Is Pope's Iliad actually a good translation or is it just really pretty?

Is Pope's Iliad actually a good translation or is it just really pretty?

is good

what, you don't like pretty things you fucking faggot?

this but rieu > pope

>translation "accuracy" meme
Dryden: "Where I have taken away some of [the author's] Expressions, and cut them shorter, it may possibly be on this consideration, that what was beautiful in the Greek or Latin, would not appear so shining in the English; and where I have enlarg’d them, I desire the false Criticks would not always think that those thoughts are wholly mine, but that either they are secretly in the Poet, or may be fairly deduc’d from him; or at least, if both those considerations should fail, that my own is of a piece with his, and that if he were living, and an Englishman, they are such as he wou’d probably have written."

What defines a good translation?

I believe any translation should be judged on its own artistic merit, especially if it is a translation of poetry.

Pic related is my favorite translation for example, and it's not really "accurate" at all, but it's beautiful poetry in its own right.

There was an old vid on youtube of an old hippie guy recommending ancient Greek poetry translations and one of the things he said is that for every 3 lines of Homer you get 4 lines of Pope. There were also some beat translations but I can't remember.

99% of translations that come out of devout Catholics are just pretty and mess the meaning in many regards.

It's sing song bullshit. He ruined it.

Here's another molester of manuscripts.

I'm usually an autist about faithful translations, but Whalley's version of Genji sold me on the idea of more liberal reinterpretations. Although I think in his case it was more ignorance, like in a Constance Garnett sorta way (except good).

Why are these things always titled like "The Illiad - Homer - Translated by Fuckface"? I feel like it would be more accurate to title them "The Illiad - Fuckface - Based on transcriptions of Homer".
Can we stop pretending they're just Homerian works translated to English and accept they're original works based on the work of Homer?

ah, the classic "spirit" of the text that makes people write stuff that's not in the text

>being so pretentious that you call Zeus "Jove"
So this is the true power of Anglo Roman-fetishism, that goes on besides the "fagging" at schools like Eton

classical education was the cringiest meme in literary history

it's like if weaboos learned japanese from a bootleg fansub VHS and then tried to translate other anime with it

> it's like if weaboos learned japanese from a bootleg fansub VHS and then tried to translate other anime with it
You are a very stupid, very ignorant little man, and you should feel bad about that.

Open a pic of the solar system in another tab and read the names of the planets you dumb fucking cunt.

>fell for the neoclassical meme

don't take it personally senpai it's the fault in thine stars

>translation of poetry
why even bother

If I was a chef who wanted to give the same feeling to an Englishman that a plate of spaghetti would give to an Italian, I wouldn't make spaghetti. Instead I'd have to make something that would remind the Brit of whatever garbage his mother managed to convince him was food when he was a little boy.

I just based the best version of the Iliad on who did the best translation of Phoenix' speech from book 9.
And for that Lattimore is the winner. Fagles is a close second.

Pope's Iliad is just something else entirely.

Pope is worth reading in his own right and not as just a translation of Homer.

>Here's another molester of manuscripts.
If you want to read the manuscripts, learn Greek. If you want something that represents a similar level of quality in English as Homer represents in Greek, read Pope. If you want lower quality English that will delude you into thinking you're closer to Homer somehow, read someone else.

Where to get a decent edition of Pope's Iliad and Odyssey?

You'll have to buy them used. I checked on AbeBooks and from what I can tell they were still in print up through the 1970s and there are some inexpensive hardcovers available. If you're fine with a paperback, Penguin Classics released an edition of the Iliad (but not the Odyssey) about twenty years ago, which is also out of print.

Rieu is a prose translation and quite a bore, in my opinion.

>t. someone who understands nothing about translation and differences between languages