zlacker

As always I think your best move if you want to read a work with many translations available is simply to read the first 2-3 pages (or some other short identical segment) and see which one feels best to you. I have read several and I value them all for different reasons.

I love Pope but wouldn't read him for an "accurate" translation (he didn't know Greek!) and I like Butler's prose but it's a total transliteration, not poetry. My go-to recommendation is Lattimore (not Fagles, which I found dull), but now we have Emily Wilson in the mix too (with a great preface to boot).

Taste them all and go with whichever is best for you - you can always read another later, but your first time for a classic should be enjoyable and natural. Only you can say which one you enjoy most.

>>devind+(OP)
My, I get the impression that 'translations' are far more like a work of art in their own right, than, er, a translation!

>>verisi+Gh
This certainly is the case! Translation is a creative process, not merely transformative, let alone mechanical. Especially with classics, where much interpretation is needed. The very first line of the Odyssey is a perfect example - the word used to describe Odysseus famously has no direct translation, so everyone puts their own spin on it.

Reading the amount of thought that goes into a translation is always interesting to me - for instance the introduction to a Sir Gawain and the Green Knight I have really helped me understand how the alliterative style worked and why the translation was done in a certain way (and why it was so hard).

>>verisi+Gh
There's an enjoyably pessmimistic phrase in Italian - "traduttore, traditore" which translated(!) means "translator, traitor", emphasising the impossibility of an "accurate" translation.

I love reading translations, but would love to have the time to learn languages to read the originals. (I tried learning German for WG Sebald, but found it very hard, figured his writing was going to be pretty hard in and of itself, know that he worked closely with his English translators, and given he taught in an English university for decades figured they were going to be very "good").

>>verisi+Gh
I think it would be much more deterministic/mechanical if we did translations of the words and didn’t touch grammar/structure, but that does not have mass-market appeal as the flow is disrupted and some words get denser.