Translations of Homer

[sdi]

And while I'm blathering about Homer, if you're interested in reading him, my favorite translation for pleasure reading is W. H. D. Rouse's: The Story of Achilles and The Story of Odysseus. (The latter was even suitable for reading to my then-seven-year-old daughter so long as I explained things as I went along.) Those are hard to find in hardcopy, but don't let that stop you: even if all you can get locally is Samuel Butler's translation, it's stodgy but it's fine (for example, I have a really nice leather-bound, gilt-edged edition from Barnes and Noble, which I got while traveling for maybe $20 and is pretty hard to complain about).

Alexander Pope's Iliad is exquisite but I can't read heroic verse for more than a couple pages before my eyes bleed.

If I need a very precise translation (if I'm trying to understand the Greek line-by-line, say), I've been very impressed with Andrew Lang's Iliad and Odyssey every time I've looked things up in them (but I haven't read them cover to cover).

My daughter liked the Odyssey so much that she begged me to read her the Iliad, but even with an easy translation (and my skipping over large sections), it was too much for her. She enjoyed Rosemary Sutcliffe's retelling for children, Black Ships Before Troy, though.

Comments

[jprussell]

When I was studying Classics in college, we tended to use the Lattimore translation of both, which strikes a pretty good balance between accurate translation and readability (though maybe erring on the "accurate translation" side), and I've read some excerpts of Stanley Lombardo's very colloquial translations and liked them fine. Likely less good for some of the finer philosophical points, but he's a good enough classicist that I mostly trust his wider latitude in translations.

A fun side-note: while I was in college, Lombardo came to campus for a performance (he got his PhD from my Classics department). He recited the scene where Achilles chases Hector around the walls of Troy, with a hand drum and a harpist accompanying him, in the best verbal rendition of Homeric Greek we can reconstruct. I didn't speak a word of Greek at the time, but it was a powerful performance nonetheless - it sounded like a chase, growing faster and more tense as it went. When my friend talked me into going, I wasn't that interested, but it's remained a fond memory ever since.

Cheers,
Jeff

[sdi]

That sounds fun! It's part of why I'm trying to learn the language—poetry simply doesn't translate—but since Greek especially has really been locked into academia in the West, it's difficult to learn on one's own.

[jprussell]

That and ancient Greek is just plain hard! The method by which I first learned in the "Intensive Summer Greek" program at the University of Texas, developed by Gareth Morgan has a lot to recommend it - rather than merely memorizing reams and reams of vocabulary and declension tables (though much of that is still needed, of course), it focuses on "roots," which helps to open up swathes of related words all at once, and then applying them to real texts (simplified at first, but quickly moving on to some of the more straightforward real texts). One insight I gained from this approach that helped a lot was that early Greek apparently used prepositions adverbially as their own particles, which at first seemed ridiculous and incomprehensible, until I realized a. English does this all the time (as in "beat up" or "run down"), and b. later Greek just smashed the prepositions into the words to form compounds (as in epistemo "I stand on"). Last I checked, the full material hadn't been published yet, but it's being put together into books and an online course here: https://jamesfpatterson.com/gml/

Of course, there's something to be said for spending six hours of classroom time five days a week and at least a comparable amount of time on homework for a whole summer, and most of us can't swing that for self-study, but the materials might be helpful nonetheless.

Cheers,
Jeff

[sdi]

Greek is, indeed, just plain hard! I've also an awful Mercury, so I assume I'm just not well-suited to the task—it's a wonder I've managed English!

I've actually had a pretty easy time ingesting vocabulary, it's the grammar that's been defeating me: even if I have a declension table down pat (no easy task in itself!), I have great difficulty applying them when reading (due, I assume, to the different context). I think once I get to the point of being able to just read a significant fraction of a text, the practice will get me there, but since reading is such a slow and laborious process right now, I'm not getting through enough material for it to "click."

Thank you for the link to Gareth Morgan's Lexis, I will take a look at it!

[jprussell]

If I remember right, that might be something that the Lexis approach helps with as well - pointing out the patterns behind the seemingly arbitrary declensions and conjugations, so that they stick in the head more readily, but yeah, it's weird for an English speaker, most of all in poetry where customary word order gets all jumbled up and our analytical (word-order/position) assumptions lead us astray.