It seems the topic of credibility of translations of Homer have come up on the site. It is good, in any case, because it gives me the opportunity to point out a fact that is often taken for granted. I'm sure I've not been the first one to make this point here, but I've been seeing some uninformed takes. Here is a post to clear the air.
I'm not claiming to be an expert on the subject, and if I've gotten anything wrong, I'd be happy to discuss it. I'll try to just point out the facts, as I've understood them.
These poems atteibuted to Homer were most likely the result of an oral tradition, or hundreds of years of bardic storytelling, often accompanied by music. The fact that they were sung and performed, sometimes on the stage, means there is a pretty good case for vernacular translations, such as Emily Wilson's. They were not "high literature," like we think of them today, but folk tales, about the history/mythology of the Greek people and their country.
Not to mention, there are hundreds, thousands of years between various versions after the text finally got written down.
The two poems are generally presumed to have been composed sometime from the eighth century BCE (or earlier) to the mid-seventh century BCE and written down by the mid-sixth century BCE, likely in conjunction with performances at the Panathenaia Festival in Athens.
The earliest surviving example of Homeric papyri is from the third century BCE, about the time that scholars in Alexandria produced a relatively stable text that was subsequently used by scribes to produce copies. Over 1,000 manuscripts of Homer's works exist. [1]
Claiming authority of one translation over another for their faithfulness to the "original" is not - I don't think - the right approach to discussing these poems and their textuality and it misses the mark completely.
The text has been transformed, arguably, innumerable times, every time it was sung, performed, transcribed, and or translated, and so it's impossible to say what the original would have been. Making a claim about which is the best translation is nothing new, but also, is a matter of opinion. There is lots of scholarship on that.
Also, there's an open-sourced project to create a doligital archive of these manuscripts, for those interested.
The Homer Multitext project seeks to present the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey in a critical framework that accounts for the fact that these poems were composed orally over the course of hundreds, if not thousands of years by countless singers who composed in performance.
I think post was about odysee com but it was another thread completelly different
Indirectly, it is. The movie was based on an ancient poem, whose translation is often debated.
You make good points. But that also doesn't mean that all interpretations are equally valid, right? We can still debate about which readings / translations are more or less true to the historical core.
You beat me to the punch. I agree with the main points but it does seem like there would still be criteria for judging the merits and demerits of a particular translation.
I wonder what those would be.
My point is that I prefer the linguistically accessible one, because these were folk poems. That might be my standard of "true to the historical core."
There are others that are syntactically complex, verbose and hard to read, written for a literati to pore over. I don't believe this to be in the true spirit of the poems.
I agree that a good translation of Homer ought to be linguistically accessible. The best critiques of Wilson's translation have less to do with the style of language and more to do with the complete loss of meaning in many cases - particularly when it suits her feminism.
I haven't read the translation, so I don't know how egregious this is.
But if she brings the poem to life for a few million new readers, then I would think some cultural bias is a fair trade off.
Besides, this begs the question of whether these people care more about the literature or arguing about protecting people from so called woke brainwashing.
Seriously... although I share in the sentiment that progressive ideology has gotten a bit out of control in the last 10 years, I kinda think the backlash to that is going a bit overboard too. Some people are seeing woke boogeymen everywhere. (I'm not making any claim one way or another on Wilson's actual translations since I haven't read it, and wouldn't be qualified to judge its fidelity to the sources anyway.)
That's what makes me most interested in the source of very strong feelings about this.
And if the so called woke brainwashing is antithetical to the text?
The only problem I would have with this is if it stopped people from actually engaging with the text. I'm not that interested in the culture war you are referring to.
I agree. And I may have been too direct in my complaint. There is a truth to what really happened and there is a point in trying to preserve it.
I do think the more interesting question here is at what point have bards been allowed to take poetic liberties, while preserving the core.
Did cyclops really exist, sirens and giants? I don't know, but that's the mystery that draws me to the poem.
I recently surprised my father by admitting I hadn't read the Odyssey even once, in any language!. It turns out that an English literature major doesn't have the same ideas about literacy as a classics scholar...
[ I only studied classics in high school, and it's pretty much universal these days that Greek, the language of the Odyssey, is the advanced language, only reached after attaining a high level of proficiency in Latin; so I have actually read parts of the Aeneid, as is much more common among "scholars" who didn't continue classics past high school ]
I haven't read the poem in its entireity either, but now that there's a Nolan film for it, I just might. There's few things I regret more in life than cheating on a good book (or poem) by watching the film adaptation first.
one of my shallowest acquaintances from the academic world actually told me that I should avoid reading a good book before watching the movie, if a popular movie has just come out, precisely because the movies are often worse; that way, I'm likely to get impressed by how good the book actually is, rather than disappointed by a mediocre movie.
Agree. On the other hand, if the movie is good, then you feel satiated without ever having been intimate with the writer. Even worse, you actually do, and spend whole time thinking of another lover.
I wish I had read it before seeing the movie. Some of the scenes may have made more sense.
Then again, I might have been even more disappointed in the film.
some of the plot elements are honestly just filler; e.g. would anyone have complained if the Lystragonean's island had been skipped, and those ships lost by other mishaps?
the only plot significance of that sequence, in the movie, was the loss of two ships, which could equally have happened in any of the more significant or iconic parts of the plot.
I skipped your review because at the time I was still considering seeing the film.
@remindme in 9 hours to go back and check this out.
would love to hear your own thoughts about the movie after you see it
It might take me a few years lol. Just added the poem to my reading list, behind Gravity's Rainbow and Ulysses. While I'm not a slow reader, I'm not a very focused one.
I didn’t see any.
when it comes to the text's historical coherence, I think a debate on methodology is valid and conducted by those who understand the subject, rather than being a matter of random, casual complaints.
In the project site I can’t acess the archives there. Can you?
https://www.homermultitext.org/image-archive/
this is a better link
https://www.homermultitext.org/