Advice on Reading Homer in Translation

Advice for anyone reading the Iliad: read Simone Weil's essay "The Iliad, or the Poem of Force" first [1]. The essay was a profound experience on its own for me, in a way that came as a great relief in a world which seemed to lack all moral gravity. (Note, it was written in 1945.)

And it conveys better than anything why the epic was composed, why it survived to be written down (the Bronze Age Collapse and a whole dark age separated the era of the Trojan War from the era of Homer!) and why people have been reading it for almost three thousand years.

[1] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/simone-weil-the-ilia...

I think there's enough mental barrier's to deciding to read The Iliad and The Odyssey without a learned professor adding more. If I'd read this article first I would have never bothered attempting to read either. That would have been a great personal tragedy.

> I would recommend... reading a plot summary or abridged retelling of the epic you are planning to read before you begin.

Terrible advice for a potential reader. I'm not a student and don't need assigned pre-work.

I struggle with reading poetry, always have for whatever reason, and I suspect I'm not the only one. I'd tell anyone who was intimidated to read Samuel Butler’s prose version and to heck with anyone who's worried about whatever may be lost in translation.

The stories are wonderful. They're transporting. I've rarely felt so completely consumed by another world. I read The Aeneid when I was done because I wanted to keep that feeling alive.

Try a few different translations - go to the library or download sample chapters from amazon. Decide what works best for you. Read them purely for pleasure because they are wonderful.

This is a great run-down and mirrors my experience of reading Fagles, Fitzgerald and Wilson.

My favourite though is Christopher Logue's version of the Iliad called War Music - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Music_(poem). It was controversial because he didn't know ancient Greek and based his version on other translations, as well as taking liberties with the text and introducing anachronisms (one of my favourite lines is about the "camera" panning across the armies in front of Troy). It's the only version I've read where I could clearly hear the characters talk in my head - it was a bit like reading a play at points.

Just finished re-reading Emily Wilson's translation of the Odyssey a few weeks ago.

If you haven't read the Odyssey before, I think her translation is accessible enough to just jump right in.

My favorite part of the story is how central luck is to everything.

The characters constantly accept the role of luck in what they do, and the potential of landing on the wrong side of it.

Few modern stories give luck and randomness such prominence, and downplay our own ability to entirely control outcomes.

> our culture has trained us to take rhyme less seriously

As I was reading this, I realized compositions with metric and rhyme are a good way of decreasing the chances of someone altering them.

I'm thinking about the times before the printing press. Times when people copied books by hand, sometimes altering stuff during the process. I imagine altering a composition that has strict form is much harder than altering free text. Can't just insert or remove words freely (metric would change), can't just exchange a word by some other unrelated word (rhyme would change). Someone wanting to modify such works would need to be more than copyists.

> I would recommend... reading a plot summary or abridged retelling of the epic you are planning to read before you begin.

Hard disagree. Maybe that way is wise if you're cramming for a test, but the experience of reading any book (or watching any movie) is richer if you go into it first on your own terms. Otherwise you're inevitably shaded by the secondary source.

I read the Butler translations without knowing much more than Zeus and it was a delight.

Some related links:

- Emily Wilson insights on some of her translations: https://www.emilyrcwilson.com/emilyrcwilson-scholia

- Compare a few passages from the Odyssey: https://www.exodusbooks.com/odyssey-comparisons.aspx

- "The Homeric version", by J.L. Borges: https://gwern.net/doc/borges/1932-borges-thehomericversions....

A good translation makes or breaks a book.

If you're going to read a foreign book, always research the translation first.

IIRC, the primary copy of Les Misérables (the one with the nice cover) is the public domain translation from 100 years ago, vs. the two more recent excellent Penguin translations (1982, 2015).

It's only superficially relevant here, but I love the poem, so I'll share it anyway:

On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer, John Keats

  Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
  And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
  Round many western islands have I been
  Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
  Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
  That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;
  Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
  Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
  Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
  When a new planet swims into his ken;
  Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
  He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men
  Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—
  Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

"Some version of the Iliad most likely became relatively fixed by around the second quarter of the seventh century BCE and a version of the Odyssey by the middle of the same century."

