday speech. Of course Pope does not sound anywhere near as impossibly odd and archaic as Homer sounded to an ancient Greek but he is certainly closer than Wilson. Purposefully modernising Homer completely obfuscates the most evident part of his aesthetics.
Correct, all english translations lack in expression. They try capture the epicness differently than Homer in their foul language
I take it you can read and understand the subtleties of Homeric Greek, if not, shut the frick up.
Is this translation specifically intended for 5yos? Otherwise how could one explain this mockery of blank verse?
I think she wrote it so that it could be assigned to american high schoolers, who are by and large functionally illiterate. Functionally illiterate adults can read it too with ease, making it a book that is very easy to sell to masses of people (who are mostly unconcerned with actual literary and poetical beauty). It's a genius marketing move, worthy of our wretched pseudo-culture.
>Is this translation specifically intended for 5yos? Otherwise how could one explain this mockery of blank verse?
>I will use my translation of a classic as a platform for modern political happenings
And they say Marxists didn't infiltrate into academia. They treat everything as a Trojan horse for their bs.
We all research the past because we're looking for the answers of the problems of our present, and the past always holds value exclusively in reference to the present, it is worthless by itself.
To her it's the soggy knee and pandering to third worlders, to chuds it's to learn at which historical crossroads did the west take the wrong turn. The sentiment is the same.
>the past always holds value exclusively in reference to the present, it is worthless by itself.
Actual moron or just baiting
Elon isn't destroying Twitter fast enough.
Lets hope the paywall will finally kill it off.
Will someone eventually start up a twitter 2.0 or will we be free from this type of AIDS?
Economic reality always asserts itself in the end.
This is bad news for socialism, which depends on other people's money. Socialism dies without subsidy.
Twitter's cofounder already started Bluesky (invite only so far)
What paywall? That hasnt been a thing for months
It's apparently a thing again.
It was news just last week.
>And they say Marxists didn't infiltrate into academia.
Right? they totally did, and this is coming from a guy who was left leaning going into college.
Went to what is essentially an Engineering school in the southern US, and my English / History classes were all like that. I distinctly remember being in a classroom with like 28 white girls when we started reading the Symposium, and one girl said (paraphrasing) “Do we have to read about dead white guys?”
Ancient Greeks, ancient fricking Greeks who existed before the modern conception of race / sexuality / etc. And she successfully boiled them down to “stale pale males” like we were talking about the Victorians are some shit. And whats worse the limp wristed professor basically agreed with her but added “its still important.”
Academia is no longer functional, unless you went for a pure STEM field. Or maybe Business where everyone’s an butthole any way so it all cancels out.
>And they say Marxists didn't infiltrate into academia.
Nobody says this. Universities were left-wing brainwashing machines even when I was there, in the late 1980s. Luckily I studied Maths and then Information Technology, which are pretty resistant to political bias.
>Luckily I studied Maths and then Information Technology, which are pretty resistant to political bias.
Nobody tell him. Let him dream and let it last.
>Luckily I studied Maths and then Information Technology, which are pretty resistant to political bias.
lol
>And they say Marxists didn't infiltrate into academia.
Ah geez dude, it's been so long since I read kapital, can you point to the specific volume and chapter where Marx talks about how we need to translate Homer's epics into bad prose and misrepresent the core themes?
Curricula are political tools. They contain an implicit political framework. Very few professors will teach you something with absolutely no applications in up and coming markets. For example, Euclid's proofs are beautiful, but I never learnt them in primary, secondary, or tertiary education. I had to read it myself. It makes sense - these proofs give you great insight into mathematics and its history, but there are more readily profitable modes of proof you can learn. Your course list was probably primarily analysis and statistics, maybe some stuff on number theory to cover cryptography.
No one alive went to a nonpoliticised university; since the early 20th century the notion of academia has been bastardised into any study that will turn a profit.
>t. maths major
Are you american?
Thankfully not.
Why not?
>you're not a marxist unless you do exactly what marx said verbatim, also real marxism has never been tried and there are no real marxists
Actually good bait.
t.queer
This lmao, it’s so funny to hear people complaints about how university are becoming “too political“ when the school system in general is almost entirely at the mercy of our economic system, as if the market is some kind of politics free, objective Tool of Reason.
>But anon, the market is always right! How could you possibly deny such a self-evident truth!
Something about explaining water to a fish
>they didn't teach me euclid's proofs in my crappy undergrad degree
>it's a capitalist conspiracy to ensure people only learn useful stuff!
dood
braindead leftist analysis. the turn to "practical" education in universities started in the 19th century to support the military. that's why we call them "civil engineers" today because originally the default kind of engineer was a military engineer. you can trace this back to german/prussian militarism. the vast majority of colleges and universities are non-profit, so the idea to turn a profit is odd indeed. elite universities like stanford, mit, and columbia were built with massive military spending. math majors are some of the laziest people you will find on campus hoping to cram their way through college without having to write any research papers or write any code. absolute crumb bums and you are no exception.
