
Translator's Note to the Odyssey - diodorus
http://poems.com/special_features/prose/essay_wilson_odyssey.php
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gowld
This translation is a new translation of The Odyssey, released today,
currently #1 Best Seller in Ancient & Classical Poetry, and paper format is
sold out.

[https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0393089053](https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0393089053)

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js2
Hard cover. Paper(back) not yet released.

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khedoros1
I think they meant paper, as opposed to electronic.

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Jun8
If you are at all interested in poetry and its translation as well as AI
(assumed since on HN) a great book to read is Hofstadter's _Le Ton Beau De
Marot: In Praise Of The Music Of Language_ wherein he offers 60+ translations
of a playful poem by Clement Marot.

~~~
riffraff
I posted the same comment before noticing yours.

Notice the book does not only contains the translations, but mostly the
author's musings on translating, as someone who speaks a few languages and has
a deep love for them.

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js2
Recent HN thread (3 days ago, 70 comments):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15624881](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15624881)

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trowaybloway
I'd prefer to learn the language to read it in the original form, but it's
vice versa, people learn the language from translations of Homer.

I wonder how much comparative analysis has gained or will from AI. Given a
suitable model to start with, a huge probability tree of ontologies could be
handled to reconstruct common ancestors in proto-languages. There were people
here reporting interest in machine translation of some 30000 Sumerian clay-
tablets, the other day.

The pairing with semantic inference would be interesting, too, or the inverse,
alike to deep dream generating adversarial reinforcement in pictures,
extracting the principal components of a language to infer stages of it's
development, like a sequenced Word Net. There might be some surprises in the
ambiguity of metaphors.Especially in long living or quickly developing
languages folk etymologies must be common, especially given religion, so a
naive machine approach might even help next to manual translation (human in
the loop ai).

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ubernostrum
_I 'd prefer to learn the language to read it in the original form, but it's
vice versa, people learn the language from translations of Homer._

Ancient Greek was not one language. Like any language, it had multiple
dialects and evolved significantly over time. The big one is Ionic Greek,
which was the source of the Greek of three time periods scholars care about:
Homeric Greek, the language of Homer, named for him; Attic Greek, the language
of the "golden age" of Athens; and Koiné Greek, the language of early
Christian texts.

An analogy I've heard a few times is to compare Homeric Greek to Chaucer's
English; Attic to Shakespeare's English; and Koiné to modern vernacular.

The usual approach is to teach Attic, since it has a large, well-understood
corpus and offers the easiest path to either of the other two (in much the
same way that it'd be easier to get to Chaucer if you started by learning
Shakespearean English). That's how it was taught when I did Greek in college,
for example; we started with simple contrived texts in Attic Greek, then moved
into reading selections from Athenian figures like Plato and Aristophanes and
Euripides. The very back of the book had short passages from Homer for truly
ambitious students, but we didn't get into them.

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StavrosK
I think that analogy is pretty apt, given that Koine is readily understandable
by modern Greeks. Priests in churches today read the original passages from
the third century BC in sermons.

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gowld
> Impressive displays of rhetoric and linguistic force are a good way to seem
> important and invite a particular kind of admiration, but they tend to
> silence dissent and discourage deeper modes of engagement.

An important lesson for those who advocate that a liberal education should
focus on pretending to read Great Books.

~~~
trowaybloway
conversely, rhetoric is a good way to show the topic is important to the
speaker.

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gkya
Slightly off topic, but a serious annoyance of mine these days: wherever I
encountered a news about this translation, the fact that the translator is a
woman was about always more in focus than the translation itself. Can't we be
done with this "first woman to..." thing already? Isn't this kind of
belittling in that the actor being a woman is newsworthy? Why can't the titles
just say "A new translation of Odyssey"? But look at them instead:
[https://imgur.com/T7AaGkg](https://imgur.com/T7AaGkg)

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B1FF_PSUVM
So ... there were these toddlers who could use a bed time story ... and I
filched liberally from the Odyssey, only trying to keep down the gore -
escaping Polyphemus cave, but not poking him in the eye, etc ... Circe and the
pigs, Aeolus and the winds, the lotus eaters, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis
... and they slept well.

Thanks, Homer, old pal.

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leephillips
Thank you for submitting this and making me aware of this wonderful, quite
wonderful, note. I want to read this translation now, on the strength of it.

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throw-away-8
What would the things of Troy, be to you, Achaeans, without Helen?

Insomnia. Homer. Taut canvas. Half the catalogue of ships is mine: that flight
of cranes, long stretched-out line, that once rose, out of Hellas. To an alien
land, like a phalanx of cranes – Foam of the gods on the heads of kings –
Where do you sail? What would the things of Troy, be to you, Achaeans, without
Helen? The sea, or Homer – all moves by love’s glow. Which should I hear? Now
Homer is silent, and the Black Sea thundering its oratory, turbulent, and,
surging, roars against my pillow.

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dilap
> The gendered metaphor of the "faithful" translation, whose worth is always
> secondary to that of a male-authored original...

Huh? I mean, men can be faithful too, and women author originals.

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youzicha
I think she's making a reference to an existing theory---that historically
people have talked about translations using gendered metaphors, with the
translation in the role of the wife. In particular, by googling a bit I found
an article "Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation" [0] (with 662 citations
according to Google Scholar) which says

> The sexualization of translation appears perhaps most familiarly in the tag
> _les belles infideles_ \--like women, the adage goes, translations should be
> either beautiful or faithful. The tag is made possible both by the rhyme in
> French and by the fact that the word _traduction_ is a feminine one, thus
> making _les beaux infideles_ impossible. This tag owes its longevity--it was
> coined in the seventeenth century--to more than phonetic similarity: what
> gives it the appearance of truth is that it has captured a cultural
> complicity between the issues of fidelity in translation and in marriage.
> For _les belles infideles_ , fidelity is defined by an implicit contract
> between translation (as woman) and original (as husband, father, or author).

and gives various other examples where people use (patriarchal) marriage as an
image.

[0]
[https://www.jstor.org/stable/3174168](https://www.jstor.org/stable/3174168)

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riffraff
That seems to be reading _a lot_ more than what is reasonable, based on a
simple gendered noun.

For a counterpoint, in italian there is the expression "traduttore, traditore"
(translator, traitor/betrayer), where the unfaithful is a man.

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Arete3141
I had that thought at first, too. But then I thought about it: she has worked
on the subtle shades of meaning in words for years in order to translate
things. So the more subtle significance of the role of translator is also
something she would have pondered for a lot longer than most of us. Perhaps,
if someone has thought deeply on a subject and worked in a field for decades,
we might listen to what she has to say instead of dismissing it out of hand
because it is unfamiliar.

