War Music: Homer and His Iliad
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War Music: Homer and His Iliad
1–10 of 33 posts
Re: War Music: Homer and His Iliad
#2I can warmly recommend the new Iliad translation by Caroline Alexander as audiobook. Suberb! I understand the new translation by Emily Wilson (whose Odyssey was excellent) should be good as well.
The new translations really bring these old poems to life, and listening to them is at least for me the best way to consume them.
Re: War Music: Homer and His Iliad
#3I can warmly recommend the new Iliad translation by Caroline Alexander as audiobook. Suberb! I understand the new translation by Emily Wilson (whose Odyssey was excellent) should be good as well. The new translations really bring these old poems to life, and listening to them is at least for me the best way to consume them.
Thanks for the recommendations, fsloth.
For anyone interested in this, I found a couple of excerpts of Caroline Alexander's Iliad translation[0] that were published in The Guardian as well as an article by Emily Wilson (the Odyssey translator also mentioned above) about the engagement of female scholars and translators with the classics[1].
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/09/new-translatio...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jul/07/women-classics...
Re: War Music: Homer and His Iliad
#4> Homer had visited windy Troy on a clear day when distant Samothrace was visible … I like to think he had walked south, like Chryses, beside the shore of the booming sea
This passage sounds a lot like the writing style of the ancient classics. I assume the reviewer chose it on purpose for that reason. I don't know that I need to read this book, but I appreciate that apparently it's a work of passion and enthusiasm.
Re: War Music: Homer and His Iliad
#5I can warmly recommend the new Iliad translation by Caroline Alexander as audiobook. Suberb! I understand the new translation by Emily Wilson (whose Odyssey was excellent) should be good as well. The new translations really bring these old poems to life, and listening to them is at least for me the best way to consume them.
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Re: War Music: Homer and His Iliad
#6I can warmly recommend the new Iliad translation by Caroline Alexander as audiobook. Suberb! I understand the new translation by Emily Wilson (whose Odyssey was excellent) should be good as well. The new translations really bring these old poems to life, and listening to them is at least for me the best way to consume them.
These are good, but to really bring them to life I recommend Christopher Logue, whose version doesn't even pretend to be a translation. There are some nice excerpts in his obituary in The Economist https://archive.ph/eaCKf
Re: War Music: Homer and His Iliad
#7I can warmly recommend the new Iliad translation by Caroline Alexander as audiobook. Suberb! I understand the new translation by Emily Wilson (whose Odyssey was excellent) should be good as well. The new translations really bring these old poems to life, and listening to them is at least for me the best way to consume them.
I disagree about Emily Wilson's Odissey. She translated the first line of the poem as "Tell me about a complicated man". She almost went with "Tell me about a straying husband". Neither complicated nor straying husband appear in the original text. Pope's description (The man for wisdom’s various arts renown’d...) is closer to the epithets we are taught at school (ricco d'astuzie or dal multiforme ingegno). πολύτροπος means resourceful, of many skills, well-travelled.
That's the first line and complicated tells us nothing about the protagonist. Everyone can be complicated, but only Odysseus is πολύτροπον. It's a quality of character few people possess.
Original comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25525457#25531307
Re: War Music: Homer and His Iliad
#8I can warmly recommend the new Iliad translation by Caroline Alexander as audiobook. Suberb! I understand the new translation by Emily Wilson (whose Odyssey was excellent) should be good as well. The new translations really bring these old poems to life, and listening to them is at least for me the best way to consume them.
These are good, but to really bring them to life I recommend Christopher Logue, whose version doesn't even pretend to be a translation. There are some nice excerpts in his obituary in The Economist https://archive.ph/eaCKf
I heartily recommend Logue's adaptation too! I'm not a regular poetry reader, nor a reader of the classics but his version really opened my mind to those worlds. I enjoy writers like Samuel Beckett and the weirder, darker end of sci-fi/fantasy (e.g. B. Catling's The Voorh), and Logue's War Music really just seemed to fit right into my taste.
Re: War Music: Homer and His Iliad
#9> Homer had visited windy Troy on a clear day when distant Samothrace was visible … I like to think he had walked south, like Chryses, beside the shore of the booming sea This passage sounds a lot like the writing style of the ancient classics. I assume the reviewer chose it on purpose for that reason. I don't know that I need to read this book, but I appreciate that apparently it's a work of passion and enthusiasm.
Thankfully the original work is now out of copyright, and there is an English translation here: https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Greek/Ilhome.php
Re: War Music: Homer and His Iliad
#10I can warmly recommend the new Iliad translation by Caroline Alexander as audiobook. Suberb! I understand the new translation by Emily Wilson (whose Odyssey was excellent) should be good as well. The new translations really bring these old poems to life, and listening to them is at least for me the best way to consume them.
I disagree about Emily Wilson's Odissey. She translated the first line of the poem as "Tell me about a complicated man". She almost went with "Tell me about a straying husband". Neither complicated nor straying husband appear in the original text. Pope's description (The man for wisdom’s various arts renown’d...) is closer to the epithets we are taught at school (ricco d'astuzie or dal multiforme ingegno). πολύτροπος…
This complaint seems odd. First complicated is obviously not in the original text, it's in Greek. I guess what you mean is "No words I would translate as complicated are in the text" but then your complaint just becomes a tautology. Saying Pope's version from the 1700s is more like what you were taught in school is similar, it's probably the version you or your teachers read so it shaped what you were taught. Essentially this comes down to saying it's different, but that doesn't make it bad.