How is the odyssey translation by emily wilson? is it good or is it shit?

>Tell me about the complicated man

J.K. Rowling will see the error of her ways soon and be /ourgirl/ because of the Johnnie Depp backlash she is receiving at the moment.

This sounds more like a cashgrab than anything to be honest, a book advertised as the "feminist take on a classic". Who keeps shilling these dumb fucking threads?

What? I mean Harry Potter is arguably one of the best book series of all time (especially numbers 2 and 4), but let's be real here lol, that doesn't prove this translation is good

hahahahahha.

A WOMEN UNDERSTANDING HOMER EVER

Ohhh you....

Edith Hamilton did pretty good with Mythology

The modern womanly culture cannot deal with the ancients in a straight matter. They will either totally ostracize ancient literature in the future (which I certainly hope for as it will stay a bastion of masculinity for generations to come). Or they will do stuff like pic related where they will reinterpret everything about ancient Greece and the great poems to the point that they will pull feminist and or political correct interpretations out of their ass and shape the texts newly through interpretation and schooling. Also, friendly reminder that you're ignoring a few thousand years of first hand male experience if you're ignoring all the misogynistic moments of literature. Stereotypes, albeit they are not entirely true most of the time, don't arise out of nothing. Something has to, no pun intended, trigger them. From the view of Hesiod to women as a great evil, to the excerpt from Nietzsche I posted. There is a reason why every thinking man ever realized that women are worthless when they wander out of their nature given responsibilities of child bearing and offspring.

>pic related

It's awful. Politically motivated revisionist bullshit. She doesn't attempt to translate the Odyssey. She rewrites it to fit her "moral" sensibilities and political inclinations.

This, but unironically.

What do you mean?

she literally just modernizes the language. if that counts as "rewriting," it only counts as such insofar as literally every translation ever carries with it the mark of the translator him- or herself, which is intrinsically going to inflect upon the text, just as the contemporary standards of the language it's being translated into will influence it.

I think each translation is sort of a window into the time it was translated, as well as being, you know, a translation. And you have four hundred years' of translations to choose from, if you, say, you want something with overblown cod-classical language or a romantic poetic vibe...

For the record, this isn't a feminist take on The Odyssey (she's a prickly old professor of classics) and it's a barely interesting footnote that she's a broad--if you're pitching a piece on a new translation of Homer, you sort of need a hook, I guess.

I'm vaguely interested. I don't dig the overblown KJV vibes of most classical translations, so I like that the idea that she's produced a work that dispenses with the hoary language of former translators, befitting its emergence from the oral tradition, and has also produced the first line-for-line translation of the original.

>she literally just modernizes the language.
This was proven wrong several times. Her version of the poem is highly redacted in content also.

show me one line of politically-motivated (as opposed to stylistically-motivated) redaction. hard mode: you can't be plucking something out of context from an archived Veeky Forums thread or Breitbart article

Stop lying faggot. Plenty of excerpts were posted in the previous threads on this subject. She redacts the story. It's not a mere update using contemporary English.

How much are you getting paid to shill this garbage here?

ITT:
>it's about ethics in greek translations

Not him, it isn't about politics either, why would you tell that Odyssey is a "complicated" man. If you're arguing in todays context it makes him sound like someone with issues, or a man that is overly mysterious and complicated; or a man that is hard to understand. Why?

>Tell me, O Muse, of the man of many devices, who wandered full many ways after he had sacked the sacred citadel of Troy.

>Sage mir, Muse, die Taten des vielgewanderten Mannes, Welcher so weit geirrt nach der heiligen Troja Zerstörung,

>O junaku mi kazuj, o Muzo, o prometnom onom; Koji se mnogo naluto razorivši presvetu Troju

Three languages. A men of many devices, a man that is very traveled, a men that passed many places. I will not pretend I can read the original but I'd rather trust the stylistic approach of the dozen translations I've seen than someone pulling something out of their ass just to do something that hasn't been done before.

not even him, but there are literally hundreds of homeric translations that vary in styling and interpretation.
Any seasoned reader of Homer knows this.
Stop getting rekt because of >muh women

The Greek original has 'polytropos' which is hard to translate, here's a whole article on Wilson's choice: languagehat.com/polytropos/

Didn't know that Hobbes just skipped it.

