/lit/ - Literature

>>16939926
It's good for illiterate zoomers

>>16939926
>Tell me about a complicated man

>>16939926
lel.

>>16939939
>>16940634
What's wrong with it?

>>16940675
Translated by a woman

>>16939926
get the Robert Fagles Translation

>>16940705
Strange way to spell Lattimore

>>16939926
>>/lit/thread/S15251558

>>16939926

>>16940721

>>16940722
Beat me to it.
Here is another one.

>>16939926
Here's a few examples of the first line
Fagles
>Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns
Lattimore
>Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways
Fitzgerald
>Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story of that man skilled in all ways of contending
Emily Wilson, no Joke
>Tell me about a complicated man
Lmao, I was like Lmao
Read Fitzgerald

Me like pope

>>16940752
But Emily Wilson's translation has many benefits which Chapman and Pope lacked!

>>16940732
>>16940752
Pope
>The man for wisdom's various arts renown'd, Long exercised in woes, O Muse! resound.

She has some bright students too.

We need to outlaw women

>>16940729
> metal, rock, and classical music have made songs about Homer’s Odyssey for years, ranging from shit to epic
>some boring ass rap makes it “relevant” again
Why would I listen to a shitty rap about it when I can listen to better avenues about the story.

>>16940764
this is aggravating.

>>16940764

It's different and has a feminist gimmick, who cares. There's been plenty of translations and it's not like Fagles or Lattimore is gonna be lost forever because of this. If you honestly care that much, no translation will ever capture the full beauty of Homer. Go download the cambridge textbook for ancient greek off of libgen and start practicing, If a dumbass like me can do it so can you.

>>16940727
>>16940764
I'm glad I didn't study the arts

>>16939926
https://kirkcenter.org/reviews/a-coat-of-varnish

>>16940819
>It's different and has a feminist gimmick, who cares

The real problem is that it's a shit translation, though. It's not poetry. It's metrified prose. Wilson has no talent. See discussions in >>16940721

OP explicitly asked whether the translation was good or not. If he wanted to learn the Greek, he would have asked for a Homeric Greek textbook.

>>16940866
>I myself read Homer for the first time as a high school freshman, in the simple prose versions of Butler and Rieu, which I still commend to people. Neither of them were the writers that Wilson is. And to top it all off, Wilson can actually write verse.

If only she could write poetry...

>>16939926
I had to read it for class and I thought it was fine. I read the Fagles version first and thought Wilson's would be shit, but it was nice to have a more simple version that was straight to the point. Overall, you want to read multiple translations of works like the Odyssey.

>>16940928
>but it was nice to have a more simple version that was straight to the point

A prose translation would probably be superior if that was your goal.

>>16940935
It wasn't my choice, but it seemed okay for a rushed literature class.

>>16940951
From the review posted above:

>Wilson does not accept this; and indeed goes on to mock this idea of faithfulness in general, claiming that the whole concept of a “faithful” translation is “gendered.” Since this is an obvious lie, I’ll stop her right there: there are, indeed, words in English that are gendered. Muscular male bodies frequently sport multiple curves, but English speakers do not call men with such bodies curvaceous, because that word is gendered. But “faithful to his wife” is just as idiomatic, in English, as “faithful to her husband” is. Not everyone values fidelity equally, as is obvious enough from looking at the world, but the concept is not “gendered.”

>And what does Wilson mean by the term? At first glance, not much more than “bad,” or “a kind of constraint I don’t care about,” but there is more to it, as Wilson objects to the notion of a “translation, whose worth is always secondary to that of a male-authored original.” Omitting the silly talk about gender—one could have the same discussion about translating a “female-authored original”—I will pass on to Ms. Wilson a bit of personal advice: that if she feels this way, translation may be the wrong line of work for her. There is not the slightest doubt that her Odyssey will be considered secondary to Homer’s. Translation is derivative work, and remains secondary always to the original.The number of people who know who translated Jane Austen into Italian is a fraction of the ones who know Jane Austen. If Wilson desires to be a primary cultural figure, she will need to write her own material, and leave Homer out of it. She is certainly talented enough.

>That Wilson should for ideological reasons resist any notion of fidelity in a translation is a loss. The harm it does to her Odysseywill be obvious to anyone who knows the Greek text well. And more than that, this kind of fidelity is, in fact, one of the more interesting constraints a translator has to deal with—and it is a shame that Wilson does not engage with it more rigorously and honestly, the way she engages with poetic structure. It is her fidelity to poetic constraints that constitutes the real arete of this translation.

>>16940768
Imagine writing that last tweet and thinking it means anything

>>16940908
Good thing I was talking about this thread in general, which is the same as any number of threads about this or whatever new gimmick translation like that beowulf one. People bitch about culture war, post some wojaks and maybe if you're lucky someone posts some definitions from the Liddell & Scott. Seriously we all know what these threads turn into and why they are probably posted. The thread you linked is more of the same, mostly people getting butthurt with a few informed comments (not all of them critical of the translation at that).