>braindead leftist analysis
Can you explain what you mean by leftist? I don't identify with any political movement so it's interesting you think I'm left-wing.
>started in the 19th century
Yeah, and it was the only option since the 20th century. The 19th century still had some liberal colleges floating about. Seems like you're trying to correct me on a technicality, only I didn't say anything false.
>majority are non-profit
What's that got to do with this discussion? Universities don't need to turn a profit to be complicit in pumping out economic units. The entire function of the modern university is to palm to someone else the employer's responsibility to train his employees.
>math majors are some of the laziest people you will find on campus
This is about the only true thing you said; work smarter not harder. I didn't have to cram though. Laziness is a virtue in this day and age where industry amounts to scamming people, gambling on the future, or otherwise pumping toxins into the air and ocean.
>write any code
Code shmode, I wrote code for fun during my studies to help me with solving problems that my professors never told us to solve. Sounds like a bunch of seethe over my having the luxury to read beyond assigned tasks. Sorry you picked a brainlet course that forced you to waste every precious minute on menial tasks to "prepare" you for the "workforce" lmaa
>can you point to the specific volume and chapter where Marx talks about how we need to translate Homer's epics into bad prose and misrepresent the core themes?
Marxist =/= Marxian
Now you're just inventing words to fit your specific worldview. Admit you've been propagandised and move on with life.
hahahahahahahaha what the frick
How do Greek dekinais justify themselves? Practically every "based and redpilled" author you can think of knew some Greek. What excuse do you have not to learn?
Where do you live that you can buy the original Greek texts?
Loeb Classical library publishes Ancient Greek texts with prose translations into English on the oppposite page
Readily available in Burgerland and Bongland
Not sure about anyplace else though
They're bloody expensive though.
If you're lucky, your library will have a good stock of them.
>$30
I guess I’ll just have to read my translation by Chaucer 🙁
Used bookstores and abebooks
I have dozens of OCTs, vast majority for about $10-$20 each
Loeb is for pseuds who need cribs. Oxford Classical Texts is what you want
this
for instance, see pic related.
>that shipping cost
Lol. It’s interesting how Oxford Classical Texts are so much more expensive than the average book (going by Amazon cost) because they figure if you can read Latin or Ancient Greek you are educated and have $$
There's also the dynamic pricing algorithm that Amazon uses. It figures out your tastes based on your past purchases, and bumps up the price for things it knows you want.
but you could just browse amazon on a different computer and put it in your cart before you log in? moreover, if the price ended up being higher than their competitors you would just shop somewhere else. really lame conspiracy theory, dude.
>really lame conspiracy theory,
lmgtfy
ahh yes "influencermarketinghub.com" the authority on amazon's pricing strategy...but suppose they are credible:
>Amazon's dynamic pricing algorithms continuously evaluate, review, and update the prices of millions of its products multiple times a day, ensuring that they offer the most competitive prices to shoppers, ensuring retention and brand loyalty
the most "competitive prices" means the lowest prices.
>https://sell.amazon.com/tools/automate-pricing
it's actually a way to force 3rd party sellers to compete with each other to have the lowest price to receive preferential placement in amazon search results. your conspiracy theory that they charge you more for stuff you want is completely wrong, of course.
Go to bed, Jeff. You got found out, it's over.
if amazon charged more, people would just go to target, walmart, or barnes and noble. amazon is not a monopoly no matter what biden's stooges at the ftc say.
Really? Can you game the system by searching schlock on your account but browsing what you really want while not signed in? I’m semi embarrassed to admit I like prince watching on Amazon. When I see books I want get below a certain price I’ll pull the trigger and feel I did good. It’s not like that $2-10 I saved even means anything to my wallet either
i always watch the price on protein powder. it's pretty volatile. you can get good discounts sometimes. probably because it takes up a lot of space in their warehouse and has an expiration date.
Any recs on a brand that's not adulterated crap?
Not him, but some of the big booksellers on ebay will jack their prices on an item once they see that someone has it loaded in their cart or saved in their watchlist. When I am shopping for books, I make physical notes on paper rather than leave the electronic evidence that I am interested.
That shipping is because I live in Japan, anywhere in the West will be much cheaper. There are plenty of options in the US and Europe
They are more expensive because they are specialty texts, printed in smaller batches and with a limited readership. If you buy used they really aren't that bad, I find Loeb and OCT routinely for $10-20. Teubner are expensive.
I agree that those factors play into it but there is definitely a certain prestige connected to a higher income bracket. As an aside, Japan is a weird place. I went for a week some years ago and random girls would come up to me to take pics with me. Making the peace sign and all. I wonder if they thought I was a celebrity? Some brute forced the pic. ‘‘Twas strange
>t. perseuslet
You can read them online for free, they aren't copyrighted.
