https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeric_Question
[2] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Authoress_of_the_Odyssey
It rather reminds of The New Four Seasons by Nigel Kennedy - https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/oct/29/nigel-kennedy-... - and Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet, as they're all interestingly irreverent takes (at least in my view) on a classic.
Bryant's defence of the approach is interesting:
> In the Preface to my version of the Iliad, I gave very briefly my reason for preserving the names derived from the Latin, by which the deities of the Grecian mythology have hitherto been known to English readers —that is to say, Jupiter, Juno, Neptune, Pluto, Mars, Venus, and the rest, instead of Zeus, Herè, and the other names which are properly Greek. As the propriety of doing this is questioned by some persons of exact scholarship, I will state the argument a little more at large. The names I have employed have been given to the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece from the very beginnings of our language. Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and the rest, down to Proctor and Keats —a list whose chronology extends through six hundred years —have followed this usage, and we may even trace it back for centuries before either of them wrote. Our prose writers have done the same thing; the names of Latin derivation have been adopted by the earliest and latest translators of the New Testament. To each of the deities known by these names there is annexed in the mind of the English reader —and it is for the English reader that I have made this translation —a peculiar set of attributes. Speak of Juno and Diana, and the mere English reader understands you at once; but when he reads the names of Herè and Artemis, he looks into his classical dictionary. The names of Latin origin are naturalized; the others are aliens and strangers. The conjunction and itself, which has been handed down to us unchanged from our Saxon ancestors, holds not its place in our language by a firmer and more incontestable title than the names which we have hitherto given to the deities of ancient Greece. We derive this usage from the Latin authors —from Virgil, and Horace, and Ovid, and the prose writers of ancient Rome. Art as well as poetry knows these deities by the same names. We talk of the Venus de Medicis, the Venus of Milo, the Jupiter of Phidias, and never think of calling a statue of Mars a statue of Ares.
> For my part, I am satisfied with the English language as it has been handed down to us. If the lines of my translation had bristled with the names of Zeus and Herè, and Poseidon and Ares, and Artemis and Demeter, I should feel that I had departed from the immemorial usage of the English tongue, that I had introduced obscurity where the meaning should have been plain, and that I had given just cause of complaint to the readers for whom I wrote.
0: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/homer/the-odyssey/william-...
I think that's an unfair characterization - Benjamin Jowett's translations of Plato's dialogues are decent and readable (these are readily available online). I also liked H.G. Dakyn's translations of Xenophon's The Memorabilia and The Symposium:
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1177/pg1177-images.html
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1181/pg1181-images.html
>The [International Booker Prize] celebrates the vital work of translators, with the £50,000 prize money divided equally between the author and the translator.
I don't think it reads very smoothly, and Butler adopts a kind of archaic tone (even for the time, I mean—not just that the translation is, itself, now old) that does more harm than good to the text. Not literal enough to justify the clunkiness, not distinctive and skilled and poetically-sublime enough to be a great English work in its own right (see: Pope) despite putting some effort into it[1]—basically, just a rougher read than other options, without much benefit to offset that. It's not terrible, I'm just not sure there's anything to recommend it—I'd say read a different Homer, and if you want to read Butler, read Erewhon or one of his other novels.
[1] For instance, from the link:
"So saying she bound on her glittering golden sandals, imperishable, with which she can fly like the wind over land or sea; she grasped the redoubtable bronze-shod spear, so stout and sturdy and strong, [...]"
He's trying with all that alliteration and the meter, and at times it works quite well for the space of a few words, but the wider a view, if you will, one takes of it, and as one proceeds with the reading, the worse it looks—to my eye, anyway.
[EDIT]
Other Butler, for free.
Erewhon:
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/samuel-butler/erewhon
The Way of All Flesh:
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/samuel-butler/the-way-of-a...
If you read and like Erewhon, you'll probably also like the sequel Erewhon Revisited. Didn't see it on Standard Ebooks, but I assume PG has it.
https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/nebrowser?id=tgn%2C7013...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_English_Opiu...
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/thomas-de-quincey/confessi...
On the contrary, most of its stories relate to extremely tales and folklores - ie Polyphemus.
Have fun : https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientists-trace-...
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v34/n04/edward-luttwak/homer...
https://web.archive.org/web/20230629122951/https://www.nytim...
I pulled my Lattimore off the shelf and compared them. I was unsurprised to find Wilson's iambic pentameter version over-simplified:
"Strange woman! Come on now, you must not be too sad on my account."
vs. Lattimore's: "Poor Andromachē! Why does your heart sorrow so much for me?"
Worth a read.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/28/books/review/iliad-transl...
For those who are short of time, and like a comedy angle: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001brj5 Haynes blasts through it in 30 minutes.
her books are also great as well
illiad is here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000d7p2
https://dornsife.usc.edu/assets/sites/903/docs/wilson_emily_...
As another commenter mentioned, both the Iliad and the Odyssey were passed down via oral tradition. If you want to be "pure", the best way of consuming the stories are to hear them.
Additionally, the stories were always meant to be told, retold, remixed, etc. It is very much in the spirit of the original stories for new bards to add their own spin to it. Don't be turned off by the fact that Jeff doesn't read verbatim a translation of the original texts. He adds a lot of extra context you wouldn't otherwise get from just reading the books (context that every other listener in Ancient Greece would have already had that we don't).
[1] Iliad / Trojan War: https://open.spotify.com/show/7w7RMunEMoAapudklkkVgE [2] Odyssey: https://open.spotify.com/show/5vyJGStvyCNkel5Mqxb4OA
"This is how translations ought to be, in my view - as close to a transliteration as possible without being grammatically incomprehensible."
Butler is emphatically not this, though - It's a prose adaptation of a poem, and thus in many ways quite far from a "transliteration" compared to e.g. Fagles, Lattimore, Fitzgerald, etc.
I'd argue that Butler's translations are absolutely "translation(s) aiming to meet readers in their comfort zones," by his own admission.
From the preface to Butler's Iliad:
> It follows that a translation should depart hardly at all from the modes of speech current in the translator's own times, inasmuch as nothing is readable, for long, which affects any other diction than that of the age in which it is written.
And later
> I very readily admit that Dr. Leaf has in the main kept more closely to the words of Homer, but I believe him to have lost more of the spirit of the original through his abandonment (no doubt deliberate) of all attempt at stately, and at the same time easy, musical, flow of language, than he has gained in adherence to the letter — to which, after all, neither he nor any man can adhere.
(Oddly, unlike the Odyssey, the PG text of the Iliad does not have Butler's preface. I had to track it down elsewhere. Source: https://ia600209.us.archive.org/10/items/cu31924026468417/cu...)
I admit this quote is out-of-context, you can read here J. L. Borges - The Homeric Versions: https://gwern.net/doc/borges/1932-borges-thehomericversions....
if you speak Spanish or Italian, there are new editions that are translations from Butler, plus Atwood's "Penelopiad" and more, very nice books: