There's a recent (2017) English translation of the Odyssey by Emily Wilson. It's absolutely electric!
Robert Fagles is one of the most famous English translators of the Odyssey, but I find Wilson's to be more fun to read.
I think one reason why I enjoy Wilson's translation more is because she translates each line using iambic pentameter (like how Shakespeare wrote). The original is in six-footed lines (dactylic hexameters). This is an important style choice because dactylic hexameter was a great choice for poets in the ancient Greek language, but a poor choice in English. The translation into English using iambic pentameter gives the poem a natural flow in English.
What's most impressive is that Wilson's translation is the same length as the original, with exactly the same number of lines while changing the meter from dactylic hexameter to iambic pentameter!
>When Alexander Pope's majestic translation of Homer's Odyssey appeared in 1726, his translation of the Iliad had already been acclaimed by Samuel Johnson as "a performance which no age or nation could hope to equal."
Pope's translation, using rhyming couplets, is very much a product of its time and is, in many ways, more a re-performance of Homer than a translation. I've not yet read Wilson's translation. Richmond Lattimore's translation is a great translation although also a product of its time (it strives to produce a line-for-line literal translation) which I feel is better than his former friend Robert Fitzgerald's translation. Originally the two friends were to translate the Iliad (Lattimore) and the Odyssey (Fitzgerald). The story goes that Lattimore found Fitzgerald's translation so wanting that he then proceeded to produce his own translation of the Odyssey and Fitzgerald in turn produced his own translation of the Iliad and the two men stopped speaking to each other.
Translations are a bit like Helen vs #nofilter Penelope: they may be either very beautiful or very faithful, but unless one has been blessed by the gods, that or is exclusive.
Fitzgerald, imho, is neither beautiful nor faithful. We compared some passages side by side between Fitzgerald and Lattimore in my Epic and Scripture class and Fitzgerald was just ugly in his attempts to modernize the language rather than let Homer's word choices stand on their own (pretty much anywhere Lattimore used the more literal "winged words" Fitzgerald chose something clunky and pedestrian trying to interpret the metaphor.
I think in this case, Pope's style was exemplary of the state of English-language poetry. He excelled in the form rather than challenging it. (I love his translation but it's certainly far from "accurate." A "re-performance" is a great way of putting it.)
An example of the opposite, as hackneyed as it is appropriate, is Moby Dick. Melville was a popular author who created something that was very out of sync with the era (to which previously he had suited his style) and as it turns out very interesting - but only once the zeitgeist had advanced.
Shakespeare is certainly also product of his time. What is meant is probably "dated" or "did not age gracefully" which is not exactly the same.
Today translators are expected to be reasonable faithful to the source material. Adding rhymes to verses which is not originally rhymed, like Pope does, represent an older tradition where the translator had more free reign. Modern readers would probably expect a more faithful translation.
The King James Bible might be the ur-example, as I’ve heard it said that it’s so influential it basically shaped the English language.
As another poster said, the phrase “product of its time” in this case is talking about if the language holds up over time or ends up sounding dated and thus loses its luster.
And Hegel likewise has high praise for the translation of Homer into German by J.H. Voss:
"Luther made the Bible and you have made Homer speak German. This is the greatest gift that can be given to a people; for a people remains barbaric and fails to see the excellence it knows as its own true property as long as it does not come to know it in its own language. If you want to forget these two examples, I still want to say of my own efforts that I will try to teach philosophy to speak German. If it ultimately comes to do that, then it will be infinitely more difficult to give triviality the appearance of profound speech".
My impression is that every new translation of one of the canonical works produces a similar reaction. Emily Wilson is just the latest that everyone is fawning over. I guess the value is in making the old thing new again.
(Personally, I find that I always seem to have a special place in my heart for my first translation of something -- for me, nobody beats Richmond Lattimore. But I'm more nostalgic than most.)
The difference being in art this is possible, as art doesn't get better, just gets different.
Bach is no lesser than deadmau5 because deadmau5 composes 300 years later. But technology from 300 years before is by definition less advanced than todays...
The translation cease to be good over time, because the meaning of words changes and the way people construct sentences changes. The way people speak and understand text changes.
What was pleasant to read text 300 years ago is unpleasant hard to read text. What was normal word 300 years ago is unusual rare word now. What is even worst, the same word now can mean something completely different.
It is more like technology then music in this regard.