Greece
thank νεφεληγερέτῃ Διί, I did
I learned but that was years ago and I don't remember shit. Even worse, I spent a semester in Greece and modern Greek is AIDS tier.
This c**t's Odyssey was BTFO here:
https://kirkcenter.org/reviews/a-coat-of-varnish/
Excerpt:
Wilson also lapses into bizarre circumlocutions around the story of the Cyclops. Homer describes Polyphemus, who eats six of Odysseus’s men raw, as “athemistos”—literally something like “without a sense of divine right or wrong,” but “lawless” usually does the job in English. Lack of respect for themis, true right and wrong, is posited by Homer’s contemporary Hesiod as the cause of all human evil. Wilson, however, decides in her introduction that the story of the Cyclops is really a story about colonialism (“the Polyphemus episode seems to meditate uneasily on the processes of colonization”), and hence it is her duty to resist any tendency to dehumanize the sixty-foot-tall, one-eyed, flesh-eating son of the sea-god. She translates athemistos as “maverick,” an offense not only against sensibility, but also against the aesthetics of her poem—the word leaps off the page, wildly inappropriate to Wilson’s typical register. Needless to say I just about fell over laughing. And huperphialos, which she is happy to render “insolent” and “arrogant” when it comes to the suitors, she changes to “highminded” for Polyphemus. The sight of drunk Polyphemus vomiting up wine and chunks of human flesh in his cave was not enough to get Wilson to shy away from calling him “highminded.” I suppose ideology is not dead. She also uses the odd circumlocution “the Cyclopic people” for the Greek plural Cyclopes, which also jars. The shame of all this is that it subverts her own thesis: she claims the passage has some relevance to colonization. It’s much easier for a student to see the resonance between this episode and Kipling’s “lesser breeds without the Law” if athemistos is translated “lawless.” But as I have said, it is very hard to do any kind of close reading of Homer using Wilson’s translation alone. It simply is not faithful enough.
I made the mistake of reading the New Yorker article hyping this translation and worked myself up into a self-righteous misogynist wrath. Then I remembered I never finished the Iliad. I got about halfway through in college and fell behind and never finished because of other course deadlines. So I decided it was time to finish it. I started over from the beginning with Lattimore’s translation and am again about halfway through.
So I do have to credit this ‘daddy issues’ bong for inspiring me to read The Iliad. I just ain’t reading her translation.
>*single-handedly saves the canon*
Purdy good
what's the story here?
The inexorable decline of western academia.
She did a reading of sections of her translation of The Odessy and dressed up in costumes for each character (that picture is the dog). So basically female autism and this:
. You can find it easily on YouTube. Cringekino.
damn she looks a lot like my mother in law.
gotta find more pictures of her so i can touch myself inappropriately.
just being a quirky carefree post menopausal woman
>childlessness
>mfw when History professor got on top of his desk and started ranting about the Alamo
Perseus dot com for translating Ancient Greek resources
Off hand, there are only two good woman translators: AE Stallings; and that wife of the wife/husband pair that translate Russian novels.
Funny that Norton holds on to the King James version for their bible, but they went for the kiddie version of Homer.
Maybe she could have pulled this off if she were younger and hotter. As it is, it is just trite and lame.
mfw IQfy chuds don't like my TRANSlation
>woman writes thoroughly mediocre odyssey translation
>uses her connections + a very clever agent / PR agency to drum up a press junket billing it as some vaguely FEMINIST ACCOMPLISHMENT (even though she's far from the first woman to translate homer, and among the worst)
>right wingers smell astroturf and get mad but are too stupid to articulate it so they just go "FRICK... WOMEN?" most of the time
>this paradoxically confirms FEMINISM is taking place to moron normies who want to be seen holding Homer (they just learned what homer is)
>PR campaign successful.jpg
>emily wilson's empty sad shitty life as a low tier academic now has something resembling meaning and eventfulness for a moment
>moment fades
>"I'LL... I'LL..... TRANSLATE THE ILIAD TOO? JUST AS BADLY? GET MY AGENT ON THE HORN, I NEED ANOTHER TEMPEST IN A TEAPOT BREWED"
Great job honey, you spent another several years translating another text that clearly brings you 1/100th the joy it brought to all those unknown workaday translators who simply did it out of love, all so that you could go deeper into a some termagant internet persona that doesn't bring joy into your life either. Now learn Sanskrit and spend 20 years making subpar translations of the Upanishads that nobody asked for too. Or you know, you could quit trying to be a "public intellectual" (momentarily blogged-about termagant) and go hug your kids and do something you actually enjoy.
