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The Claudyssey: A line-for-line translation of Homer's Odyssey by Claude Fable 5

theclaudyssey.com

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Re: The Claudyssey: A line-for-line translation of Homer's Odyssey by Claude Fable 5

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://theclaudyssey.com/read/book-01.html#n1 The first line is a crappy mishmash of Lattimore and Fagles. Lattimore: >Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways, who was driven far journeys, after he had sacked Troy's sacred citadel. Fagles: >Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns driven time and again off course, once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy. Claude: >Tell me the man, Muse — the…

"man of many turnings", is a more literal translation of polytropon than Lattimore and Fagles, and and in fact the whole line is better analysed as an original, literal translation from common dictionary glosses than a "crappy mishmash". Many people who want to give a literal gloss say "man of many turns" or "many-turned man". > ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ πλάγχθη, ἐπεὶ Τροίης ἱερὸν πτολίεθρον…

Claude repeats man twice like Fagles, despite that not being in the Greek. Using driven and wandering is a weird repetition rather than just using "made to wander" which is a more natural way of directly translating the passive. Claude uses the "driven" in both Fagles and Lattimore. It also drops the "very" for no apparent reason (also not present in Fagles or Lattimore). Claude uses "once he had sacked Troy's holy citadel" mirroring Fagles's phasing, when you could just translate it "after he sacked the holy city of Troy". It also uses citadel rather than city, copying Lattimore.

Vis-à-vis polytropos, I just think that "man of many-turnings" sounds god-awful, but the similarity was mostly the fact it uses the construction "man of x" like Fagles and Lattimore rather than a normal adjective like in the Greek.

Re: The Claudyssey: A line-for-line translation of Homer's Odyssey by Claude Fable 5

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"man of many turnings", is a more literal translation of polytropon than Lattimore and Fagles, and and in fact the whole line is better analysed as an original, literal translation from common dictionary glosses than a "crappy mishmash". Many people who want to give a literal gloss say "man of many turns" or "many-turned man". > ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ πλάγχθη, ἐπεὶ Τροίης ἱερὸν πτολίεθρον…

Claude repeats man twice like Fagles, despite that not being in the Greek. Using driven and wandering is a weird repetition rather than just using "made to wander" which is a more natural way of directly translating the passive. Claude uses the "driven" in both Fagles and Lattimore. It also drops the "very" for no apparent reason (also not present in Fagles or Lattimore). Claude uses "once he had sacked Troy's holy c…

(Note: I'm sorry, I'm now realizing that my glosses were really bad, they provide a common basic meaning but that isn't always the sense that they have in the text, think "to bear arms" and "to bear a burden" in English having the same root and related meanings but different connotations)

> Claude repeats man twice like Fagles, despite that not being in the Greek.

This style is not unique to Fagles. In Greek poetry modifying words (polytropon, for preceding andra ...) can be in apparently insensible locations not found in prose and speech, but accepted in poetry for the sake of meter and poetic style. In Greek, this heritage makes it acceptable, and the marked cases provide redundancy that allows the very flexible poetic word order. Here, there is a choice to capture the sense putting "man" before Muse as the focus of the sentence as in the Greek, and then repeat "the man" again before "of many turnings" because it is otherwise more ambiguous to just say "of many turnings" after "Muse".

> Using driven and wandering is a weird repetition

I don't think it's negatively weird, it's a choice that tries to capture the range of senses that a Greek might associate with it.

> It also drops the "very" for no apparent reason (also not present in Fagles or Lattimore)

Lattimore doesn't really capture this. Fagles captures this by using a more expressive "time and again" for "far"/"many".

Maybe one can argue that Claude choses to reflect extremity in this by giving both "driven" and "wandering".

> once

This is a very understandable gloss that I had chosen to supply "after" instead. It is not an innovation by Fagles, but a choice Fagles from a small range of valid common choices.

> It also uses citadel rather than city

I think citadel is altogether an appropriate general translation as well. It is described as "holy", and the Greek is a Homeric "ptoliethron" that everyday Attic/Ionic speakers would consider an archaic word, where the everyday word is the "polis" that you and I are familiar with.

