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…
Homer and His Iliad
11–20 of 33 posts
Re: Homer and His Iliad
#12A 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…
The religions of Homer and Gilgamesh faded away a very long time ago, leaving only their myths behind.
Re: Homer and His Iliad
#13Apparently 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…
Re: Homer and His Iliad
#14A 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…
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 have the story from the perspective of the people traveling the sea. Both stories take place after a prophet named Mopsus/Moses dies in the desert as wandering by foot back from a conflict in North Africa.
The recent finds of very early Iron Age Aegean style pottery made with local clay in Tel Dan is particularly interesting in this context, especially given the lead researcher's belief it strengthens an earlier theory that the Denyen sea peoples in Adana, Anatolia were the Biblical Dan who stayed on their ships in Judges 5, what's considered one of the oldest parts of the Bible. The Denyen/Hiyawa are also the people who had 8th century bilinguals claiming their ruling dynasty owed itself to a House of Mopsus' similar to how the tribe of Dan received Moses's descendent as priest (counter to rules elsewhere) in Judges 18.
Connections between Moses and Greek history didn't escape various Greek historians either. Atrapanus of Alexandria claimed Moses was the Argonautica figure Museus and taught Orpheus the mysteries. Hecataeus of Abdera claimed many different people came out of Egypt including Greek heros like the Phonecian Cadmus or the Lybian/Egyptian Danaus, brother to the Pharoh with 50 sons (Ramses II had either 48 or 50, and in his forensic report was identified as appearing to be a Lybian Berber).
You even have Odysseus telling of attending a one day battle against Egypt immediately after Troy which they lose and leads to a seven year captivity until "a certain Phrygian" shows up and tries to ransom him to the Lybians.
Sounds a lot like the battle of Ramses II's son Merneptah against the Lybian/sea peoples coalition that happened in a single day and seven years after which an usurper takes the throne, nicknamed Mose and allegedly putting into place very Phonecian sociopolitical changes.
There's so much more to the stories than I think most people might suspect. Even just the history of Troy, into the hands of the Mycenaean fleet in the late bronze age as demonstrated by the Hittites asking Aegean cooperation in handing over a fugitive that fled there, but then into Hittite hands until conquered again by a battle leaving an archeological mark in the early Iron Age.
The medieval Book of Jashar claimed Moses joined a 9 year siege to retake a city which had been stolen away from a king who eventually appoints him their leader.
A somewhat similar story to that of Eumolpus, put in the water as a babe, raised by another family until leaving North Africa to become appointed king of the Thracians (in the Troad during the time of the Trojan War per Strabo). Or Danaus, brother of Pharoh and appointed king of the Ahyawa upon arrival.
I suspect 'Homer' is a version of the history combining a Mycenaean catalogue of ships taking Anatolia in the LBA with a later siege of Hittite controlled Wilusa in the early Iron Age.
Herodotus's comments on Helen having been in Egypt when the Memphis temple of Astarte is built (18th dynasty) is particularly interesting with this consideration, as around the time of that conquest is when "beautiful woman who arrived" is in Egypt, married a Pharoh of the 18th dynasty, was the only woman ever depicted in the smiting pose, has 6 female children in a row (1% chance randomly), and during whose time Egypt is transformed into a solar cult where she communed with the god directly without her husband (so transgressive records of it were later defaced). And a woman whose only recorded relatives were a wetnurse and a sister, much like Helen with Theseus's mother and sister.
There too, how odd that Helen should share the same name as the twins Alexandra and Helens of Wilusa, both priest/priestesses of the sun god and twins. And then you have Helen kidnapped by Alexander.
I wonder at the survivorship biases that might occur if extraordinary events occured to a collection of different peoples. Like the twelve tribes of Anatolians captured by Egypt following the battle of Kadesh, one for each son with him.
Would those twelve tribes have stories about other groups? Or in their version of the tale would everyone be from their tribe, or claim to have been led by their ancestry?
What about the representations of the roles of women in the age of the Amazons? Would those stories pass through a filter of misogynistic intermediaries easily?
I suspect given a number of finds in just the past decade that our picture of this period of history is going to change quite a lot from what we currently think.
Re: Homer and His Iliad
#15Apparently 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…
Thread author finds the word "complicated" offensive. Which is pretty weird thing to take offense about. The rest of it seems to be taking offense on quite random translation choices ... while not understanding what the original says.
Thread author claims to have had one full year of ancient Greek at Stanford.
Re: Homer and His Iliad
#16Tangentially, 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…
Re: Homer and His Iliad
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thread author finds the word "complicated" offensive. Which is pretty weird thing to take offense about. The rest of it seems to be taking offense on quite random translation choices ... while not understanding what the original says.
> while not understanding what the original says. Thread author claims to have had one full year of ancient Greek at Stanford.
Also, the author of the thread has pretty odd reading of texts in English.
Re: Homer and His Iliad
#18While it is certainly interesting to entertain the idea of an author it can only be a rudimentary and fragmentary picture at best, given the discontinuity of the text itself, its sources and the time which had since passed.
What I find more fascinating than the search for a single authorship is how the written sources give us a peek into a lively oral tradition.[1]
What we understand today as "texts" must have been radically different back then, for the vast majority of people at the time there was no such thing as a final reference in the form of a written text, the presenter itself was the source. Infamously in the western tradition Socrates introduced by Plato is known for his refusal to write things down, the arguments given in Phaedrus against writing can be easily discarded today, but I think the effort put into the mastery of the spoken word in order to tell captivating 'stories' (or like in the case of Socrates engaging in arguments) must have been extraordinary to witness back then.
[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_Author
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral-formulaic_composition
Re: Homer and His Iliad
#19Apparently 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.
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 with.
Re: Homer and His Iliad
#20Tangentially, 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…
I’ll second Fitzgerald. It seems to be an under-appreciated middle way in terms of translations.
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.