>languagehat.com/polytropos/
I still disagree with her choice, this just made me realize why the prometnom/vielgewandert and such were chosen instead mostly. Many-turned truly sounds like someone who has seen much and traveled far. But you are not automatically a complicated man if you have done anything of that.

Is he not complicated?

I mean, every work is necessarily a modification of the original. All of the translations of Homer tend to be radically different. I would argue that: Emily Wilson is not a raging feminist and this is more of an attempt to popularize the work for the general reader, rather than pushing some feminist message. The people pushing a feminist message are all the retards that are writing about the book being translated by a woman and some fucking shit about taking back the canon.

I could be convinced to the contrary but I really don't see it. At best, I think I could take an argument that her retard-level language is an attack on, like, literary modernism and a misguided attempt to democratize the classics. But I don't see a hardcore feminist agenda in the book itself.

Imagine the amount of autism required for someone to get butt-blasted over this.

Translating Homer is an incredibly rewarding experience which I would recommend to anyone visiting this board. Finishing either epic poem is, in itself, a great accomplishment.

@10371254
Now you're just equivocating. Go away.

can you give actual examples of how you think she foes this instead of just blathering

idg the interpretation of "complicated man" in here as meaning anything particularly negative, of course he's complicated

>literally started with an obviously feminist buzzword

It is best to avoid translation gimmicks

>read a poem is a great accomplishment

lol what they're not even that long

>the holy town of Troy

HOLY?
TOWN?

Fuck me

>Those harrassment teeth

She looks like every middle age women who's afraid of aging running on the va va voom of two glasses of red wine who harrass young men in clubs and bars.

You can tell she rubbed her old disgusting cunt while thinking about Odysseus several times.

Your writing smells like stale mountain dew and a sweaty neckbeard

Why are Anglos such autists about "proper" translations? Most translations are fine. Read the original if you want don't want to miss anything.

>Why are Anglos such autists about "proper" translations?

We don't have a sub 90 IQ

oh wow she wore a dress and brushed her hair before her picture was taken, what a slut

You write like a fag and your shit's all retarded.

It's not 'anglos' it's Veeky Forums

This board is obsessed with purity

You say that like it's a bad thing.

He clearly meant "finishing the translation" not "finishing reading the poem"

it is lol

*breaths in*
*head explodes*

Doesn't count since it is good.

I agree with the choice of complicated. She states that she tried to avoid the repetition of the epithets because in our written culture repetitions stiffens, and instead looks to convey a meaning.

Part of this is also that she wrote in verse, which is admirable.

Complicated was a beautiful choice and I think like in the word crafty it points to a duality between capability and the misuse of those capabilities.

The poem loses the ritualistic aspect that many expect and love in epic poetry, but it gains it in resonance.

So basically you're for the gradual destruction of the original poem by modernizing it in every generation and adding stuff because it sounds better to us today? Beautiful.

And also, as a translator myself, I will use an "repetition" or overused "epithet" if it seems like the ideal solution. A great problem with translations today is that people try to be original by any means and they use objectively worse solutions to problems just so that they have their own solution. I see no shame in taking a part someone else came up with if it indeed seems ideal when comparing it to the source.

don't people mostly read older translations anyway? it isn't like after a new one comes out the old ones are all set on fire

You're overlooking that there will always be someone who will meet the original work through this twisted new translation. Especially in schooling if teachers recommend a newer translation over the older ones. And I'm especially sure that this will happen at least in some cases because >muh wymen

I don't think most people even think about translations really, they just pick up whatever copy the bookstore/library has. Or, of course, the edition they've been assigned.

No translation is a substitution for the original unfortunately and the older translations are not necessary the most accurate.

Most earlier translations didn't have a correct philological apparatus and didn't really understand greek that well (only at the beginning of the xix century the revolution of scientific philology happened). Later middle of this century translation forgo metrics for blank verse, have to change the overall number of lines, and when they don't do that they are stiff because they are scholarly editions made to help researchers by consistency.

But here is the thing: if your complain is disregard for the original for catering our tastes, that is the accusation you can make to all translations before academia existed. Take Pope's highly refined language, that is not what the odyssey with it's bits and pieces stuck together from different registers and traditions, is like. Pope just projected his idea of the noble greeks on it.

Female translations are garbage they are incapable of being objective.

