OK, that may be a bit harsh. But the danger is that a translation that is out-of-date or badly done will turn you off the book. Many classic books whose translations are now beyond copyright are available for free. But these translations are, generally speaking, poor. To really appreciate these books, find a translation that is up-to-date and that suits your reading style.
It's often the case that there are multiple still-covered-by-copyright translations of ancient texts (and sometimes more-recent-than-ancient ones, as with e.g. almost anything Russian, or Jules Verne) that are better than anything PG has, by just about any standard of "better". Not their fault—that's just how it is. I'd definitely recommend anyone tackling these sorts of works shop for the best translation for their purposes—it can make a huge difference. Worth a trip to the library or a few dollars for a used copy, for something you'll spend hours with.
When reading works in translation, the translator is just as important as the author of the source material. Do your research!
Odyssey only—he didn't translate the Iliad.
Any specific reasons why?
> I'd definitely recommend anyone tackling these sorts of works shop for the best translation for their purposes—it can make a huge difference. Worth a trip to the library or a few dollars for a used copy, for something you'll spend hours with.
I definitely agree with this. Shop around for the translation that you like best where possible (for less popular texts you may have no choice). There are a lot of different possible "value systems" for evaluating translation quality.
For the Iliad, I have a preference for Richmond Lattimore. His is fairly true to the original and so it feels like an old story from far away, which I like. I think most people like Robert Fitzgerald better though?
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.
When you also have the original text, whenever there is a more interesting or obscure paragraph you can look to see what was really said, possibly with the help of a dictionary.
Even when the translation is good, the translator cannot stop at each sentence and explain why certain English words have been chosen, which may be the closest to what was said, or they may be not, but the translator has thought that the chosen translation is easier to understand for an average reader.
The older translations (and perhaps the future translations, taking into account the current trends) also avoided to translate whatever words were considered offensive when the translation was done.
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.
On the contrary I think reading a 100 year old translation of a 2,800 year old story is enlightening on a different level
It's also worth pondering whether the newer translations are riding on the coattails of their denigrated forebears—"would this have been as well-received and become a staple in the English-speaking world if the newer, purportedly better translation had been the only game in town from the beginning?"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_English_Opiu...
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/thomas-de-quincey/confessi...
There are a lot of "new translations" whose only purpose is to generate money for the "translator". They must be different from the old ones and most are generaly poor.
The modern style of translations-as-rewrites that aim to meet readers in their comfort zones are terrible, the literary equivalent of shitty dub tracks on foreign video media.
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?"
I find it clean, unassuming, and to read at a nice modern-feeling (but not too modern-feeling) clip without resorting to abridgment.
I pretty much guarantee that unless the translation is completely atrocious, what you will gain from this will be even worst. Languages just don't work like that. Trying to fugure out nuance or meaning from word for word dictionary analysis just don't work.
Knowing the letters is enough to allow the use of a dictionary to find most words, i.e. most nouns. Searching for verbs in a dictionary can be more difficult without knowing the grammar, as it may not be obvious which is the dictionary form that corresponds to a verbal form in the text.
I have read many Greek and Latin bilingual books and I have always found the original text to be of great value. The English text is very useful for reading quickly in order to have a general idea about the content of the original text and for searching quickly things in which you are interested.
Whenever you want to know anything certain about the content of the original text, the only way is to look at the original language. It does not matter if the original text looks like the original inscriptions. The original text may be shown in a one-to-one transliteration into Latin letters, without losing any information.
On the other hand, I have never seen any reliable English translation, i.e. any translation where after seeing twice the same English word in the translation you may conclude that the Greek author used the same word in both cases or that the author meant the same thing in both places.
Moreover, almost all translations that I have seen contain some anachronisms, i.e. modern words which do not really have any exact correspondent in the ancient languages, so when looking at the original you can see that the Greek or Latin words actually meant something else. Because of this, I have seen papers in which wrong conclusions were affirmed about what some ancient authors have said, due to the fact that some translations were accepted as being true literally, without checking the original words.