If your opinion is that Claude does not have a consistent editorial voice that is preferable for translation, sure I agree. If your opinion is that it translates while being aware of and perhaps taking cues from prior translations, sure I agree, with the caveat that it also sees dictionary definitions, the Homeric Greek itself, common ways Homeric is translated, and more literal glosses, and it seems to me in fact to take more influence from these (at least, just by looking at this first line). But it is difficult for me to agree that it just mashes up two prior translations.

As for the criticism of editorial voice I wonder if it can be solved by a matter of prompting with expertise.

Re: The Claudyssey: A line-for-line translation of Homer's Odyssey by Claude Fable 5

#63

How does it compare to previous (human) translations, what is the regurgitation level? In any case, lots of em dashes, so mission accomplished to bring it up to contemporary standards.

https://theclaudyssey.com/read/book-01.html#n1 The first line is a crappy mishmash of Lattimore and Fagles. Lattimore: >Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways, who was driven far journeys, after he had sacked Troy's sacred citadel. Fagles: >Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns driven time and again off course, once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy. Claude: >Tell me the man, Muse — the…

[deleted]

Re: The Claudyssey: A line-for-line translation of Homer's Odyssey by Claude Fable 5

#64

How does it compare to previous (human) translations, what is the regurgitation level? In any case, lots of em dashes, so mission accomplished to bring it up to contemporary standards.

https://theclaudyssey.com/read/book-01.html#n1 The first line is a crappy mishmash of Lattimore and Fagles. Lattimore: >Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways, who was driven far journeys, after he had sacked Troy's sacred citadel. Fagles: >Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns driven time and again off course, once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy. Claude: >Tell me the man, Muse — the…

Your comment persuaded me that just explaining my prompt methodology is insufficient.

With Claude's help, I ran some tests against nine different translations including Peter Green's line-matched translation, the closest method-matched human control. 36 human-vs-human pairings as controls.

Murray (the published translation of the Greek, Loeb source) and Lattimore affinities are genuinely elevated. Fagles is modest but not totally absent. The test can't exclude 4-6-word mosaic composition, and doesn't measure interpretive influence.

The longest shared passage in the 12,107 lines is 29 words. Long-fragment assembly is strongly disfavored by synthetic-splice calibration. The translation resembles Green as much as it resembles Murray, or three times as strongly as it resembles Fagles' famous one. That strikes me as being in the opposite direction from what training data-regurgitation would predict.

https://theclaudyssey.com/independence.html

Methodological corrections welcomed

Re: The Claudyssey: A line-for-line translation of Homer's Odyssey by Claude Fable 5

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claude repeats man twice like Fagles, despite that not being in the Greek. Using driven and wandering is a weird repetition rather than just using "made to wander" which is a more natural way of directly translating the passive. Claude uses the "driven" in both Fagles and Lattimore. It also drops the "very" for no apparent reason (also not present in Fagles or Lattimore). Claude uses "once he had sacked Troy's holy c…

(Note: I'm sorry, I'm now realizing that my glosses were really bad, they provide a common basic meaning but that isn't always the sense that they have in the text, think "to bear arms" and "to bear a burden" in English having the same root and related meanings but different connotations) > Claude repeats man twice like Fagles, despite that not being in the Greek. This style is not unique to Fagles. In Greek poetry m…

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Re: The Claudyssey: A line-for-line translation of Homer's Odyssey by Claude Fable 5

#66
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're making two separable criticisms: (1) that Fable's translation is a mere "mishmash of Lattimore and Fagles" and (2) that it's a crappy one. I'm not seeing, from what you quote, how this is more "mishmash" than "translation of the same underlying text as them". As for whether it's crappy, that's a pretty subjective matter; for what little it's worth "of many turnings" doesn't seem particularly dreck-y to me; it…

>driven far journeys" which to me seems barely grammatical "Tell me the man" and "of many turnings" sound far, far worse, not to mention the egregious em-dash. Obviously there's no way to really _prove_ what is good taste, but I would be quite surprised to hear you really think that Lattimore is worse than Claude here. >"Secret" seems like a weird choice, too This seems to be an OCR error from the source I copied onl…

I agree that "tell me the man" feels weird. I still don't see what's wrong with "of many turnings". To me, "driven far journeys" is a bit worse than "tell me the man" (and quite similar in kind), and much worse than "of many turnings". But maybe I just have terrible taste.

(I'm glad to hear that "secret" wasn't real. It seemed quite inexplicable to me.)

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