What a magnificent bastard this man is. No one has come closer in maintaining the fidelity of both meaning and structure.
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What a magnificent bastard this man is. No one has come closer in maintaining the fidelity of both meaning and structure.
Is it really that good? IQfy usually fellates gayles, Fitzgerald and Pope. Sometimes Chapman and Lattimore. Haven't heard much about Green.
Lattimore is the best.
What makes him superior, anon?
He's the best
Just learn ancient Greek and don't bother with translations.
No thanks, not enough literature for me to justify learning it. I might learn latin because of it how used in science.
This. Homer is the easiest pre-koine writer. There's no excuses.
My question for you sir, is how do you know it keeps fidelity?
A fair question—I can only go off comparative analysis done by people who seem to have put in a good-faith effort in doing so. Here is an example: https://www.reddit.com/r/classics/comments/l7yl6h/every_modern_iliad_translation_compared/
I've previously read Fitzgerald for The Iliad and gayles for The Odyssey; both are fine. I plan on reading Pope eventually, but I'm not sure it'll capture me in the same way given he has pretty much put the stories through an Augustan prism.
Green is, based on the sources I've studied, second in fidelity to Lattimore.
>I've previously read Fitzgerald for The Iliad and gayles for The Odyssey
you did it backwards
So it seems. I enjoyed both, however. I'm enjoying my re-read with Green based on the opening stanza and the "Shield of Achilles" section of Book 18; I'll sample Diomedes battling the Gods next.
Both Fitz and gay have good versions of both poems, but do yourself a favor and read Fitz's Odyssey at some point.
Thanks for the tip. Have you read a sufficient volume of both to offer any comparison?
Maybe in my semi-retirement, anon. Until then, it's the rat race for me.
If you've read the full Odyssey and Iliad by gayles and Fitzgerald respectively, you should already have an idea of their differences. gayles tends to be more colloquial and Fitzgerald tends to be more lyrical. And I think Fitzgerald's Odyssey is more consistently brilliant compared to his Iliad.
From the first page:
>...they killed and feasted on
>the cattle of Lord Hêlios, the sun,
>and he who moves all day through heaven
>took from their eyes the dawn of their return.
That last line is one of my favorite lines ever.
That's one of my favorite lines as well, actually. I think I may actually prefer gayles' version, which I've saved in my notes because of how brilliant I thought it was:
>He who moves through heaven took from their eyes the dawn of their return.
Quite similar.
Fitzgerald's Odyssey pre-dates gayles', so assuming that line wasn't in an earlier translation, gayles based the line on Fitzgerald's.
Not a knock on gayles, most translators steal from previous translations, and obviously Homer had it similarly. He mentions the "day of return", but I believe mentioning "eyes" was Fitzgerald's original contribution. (I don't know Greek, I just looked up the relevant lines on perseus.tufts.edu). I think that's an excellent contribution, and an example of how poetic license can be effectively used in translation.
>I think that's an excellent contribution, and an example of how poetic license can be effectively used in translation.
No disagreement there. We are fortunate to have several high-caliber translations. Cheers, anon.
gayles is by far the best by virtue of his simplicity. He gets the point across easily and doesn’t waiver or get bogged down with poetic rigamarole.
Well, I also like crime and Punishment, so I suppose I have a high tolerance for rigmarole.
>Until then, it's the rat race for me
I'm a neet and still can't learn Greek. I wonder how pissed IQfy would be by the hundreds of thousands of hours i have wasted lying in bed depressed. I have not done or learned a single thing in yesrs
Reminder to all Fitzgerald anons that he outright declared Lattimore's translations to be superior to his own and undoubtedly the standard for the next hundreds of years.
sauce me up playa
Where do you guys rank Reid's translations?
(I do not care for poetical interpretations, rather an accurate translation structured as best as possibe)
>reading translations published after the year 2000
you people don't actually do this... do you?
I can't read these as an ESL and want to die from strain and boredom. My working memory is insufficient so I need to reread most sentences several times before they sink in.
I recommend Wayne Ambler's translation of Anabasis. It is faithful as well to the original with its simple patrician elegance, unlike those 19th century translations that make him sound too flowery, much like the Renaissance poets translating Homer's rugged hexameters into pristine Virgilian ones.
Hijacking this b***h to ask for the best spanish translation.
I shopped around for the best Divine comedy translation and by god it paid off. I'm enjoying it like nothing else in a while.
Words are just symbols. Language doesn’t matter. The true meaning is deeper than the words