So I suspect this is a clever literary sort of joke, I appreciated it as such. But I was not exactly sure and wanted to talk about it. The two time periods are the same right?

I can't say how it compares to other translations, but A. S. Kline's translations of both are available for free online and, I found, easy and fun to read: https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Greek/Odhome.php.

I wonder what surviving ancient physical texts the modern translations are based on. Also, the Iliad and Odyssey were prominant books in ancient Greece so there may have been different editions and revisions then. How do you know which one you're looking at and what it represents?

Peter Green's translations of Homer are excellent but ommitted from this roundup:

https://www.amazon.com/Iliad-New-Translation-Peter-Green/dp/...

This stands true for almost any native, comprehensive early education language. Try to read Emil Cioran in French, and let me know if his aphorismes truly mean what you think they do, in their English or even Romanian (post him "departing" the latter, when writing) translations.

I like what Alfred North Whitehead said about translation in "The Place of Classics in Education". Punchline is at the end.

...

I have often noticed that, if in an assembly of great scholars the topic of translations be introduced, they function as to their emotions and sentiments in exactly the same way as do decent people in the presence of a nasty sex-problem. A mathematician has no scholastic respectability to lose, so I will face the question.

It follows from the whole line of thought which I have been developing, that an exact appreciation of the meanings of Latin words, of the ways in which ideas are connected in grammatical constructions, and of the whole hang of a Latin sentence with its distribution of emphasis, forms the very backbone of the merits which I ascribe to the study of Latin. Accordingly any woolly vagueness of teaching, slurring over the niceties of language defeats the whole ideal which I have set before you. The use of a translation to enable the pupils to get away from the Latin as quickly as possible, or to avoid the stretch of mind in grappling with construction, is erroneous. Exactness, definiteness, and independent power of analysis are among the main prizes of the whole study.

But we are still confronted with the inexorable problem of pace, and with the short four or five years of the whole course. Every poem is meant to be read within certain limits of time. The contrasts, and the images, and the transition of moods must correspond with the sway of rhythms in the human spirit. These have their periods, which refuse to be stretched beyond certain limits. You may take the noblest poetry in the world, and, if you stumble through it at snail’s pace, it collapses from a work of art into a rubbish heap. Think of the child’s mind as he pores over his work: he reads “‘as when,” then follows a pause with a reference to the dictionary, then he goes on-‘“an eagle,” then another reference to the dictionary, followed by a period of wonderment over the construction, and so on, and so on. Is that going to help him to the vision of Rome? Surely, surely, common sense dictates that you procure the best literary translation you can, the one which best preserves the charm and vigour of the original, and that you read it aloud at the right pace, and append such comments as will elucidate the comprehension. The attack on the Latin will then be fortified by the sense that it enshrines a living work of art.

But someone objects that a translation is woefully inferior to the original. Of course it is, that is why the boy has to master the Latin original. When the original has been mastered, it can be given its proper pace. I plead for an initial sense of the unity of the whole, to be given by a translation at the right pace, and for a final appreciation of the full value of the whole to be given by the original at the right pace.

"Learning Ancient Greek, however, is an immensely challenging endeavor that requires many years of effortful study and practice and it is even more challenging (bordering on impossible) to do on one’s own without a teacher."

It is a lot of work. I would point out, though, that not everyone who went through the English public schools or the American St. Grottlesex world was really a wizard. Yet given enough encouragement (often delivered with a stick, to be sure, at least in England) quite a few of them learned Ancient Greek.

I will take a moment to recommend NYRB's slim volume War and the Iliad. I think that Rachel Bespaloff's essays are outstanding, and an infinitely more qualified judge, Robert Fitzgerald, though so also.

If you'd like to give the Iliad a go in the original Greek you can try https://iliad.rocks