Unfortunately it is almost impossible to make a translation that is absolutely correct and that is working as a viable substitution for the beauty of the original verse. Pope is a rather extreme example of things, yet the translations of the XX century are very accurate and some of them are very beautiful as well. I know a lot more about the translations in my original language than in English, but both viable translations were done by philologist, academics, that are the top of Greek philology in the country. When you compare the translations you see a lot of similarities yet differences in style. But both translations respect the fact that you are working with an ancient text and it should be translated and treated as such. Take the Bible for example, there are a lot easy to read editions that don't take the canonical approach that I've just described, but they don't present themselves as something great, or new, or accurate. This translation is presented as a landmark, while it is rather silly.

theguardian.com/books/2017/dec/08/the-odyssey-translated-emily-wilson-review

Comparing the parts I've seen with the 5-6 translations in 4 languages I speak I cannot but stress the fact that she is trying to create something new by destroying the traditional approach to the Odyssey. I'd rather believe these few translations I know, and the people behind them, than one single translator who is presented as bringing something rather new that the great scholarship of the XX and XIX century somehow were not able to figure out.

Also, women can't understand Homer but well, you take that as a personal opinion.

wow a translation is being marketed so that it sells and sounds exciting, time to cry about it
and it sounds like everyone in this thread who are so worked up over it haven't read anything but some excerpts, bitch about after you've actually read it

>H-heh its capitalism my man who cares as long as it makes money

Also, if crucial parts are translated like that... Well, of course it allows judgements. The introduction and the opening hymn to the Muses are one of the most influential parts of Western literature. I'd be careful when translating that, at least as careful as with the Bible.

What are you saying? That every translation of poetry should be archaic just because? It's a translation from the original Greek, it's not changing older translations.

it's shit

I'm saying you're getting mad at the marketing and reviews which are irrelevant to the actual translation.

I think that archaisms add to the charm of the translation and give off that vibe that you're dealing with an ancient text. So talking about personal aesthetics, yes. Scholarly and critical editions are something else. Modernizing translations is a destructive trend where you turn things as the Quran or Old Testament into flower power hippy texts. I saw Quran translations where whole parts about slavery and conquering women are omitted by using new and fancy language.

I would even go so far to say that the modernization of the language used in the translations are not the main problem. Modern language can be used. What I witnessed is blatant banalizing of ancient texts like Odysseus the "complicated man" which sounds like a blogger talking about his anxiety.

That it is turning it into a flower hippy text is your personal idea. I find it a moving and enjoyable translation.

Again you yourself are saying that your concern here is not the original, but to defend the nostalgia for the original that you have. The classics as you have imagined them would Nietzsche say.

There are things that are not only nostalgia, as the Quran example I gave. Judging from the parts of the translation I saw it is banalized and some of the solutions, like "complicated" are just there to do something new. I'd have to see the rest.

Also, can you read the original? I admit that I can't so talking about accuracy is only possible while reflecting other translations and comparing them with this.

You really think this is a hippy translation that doesn't capture the poetics of Homer:

Tell me about a complicated man.
Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost
when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy,
and where he went, and who he met, the pain
he suffered in the storms at sea, and how
he worked to save his life and bring his men
back home. He failed to keep them safe; poor fools,
they ate the Sun God’s cattle, and the god
kept them from home. Now goddess, child of Zeus,
tell the old story for our modern times.
Find the beginning

Because I have read home in multiple translations and this is the closest it even gets to the pleasure of Vincenzo Monti's translation

Just compare that with Fagles:

Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns …
driven time and again off course, once he had plundered
the hallowed heights of Troy.
Many cities of men he saw and learned their minds,
many pains he suffered, heartsick on the open sea,
fighting to save his life and bring his comrades home.
But he could not save them from disaster, hard as he strove—
the recklessness of their own ways destroyed them all,
the blind fools, they devoured the cattle of the Sun
and the Sungod blotted out the day of their return.
Launch out on his story, Muse, daughter of Zeus,
start from where you will—sing for our time too.

>the complicated man
This is not an inaccurate translation. And that's true of the entirety of her new translation. It IS an accurate translation. The issue is that by translating Polytropos as "the complicated man" the translator loses a lot of the original meaning (but this is true of every translation). "The man of many paths," or "the man of many ways" would have been my preference, but I like the multivalence of the original word and it's entirely lost in Wilson's translation.

On the whole, I might recommend her translation for young adult readers since it IS more approachable, but I wouldn't recommend it for anyone seriously interested in the works of Homer. That said, other translations do exist and there's no reason not to offer something like this. I may not agree with all of Wilson's choices, but I think she did a great job, considering what her goals were for the translation.