>>16940964
I'll take a good look at this. I'm sure there are also some more reviews published in some literature or classics journals.

>>16939926
>Minoan women on the front
The real give away.

>>16940981
From the review posted above:

>Elsewhere Wilson soft-pedals the use of the Greek word “dogface” (kunopis) to describe women, despite its obvious resonance with contemporary Anglophone idiom. This creates some risible circumlocutions: when Hephaestus catches his wife Aphrodite cheating on him, he rages at Zeus, demanding back all the gifts he gave for Zeus’s “dogfaced girl.” Wilson renders “dogfaced girl” as “she looks at me like a dog.” Helen laments that the Greeks came to Troy “for dogfaced me.” Wilson renders it “they made my face the cause that hounded them.” Other translators have been perfectly content to translate the word as “bitch.” In another place Penelope complains about her female slaves, whom she calls “female dogs” (kunas). Wilson says they are “doglike,” which is fine, but contemporary English speakers—Wilson’s own stated standard—don’t call each other “doglike” when they are angry.

>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.

>>16941684
>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.
wew laddie lads, just fucking wew

>>16939926
I have it. I didn’t think it was bad but it absolutely has a sort feminist coloring. She admits as much in the first few pages and mentions how she deliberately tried to make the women seem more important and less what she probably considered misogynist.

So yeah. It’s not bad. But still, I’d pick up another translation.

>>16941012
I know right that drove me bananas. Odysseus doesn't even visit Crete.

>>16940727
>>16940764
>>16940768
This reminds me of an academic who once noted how scholars, although more autistically accurate with words, write inferior translations than actual poets who transcribe the SOVL of the original. In other words, too much brain, less heart.

If you guys think this bitch butchered Homer, wait until she gets her bushy cunt all over the greatest philosopher that ever lived.

>>16939926
It's based.
And her Iliad will be even better. She's doing readings which show promise

>>16943058
Plato destroyed philosophy. so extremely hyperbasado.
accelerate.

>>16939926
ayo holla @ me bout a fancy nigga

>>16939952
>complicated
is this supposed to be a translation for the word "πολυμήχανος"?

>>16940752
Is it usual that anglos don't refer to greek names and replace them with roman/lation ones?

>>16939926
No.

>>16943731
I think this was mainly a medieval thing

>>16943731
No. You could have discovered this by looking at any comparison of translations.

>>16941684
>Elsewhere Wilson soft-pedals the use of the Greek word “dogface” (kunopis) to describe women
Pretty stupid, given that kunopis later led to cynicism and the foundation of the dominant western system of morals and ethics. And besides that Argos (despite his brief appearance) is one of the best characters in the entire work.

>>16943758
Why should a browse through English translations when I can't even read them properly?

>>16941684
>the Cyclopic people

>>16943079
Back to IG, femcel.

most translations suck, learn greek, buy a dictionary, buy the bilingual books, its not necessary that you translate it all, just look for words that sound out of place to you or just ones that you find might be controversial.
For example anytime in plato you read something about love,friends, in aristotle each time you read about the word virtue or the good, all these words you will find have a very different meaning in greek and the translator just has to chose a random word in english, if the book is good enough the footnotes should tell you this, eu is good and arche is good and both can be virtue but not always the same one and yes you can be a virtuous man but a horse is virtuous too in the meaning that it acomplishes his action of virtue with excelence which is his virtue

>>16943814
You don't need to "read them properly" to compare the first section and see if they all say "Jove" in the same spot or not. You can literally CTRL+F this shit retarded nigger.

>>16943887
>getting books I will never read to skim through them instead of knowledgable anons that can answer me in a heartbeat
Sorry, fren. No autismo in me

>>16943933
>No autismo in me
then why are you here, faggot?

>>16941012
To be fair, I believe it's the editor that chooses the cover art.

>>16943058
She puts her cats before her kids in her bio...

>>16944049
omg like they literally put their perfereed pronoun as they

>>16943243
No, it's translation for πολυτροπος

She actually puts her twitter feed on her CV, and has dressed up a list of her 'selected twitter threads' as some kind of academic accomplishment, lmao.

>>16944107

>>16944070
This is a thing academics do a lot. They're just 'cis' men and women, but add 'or they' to their preferred pronouns. No one ever uses it.

Emily Wilson’s translation is fucking garbage. It’s like she read Lattimore’s and spun her own interpretation if the text, then called it a translation.

In mathematics, a translation is the shifting of one shape to another. That’s what Fagles, Pope, and Lattimore achieve. They do not contort the text so that it is more easily readable to the average retard.

>>16939939
No fagles is the one for illiterate zoomers and op

>>16943058
>Plato
Oh sweet fuck she's going to say Plato was a proto-fascist isn't she?