>>"I'LL... I'LL..... TRANSLATE THE ILIAD TOO? JUST AS BADLY? GET MY AGENT ON THE HORN, I NEED ANOTHER TEMPEST IN A TEAPOT BREWED"
I don't mind this part. If you do one, you gotta do the other.
>hug your kids
lol, you think she has kids?
>you think she has kids?
I am pretty sure that that was his point. She could have. She may even reach for them in the night, and talk to them - all in vain. What a waste.
She's does have kids. I feel sorry for her son.
>She's does have kids
Well, color me oofed. When does his transition start?
seems like a stupid b***h to me
do you think she rides like a nympho?
While we have yet another Odyssey / Iliad translation thread going, has anyone read the Caroline Alexander or Anthony Verity translations? How do they compare against the established versions like gayles and Lattimore? They are also fairly new translations, but there seem to be very few reviews online compared to Wilson's translation which took all the spotlight.
I read Verity. It's a prose translation but to me that does not matter. I found it very good and faithful to the cultural origins that the Odyssey has, in terms of how it reads and what type of atmosphre is present in the lines it really gives off the impression that you are reading a quasi-divine tale of gods and men, a respectful translation unlike this shit which does nothing but belittle the culture that gave birth and status to the Homeric poems.
The Alexander is very good, the slightest bit less literal than Lattimore, but with certain improvements in vocabulary choice.
>Not reading the superior War Music translations by Christopher Logue
Honestly, English is such a simplistic and ugly language, that making it like a 5 year old moron wrote it is the standard. It's not like English is a Romance language or Russian, Greek, etc.
>Honestly, English is such a simplistic and ugly language, that making it like a 5 year old moron wrote it is the standard. It's not like English is a Romance language or Russian, Greek, etc.
>Honestly
Honest comes from Old French "oneste/honeste"
>Simplistic
Simple comes from old French, derived from the latin simplus
>Language
Old french "langage", obviously from the latin "lingua" (tongue)
>Standard
Again from old french
>etc.
Self-explanatory
You can speak English just using Latin words, like this sentence. It's more or less French.
you can speak like this it's more or less= Germanic
>Germanic
Latin but spelled wrong
>It's more or less French.
Aside from you know, being nothing like French in grammar or daily vocabulary.
An English speaker cannot read a paragraph of French and understand what is being said, not in any significant detail at least. Canada should be living proof that having some vocabulary overlap does NOT equal "being the same", Anglophone Canadians and boomer Quebeckers cannot communicate.
I'm increasingly convinced that these opinions are simply held by ESLs who lack the skill to express themselves fully in English and so they conclude it must be bad. I have encountered the same opinions about GSLs learning German.
I do not like ''father stranger'' or ''Mr. Foreigner''. They are both clunky.
On the subject of heretical translations of classics, I recently enjoyed the prose Iliad by the War Nerd, aside from the two or three Sopranos references he shoehorned in.
I'm pretty sure this is just the Ed Dutton with a wig on.
Just a simple Lattimore chad myself
Frick the b***h will never read her stupid translation
>Just a simple Lattimore chad myself
>Frick the b***h will never read her stupid translation
Came here to post this. I've read Chapman's and Pope's translations, and Lattimore's is still better. What a legend he was, we shall not see his like again.
I support moronic troonyslators ruining translations, because I read Greek so I don't care
So anons must know that Homer can never be approximated in English translations, surely? Some may do certain parts well, while failing in others. In the English world, Homer takes on the roll of a storyteller. Many translators and poets have put their own spin and flavor using him as a guidebook. And frankly, if you cannot read Homer in the original, you should not be commenting on if a translation is accurate or not. Pure pseudery that would be and you should hang your head in shame
There's a difference between reading a flawed translation and reading a garbage translation.
Obviously the original will always be the best but not everyone has the time to learn Homeric Greek.
As a matter of fact Pope had known Greek since childhood and, as was common at the time, took many liberties in adapting the original to his style (like Andronicus before him, or Catullus with Callimachus). The difference is that his results are much prettier than Wilson's and that in his time the demented idea that one could study or even know Homer in translation did not exist (and add to that, of course, what I've already said about using everyday language).
>translates english version of the iliad to american
>americans get mad
Why tho? She's just trying to help.
She's not helping.
there is nothing "western" about homer anyway, read Spengler, if you want to read the western canon, start with Descartes' meditations
Look, I'm just not going to read it. I'm sorry, I just won't do it.
I'm glancing over the Lattimore translation and it seems fricking ugly. His hexameters are a mouthful, there's a reason why that had been dropped as a metre for centuries!
More people on the internet will probably read Lord Derby's translation because it's free on Amazon. Which is good, because his blank verse is beautiful.
On a serious note, how are her translations of Seneca’s plays? Debating between her, Smith, Watling, or whoever else someone might recommend
They're pretty good, even Harold Bloom took a liking to them.
Source?
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