>Fagles
The man for wisdom's various arts renown'd,
Long exercised in woes, O Muse, resound;
Who, when his arms had wrought the destined fall
Of sacred Troy, and razed her heaven-built wall,
Wandering from clime to clime, observant stray'd,
Their manners noted, and their states survey'd,
On stormy seas unnumber'd toils he bore,
Safe with his friends to gain his natal shore:
Vain toils! their impious folly dared to prey
On herds devoted to the god of day;
The god vindictive doom'd them never more
(Ah, men unbless'd) to touch that natal shore.
Oh, snatch some portion of these acts from fate,
Celestial Muse, and to our world relate.

If you're not into neo classical couplets Fitzgerald is the choice

You prefer that over this?

Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns ...
driven time and again off course, once he had plundered
the hallowed heights of Troy.
Many cities of men he saw and learned their minds,
many pains he suffered, heartsick on the open sea,
fighting to save his life and bring his comrades home.
But he could not save them from disaster, hard as he strove —
the recklessness of their own ways destroyed them all,
the blind fools, they devoured the cattle of the Sun
and the Sungod blotted out the day of their return.
Launch out on his story. Muse, daughter of Zeus,
start from where you will — sing for our time too.

Seriously, english is not my first language but "wrecked"; "complicated" nigga please... And if indeed the exact same word is used in the Homer Hymns, and look, when you use wily, much turned, much traveled it makes sense, yet a complicated robber. Her translation is basically taking complicated as an epithet for Odysseus because she thinks it fits him well and not because Homer says so.

alri emily

That translation is incredibly clumsy and wordy. I'm not even sure why he didn't go for a prose translations.

Also wreck is a proper word that has a lineage from the 12th century, I think here you are reading it too much through your online gaming sensitivity, so instead of the norse origin you read rekkd

A "complicated man" is code for a shitlord, amirite ladies?

>Also wreck is a proper word that has a lineage from the 12th century

Likely earlier. Wreccan is an Anglo-Saxon word and we have records of its use in the first millennium.

Why are there women on the cover?

What does this translation provide that previous translations do not?

Why is the translator acting like she is some author of a new book? Translators should not show their faces.

>of diseases, complicated
Is she saying Odysseus is a disease?

more like a problematic fave

Why is "complicated man" something only a woman would say? I'm not disputing that it is, and I suppose that's why it's so funny when put in Homer's mouth. What I want to understand is why it seems self-evident.

I saw one review (by a woman) saying it sounded like 'a friend bitching abut an annoying boyfriend' and that seems to be the tone that people with that complaint have are reading into it. Seems like a lot of projection to me, for one the author isn't some 20 something or whatever stereotype and second "complicated" isn't negative or even a necessarily critical description of a person.

You smell of soy milk and pine cone soap

>lol
Get your arse back to wherever it came from.

>*action*
Fuck off.

It's an enjoyable modern verse translation done by a classics scholar. People should be happy.

>for one the author isn't some 20 something or whatever stereotype
I see your point, but that doesn't mean much if the targeted audience is supposed to be those 20 something stereotypes and the language she uses theirs.

> I find it a moving and enjoyable translation.
Kill yourself. Fucking plebeian.

Pretty much.

>enjoyable
>modern verse translation
>>>/redit/

Ok I decided to use the google machine and I can see this book is complete trash

I'm sure you are reading homer in the original greek right?

Yeah no modern translations are ever enjoyable.
I'll call richard howard and let him know.

Because women want to understand people, men want to act alongside them. Unlike the other translations in this thread, which are beautifully factual, complicated is the only one that tries to describe a single entity of the total PERSON rather than describing the entity based on what it has been through and done.
It's like the whole deeds not words thing. Complicated assumes that there is this thing that is that person and we should understand them as an enduring entity. This is simply not true. A person isn't complicated while they're taking a shit. What you're basically saying is that you don't understand them, or they are difficult to figure out. But WHAT is difficult to figure out about a PERSON? What they do? When? When they take a shit it's because they take a shit. When they save their friends they are compelled through love or honour. So it's more like saying "OMG I just can't believe he did that!"

because men understand it well enough that it doesn't need to be said.

More proof that 2D > 3D.

okay so no one upset has read beyond the first page of the new translation, got it