>>16944107
please tell me this isn't real

>>16944629
It's very real, anon - https://www.emilyrcwilson.com/emilyrcwilson-scholia

>>16944642
She seems to be implicitly acknowledging the importance of faithfulness for translations here:
>“Ideally, every choice has to make sense in itself & in the context of 10,000 other similar choices, in the larger quest to produce a text with a deep and detailed connection to the original, & with its own life and integrity in English.”

>>16944642
We need to ban women immediately.

The absolute state of the west. Why weak people are allowed to shit on everything.

>>16939926
>Divine Athena winked at him and said,
>"Here, Mr. Foreigner, this is the house."

>>16944289
>They do not contort the text so that it is more easily readable to the average retard.
kek

>>16944071
That's even worse.

>>16940675
She takes great liberties in the name of her own personal politics and pretends that it is based on fact. She clearly has an agenda at hand, and the general translation is very poor and even more unremarkable. If I ever walk into someone's home and see a copy of this fucking shit, I am throwing it in the fireplace and walking out.

>>16940722
I want to read more of Tyrones version or see black odyssey movie

>>16940775
Any recs for modern musical reinterpretations of Homer?

>>16945281
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qI0mkt6Z3I0

>>16940752
I feel like Pope's version would be good to read after reading an actual translation. The poetry is probably lovely, but he would have had to take a lot of liberties with the text to write the entire thing in heroic verse

>>16945298
this sounds great - is there more in the same vein (reconstructed ancient music set to corresponding literature/poetry)?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUcTsFe1PVs
i only know this, but the performer is not a scholar, afaik

Fitzgerald or Lattimore for the Odyssey, bros? I love Lattimore's Iliad but his Odyssey feels a bit flat to me. Fitzgerald's is a joy to read but unfortunately loses the precision and fidelity of Lattimore's translation. Fuck Fagles and Pope don't mention them.

>>16943777
in scroll 1 of iliad achillies says ''τιμὴν ἀρνύμενοι Μενελάῳ σοί τε κυνῶπα'' my greek is not too good but what happens with the gender of the dog, would it be right to translate it as bitchface?

>>16939926
no

>>16945388
κύων can be both masculine and feminine, so yes, bitchface isn't wrong, although it has a diferent cultural subtext.

>>16944107
No....
I know you're SUPPOSED to put anything you can spin in a good light on your CV, but if your fucking social media ends up on it, that should be a sign that you're wasting WAY too much time on social media.

>>16939926
She went into it with the explicit intent to fuck it up with her own shit.

>>16943243
Google says it translates to resourceful. Complicated and resourceful aren't even close to each other. Which one is it?

>>16945298
Thanks, but I meant something along the lines the other anon said
>metal, rock, and classical music

>>16944447
Fagles' translation is the best one. Keep crying, nigger.

>>16945374
Lattimore

>>16945653
For me, it's Lattimore for Homer and Fitzgerald for Virgil.

>>16939952
kek

>>16941684
>the Cyclopic people
Polythemus: I'm poc (people of cyclopia)

>>16945448
πολυμήχανος means inventive, resourceful,
in modern greek at least. But even if you do the etymological breakdown, it is a very big stretch to translate it to "complicated".

"πολυ-": many

"μηχανεύομαι": scheme, machinate.

so Odysseus is a man of many schemes, not complicated

>women version
How about 'no'.

>>16939952
then Eurybates the negro would also have to be a complicated man because he is most similar mind having to odysseus

>>16940729
Just sing it in the original fucking greek beating a stick on the ground the way it was fucking intended

COMPLICATED

>>16940764
>My work is better than Chapmans
Your translation won't survive 4 months let alone 400 fucking years you absolute heathen.

Where the fuck do women get the fucking nerve for this sort of shit?

The fact that she translated the odyssey before the illiad says everything about her ewige cuntry.

>>16940768
>a non-relaist musical-dramatic genre can't tell you anything
>but it surely tells you something
Then what is that something?

she sounds like a chud for translating this alt right trash

>>16945932
To be fair, an important part of translation is taking context into account. My classics professor translates polutropos to "of many ways". He said complicated is connected to Polutropos through some Latin etymology but not exactly sure what it was. That being said, complicated is an awful choice for the sake of poetics.

>>16939926
Wilson will be remembered as the community college option for translation desu.
The english language has not evolved meaningfully enough to replace Lattimore or Fagles yet.

>>16943859
People of cyclopicity

>>16945522

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaN3pwBsRf8

>>16940729
More like raping The Iliad

>>16945428
This. It's just another cunt spreading her goo over other men's work and calling it her work

>>16945522
Monterverdi has an opera about Odysseus, I believe.
I haven't watched it yet.

Overall, you will find pretty much all of Greek mythology covered in the Baroque opera repertoire.

>>16943996
for literal whos, but not for celebrities