If you have some particular fondness for Victorian English, sure, read what you enjoy; but antiquated language doesn't make anything intrinsically better, and it takes the average modern reader further away from the work itself. These works weren't composed in a language that was, for their audience, hundreds of years out-of-date.
Moreover - particularly with ancient texts - older translators were typically writers first, scholars second. As pointed out elsewhere on this thread, Pope didn't even speak Greek when he "translated" the Iliad. The Butler translation here is prose. An approach to translation that takes fidelity seriously is a more modern invention.
For some of the ancient texts there are editions with commentaries, which include both the original text and an approximate translation for it and in which most of the less usual words and phrases are discussed in detail, to establish their most probable meaning.
While such a commented edition may be the best tool, what they add over a bilingual edition and a dictionary is much less than the difference between the latter and an English-only edition.
The English translations may be more acceptable for literary fiction (where for many people it matters more to be entertained than to know what the ancient author truly said), but they are particularly bad for any text that has any scientific value, e.g. Aristotle, Plato, Pliny, Herodotus and so on, because the translator normally lacks expertise in sciences and is unable to identify the appropriate English words.
Even in Homer, there are many names of animals, plants and minerals, or even of colors, which are normally mistranslated into English.
I have found that modern translations inject a “modernness” into the language that isn’t present in translations from a century or two ago. If that doesn’t bother you, then sure, pick up a recent translation.
It seems to me that most of the other translations I can find are closer to the Wilson translation. I don't know any version of Greek, but the name Andromache doesn't appear in that line (book 6 line 486) at all, and nobody else seems to interpret the line as a rhetorical question.
All this just to say, maybe Wilson's is closer to the original text?
I think, if you've studied classics, you should know that seeing a few greek letters in a mathematical formula and mispronounced is nowhere near being able to parse a word written in Greek letters.
> I have read many Greek and Latin bilingual books and I have always found the original text to be of great value.
You've misunderstood, though. The latter is true because of the former. The comment I replied to specifically referred to people who don't know the language.
> The original text may be shown in a one-to-one transliteration into Latin letters, without losing any information
Not exactly true because our alphabet doesn't have standardized stress marks, aspiration marks, or even standardized 1:1 transliterations of the characters. But in general I think you're correct that transliterating it could be helpful.
> On the other hand, I have never seen any reliable English translation, i.e. any translation where after seeing twice the same English word in the translation you may conclude that the Greek author used the same word in both cases or that the author meant the same thing in both places.
I am pretty sure I have, but I don't have any references on hand.
> Because of this, I have seen papers in which wrong conclusions were affirmed about what some ancient authors have said, due to the fact that some translations were accepted as being true literally, without checking the original words.
You've definitely hit an important point here. Even without having studied classics very intensely, I can almost immediately spot bullshit peddlers when they reference "the Greeks" and quote some passage completely out of context. But most of the time, it's less about the translator's word choice and more about ignorance of the society in which the original was written. That's not something you're going to get anyway from laying the original text next to the translation.
I'm completely baffled by this criticism in the context of a translation of a 7th Century BC text, particularly in terms of the notion of making the text 'accessible' to a modern reader.
If anything I'd argue that Butler's prose translation does far more violence to the original text. The idea that e.g. Lattimore is more accessible than Butler is remarkably strange to me. In particular, you mention that contemporary translations tend to avoid 'difficult' language, which is flat wrong in the context of Lattimore - his syntactic constructions, because they need to fit the poetic meter he uses, are frequently quite complex and nested. Nor is the vocabulary particularly simplified; I think Butler is much more watered-down in this regard.*
Can you elaborate on which 20th/21st century translations of Homer you are referring to?
*(That is not to say there aren't any possible criticisms to be made of Lattimore in terms of anachronism - when Helen talks about her own conduct in the Iliad, Lattimore inserts some fairly harsh 20th-century gendered insults that are, as far as I can tell, in no way attested to by the original Greek)
"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...)
δαιμονίη μή μοί τι λίην ἀκαχίζεο θυμῷ:
δαιμονίη is of disputed meaning, but basically a literal translation might run:
Possessed woman, don’t be so upset in your heart for me.
Here Lattimore doesn’t look so good.
None of that is science in contemporary sense.