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Homer and His Iliad

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Re: Homer and His Iliad

#21

Post by christudor »

davidivadavid wrote: post #9
Torkel wrote: post #7

Apparently there's a new translation of the Iliad coming out. A thread on it came up on twitter. The thread author strongly dislikes the new translation - be that as it may, author seems a bit biased tbh. But the thread has images of the same passage from multiple translations. It is interesting to see the differences! The oral tradition roots of these texts makes translating them for modern readers a challenge. Reli…

"Completely ignorant of the topic" is more accurate than "a bit biased." Most of those threads are partisan BS with absolutely no knowledge of (or real interest in) Ancient Greek, Homer, poetry or translation in general. Abysmal idiocy.

I don’t agree with the Twitter thread, but I do think there are fair criticisms to be made of Wilson’s translation, one of which is that she stretches the meaning of the Greek – up to and including just ignoring certain lines – in order to present a particular view of Odysseus.

Richard Whitaker‘s review (published in Acta Classica 63 (2020), pp. 1-15) is quite good on this (as well as on other problems with Wilson’s translation): https://casa-kvsa.org.za/legacy/AC63-Whitaker-18DEC2019.pdf

Re: Homer and His Iliad

#22

Post by goodbyesf »

kromem wrote: post #14
ggm wrote: post #2

A great read. Gets directly to the heart of the problem of ideation of authorship through deep time of an oral tradition transcribed. I can't see Homer as a singular, but I wonder which scribe cast the language strongly into a form modern ancient Greek scholars most recognise. We must be working back through fifth and sixth generation retakes on the ur-texts. Qualities of poetic form and things like alliteration go t…

You might be surprised at just how much the old Greek stories and the Abrahamic ones cross over actually. For example, the story of a sheepherder who kills an elite pre-Greek warrior with the cast of a stone. In the Bible you have David killing the sea person Goliath (though elsewhere it mentions another killed him, and some scholars think the story was reappropriated to the Davidic dynasty). In the Argonautica you h…

It's more fundamental than that. The jewish god is just zeus stolen right out of greek mythology literally atop a mountain slinging lightning.

Exodus 20:18 - "When the people heard the thunder and the loud blast of the ram’s horn, and when they saw the flashes of lightning and the smoke billowing from the mountain, they stood at a distance, trembling with fear."

The twelve olympians from greek myth became the twelve tribes of israel with became the twelve disciples of christ.

Noah's flood comes from the flood of gilgamesh.

It's all stolen and reimagined myth.

Re: Homer and His Iliad

#23

Post by giraffe_lady »

goodbyesf wrote: post #22
kromem wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be surprised at just how much the old Greek stories and the Abrahamic ones cross over actually. For example, the story of a sheepherder who kills an elite pre-Greek warrior with the cast of a stone. In the Bible you have David killing the sea person Goliath (though elsewhere it mentions another killed him, and some scholars think the story was reappropriated to the Davidic dynasty). In the Argonautica you h…

It's more fundamental than that. The jewish god is just zeus stolen right out of greek mythology literally atop a mountain slinging lightning. Exodus 20:18 - "When the people heard the thunder and the loud blast of the ram’s horn, and when they saw the flashes of lightning and the smoke billowing from the mountain, they stood at a distance, trembling with fear." The twelve olympians from greek myth became the twelve…

IIRC yahwism came from the canaanite polytheism and while that god is very similar to zeus it is actually a different and unrelated tradition.

Similarly certain numbers and especially the flood theme recur across mythologies that are proven to be unconnected.

You can't take even very clear similarities and use them alone to draw connections between traditions like that. In fact the allure and inevitable failure of this approach was at one point enough of a cliche that the reader's awareness of it is assumed for a major plot point in the novel middlemarch, written 150 years ago.

Re: Homer and His Iliad

#24

Post by watwut »

Torkel wrote: post #19
davidivadavid wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Completely ignorant of the topic" is more accurate than "a bit biased." Most of those threads are partisan BS with absolutely no knowledge of (or real interest in) Ancient Greek, Homer, poetry or translation in general. Abysmal idiocy.

Yeah - I should probably have pointed out more clearly that the author there seems to be a bit of a partisan jerk... I did see it, and I did try to point it out, but obviously not well enough. The point I was trying to make was that there are such large differences in between the translations, and the thread does contain the same passage from multiple translations. But, again - poor choice of link to illustrate it wi…

I actually like the Wilsons threads for that purpose better. Here is rather lengthy thread of many choices you can make as translator: https://twitter.com/EmilyRCWilson/status/1027194889803587585

And comparative thread of other translations: https://twitter.com/EmilyRCWilson/status/1093157738857811968

One big reason is that her threads are rather emotionless, difference in translation is something to analyze rather then get outraged about. While they show different choices and compare them to original text, she is not insulting other translators nor getting offended over nor calls their existence a crime. She even praises other translators in various threads, there is actually no war between her and them.

Even when she criticizes the other translations for inaccuracy, from the more of feminist point of view, she argues more by text, reading of original poem and meaning then by feeling outraged (unlike the original thread listed here): https://twitter.com/EmilyRCWilson/status/971823043512360960

Re: Homer and His Iliad

#25

Post by davidivadavid »

christudor wrote: post #21
davidivadavid wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Completely ignorant of the topic" is more accurate than "a bit biased." Most of those threads are partisan BS with absolutely no knowledge of (or real interest in) Ancient Greek, Homer, poetry or translation in general. Abysmal idiocy.

I don’t agree with the Twitter thread, but I do think there are fair criticisms to be made of Wilson’s translation, one of which is that she stretches the meaning of the Greek – up to and including just ignoring certain lines – in order to present a particular view of Odysseus. Richard Whitaker‘s review (published in Acta Classica 63 (2020), pp. 1-15) is quite good on this (as well as on other problems with Wilson’s…

There's fair criticism to be made of most translations.

The fallacy begins when one assumes that there is some kind of perfect ideal translation that exists somewhere, that translations can be compared to. Translation, especially literary translation, always involves some amount of arbitrary, artistic parti pris.

Wilson's translation involves a lot of formal (preservation of the number of lines, iambic pentameter) and rhetorical (modernization of the vocabulary) constraints that require sometimes wide deviation from the original. That's inevitable.

What's interesting however is to look at those deviations as an opportunity for conversation, not as an opportunity for correction, which is just nonsensical in the context of a translation that doesn't aim primarily at accuracy. Except for clear mistakes, most of the choices Wilson made were made in complete awareness of the trade-offs they involve.

The Twitter discussion fantasizes about a translation where no such trade-offs exist, which tells you enough about how much translation experience the authors have (none).

Whitaker's review is a good academic review that doesn't at least fall for those beginner misconceptions and recognizes trade-offs explicitly: "Both Green and Verity use a long, six-beat line. This has the advantage for them that they can translate almost every word of the Greek original. But it also, sometimes, leads to a wordiness, a certain turgidity in their versions that makes one sigh for the concision of Wilson."

Re: Homer and His Iliad

#26

Post by [deleted] »

bobbytuck wrote: post #20
tiahura wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll second Fitzgerald. It seems to be an under-appreciated middle way in terms of translations.

Not at all "under-appreciated" If you were in grad school (or maybe even undergrad) 30+ years ago, you read Fitzgerald. Period. It's the fundamental translation. Everything new is judged by Fitzgerald's version. That said, I just finished the Lombardo translation for the Iliad -- and, yeah, it's good. Modern, quick, sweeping. But Fitzgerald's echoes are hard to silence.

[deleted]

Re: Homer and His Iliad

#27

Post by mrangle »

goodbyesf wrote: post #22
kromem wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be surprised at just how much the old Greek stories and the Abrahamic ones cross over actually. For example, the story of a sheepherder who kills an elite pre-Greek warrior with the cast of a stone. In the Bible you have David killing the sea person Goliath (though elsewhere it mentions another killed him, and some scholars think the story was reappropriated to the Davidic dynasty). In the Argonautica you h…

It's more fundamental than that. The jewish god is just zeus stolen right out of greek mythology literally atop a mountain slinging lightning. Exodus 20:18 - "When the people heard the thunder and the loud blast of the ram’s horn, and when they saw the flashes of lightning and the smoke billowing from the mountain, they stood at a distance, trembling with fear." The twelve olympians from greek myth became the twelve…

None of it is "stolen", any more than the mythology of Zeus is stolen from Vedic tales. None of it is re-imagined, but re-articulated. If you are looking for evidence of a cultural crime, you haven't begun to get it with all due respect. This is about truth telling, not ownership of the truth. As always, the truth is always re-articulated across cultures. Generally, embedded in a manner that makes it maximally difficult for liars to corrupt it. Pointing at its articulation in various cultures as theft is, in fact, evidence that its defense system works.

Re: Homer and His Iliad

#28

Post by basch »

goodbyesf wrote: post #22
kromem wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be surprised at just how much the old Greek stories and the Abrahamic ones cross over actually. For example, the story of a sheepherder who kills an elite pre-Greek warrior with the cast of a stone. In the Bible you have David killing the sea person Goliath (though elsewhere it mentions another killed him, and some scholars think the story was reappropriated to the Davidic dynasty). In the Argonautica you h…

It's more fundamental than that. The jewish god is just zeus stolen right out of greek mythology literally atop a mountain slinging lightning. Exodus 20:18 - "When the people heard the thunder and the loud blast of the ram’s horn, and when they saw the flashes of lightning and the smoke billowing from the mountain, they stood at a distance, trembling with fear." The twelve olympians from greek myth became the twelve…

https://www.thetorah.com/article/yhwh-the-kenite-god-of-meta...

The Kenite Hypothesis says God came from the South. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenite_hypothesis

Re: Homer and His Iliad

#29

Post by basch »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #23
goodbyesf wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more fundamental than that. The jewish god is just zeus stolen right out of greek mythology literally atop a mountain slinging lightning. Exodus 20:18 - "When the people heard the thunder and the loud blast of the ram’s horn, and when they saw the flashes of lightning and the smoke billowing from the mountain, they stood at a distance, trembling with fear." The twelve olympians from greek myth became the twelve…

IIRC yahwism came from the canaanite polytheism and while that god is very similar to zeus it is actually a different and unrelated tradition. Similarly certain numbers and especially the flood theme recur across mythologies that are proven to be unconnected. You can't take even very clear similarities and use them alone to draw connections between traditions like that. In fact the allure and inevitable failure of th…

And arguably even imported from elsewhere into the Canaan stories.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenite_hypothesis

Re: Homer and His Iliad

#30

Post by pallas_athena »

blueyes wrote: post #10

Tangentially, I'd like to just plug the translations Robert Fitzgerald made of the Iliad and the Odyssey in the 1960s and 70s. Your experience of these books will very much come down to the translation you choose. In America at least, his are not the most commonly found in the classics section of a bookstore. I'm told he plays a bit loose with Homer's word choice (I don't read Ancient Greek), but personally I don't m…

Borges: The Homeric Versions (pdf)

https://gwern.net/doc/borges/1932-borges-thehomericversions....

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