> The translation cease to be good over time, because the meaning of words changes and the way people construct sentences changes.
Agree with the rest of what you say but take issue with “ceases to be good”, since, even with translations, determining what is “good” about a piece of literature is complicated and often more about the process than the outcome.
For example some translation which still has a lot of artistic merit or historical importance, but, as you said, is now dated and difficult to read because the language has changed so much since when the translation was written.
I’d argue it doesn’t make sense to call that translation “bad”. “Bad for an undergraduate”, or “bad as a first translation to read, or “bad at X”, some specific thing, but overall bad? Personally I’d argue now.
Also for what it’s worth even if the science behind music doesn’t change, music itself - how we hear it and our culture for it - kinda does.
For example, lots of sounds / music that used to be considered unbearable noise is now widely accepted and popular. Looking at the changes in western popular music in the 20th century is a great example of this.
But —- I agree with you that language and music (and art) are all sort of their own kinds of technologies!
There are materials and techniques and functions and so on. The technology / art divide is much blurrier than is often appreciated. :)
We had strayed from this prophesy for a while, but we've since repented. Now we're trying to push as much computing as possible to the cloud, leaving ourselves with only dumb terminals.
Wilson's translation doesn't sing. Yes, it's quite precise, but when translating poetry there's both the precision and the song of it.
The first one I read was Fitzgerald's translation. That was the one my father gave me. He studied classics at Cambridge and claims that none of the translations really capture the original, but Fitzgerald is closest. My Greek is rudimentary, but having looked through most of English translations, I definitely prefer Fitzgerald.
I got turned on to Emily Wilson's translation by this great episode of the Ezra Klein podcast with Madeleine Miller on myth, nostalgia, and how power corrupts, which I found really compelling: https://www.vox.com/podcasts/2020/4/24/21233353/madeline-mil... Wilson's book is next in my pile!
If you're interested in enjoyable translations of Homer, I'd strongly recommend War Music by the British poet Chrisopher Logue. It's The Iliad, but he called it something like "a retelling" rather than "a translation" because it gave him more leeway. Unfortunately he died before he could finish it.
I think the "cliched, British empire part of our culture" aspect talked about by Alice Oswald is why I love Logue's version so much - it becomes much more vivid in his retelling for me, somehow using a modern idiom to bring an ancient story alive.
I've read both the Iliad and Odyssey translated by Fagles, and although I can't compare it to Wilson's version I think they're reasonably approachable versions without any stuffiness, although not exactly exciting, as you say.
I really enjoyed The Song of Achilles and hope to find Circe used sometime soon. For someone who wouldn't last ten minutes getting through the poetry of the Odyssey, it is something. I envy everyone else who can.
I've read a few translations, and while I appreciate Wilson's clarity, I honestly found it pretty boring. My wife and I read it aloud and, compared to Fagles (which is my favorite), the words she chose often seemed to lend no emotional energy to the story. I'm not trying to dismiss your opinion at all, but I'd really like to know what I'm missing.
IANALC (I am not a literary critic) but I share your impression of Wilson's translation.
I thinks Wilson makes things a little too clear in her effort to produce a modern story. This erases a lot of purposeful vagueness, allusions to background knowledge, innuendo, and general openness to interpretation that makes classics "feel classic."
For example, the first few lines of Pope's translation says that Odysseus, "Wandering from clime to clime, observant stray’d, Their manners noted, and their states survey’d." In Greek mythology, Odysseus was said to have been an unusually curious man. Even in his far-flung travels, he took note of the natural and human elements he encountered, as if he was Charles Darwin! Unlike Darwin's, though, his surveys were neither methodical nor preserved for posterity. His days were unnumbered, and we can merely glimpse a few portions of his exploits that a muse can snatch up for us. There's plenty of blank space for us to fill with our own imagination and interpretation. Indeed, we fill it with a sense of grandiosity and timelessness, as we do when we read any good epic from Homer to Tolkien.
This introduction to the main character is completely missing in Wilson's translation. Odysseus just becomes a "complicated man" who filmed five Die Hard movies in a row to save his crew and get back home. Wilson's opening feels... hollow. It leaves little room for imagination. It sets us up in popcorn mode, merely waiting for the author to fill us in, punch by punch.
Perhaps, everyday English has co-evolved with modern science for too long to avoid sounding matter-of-factly.
Yeah, and neither am I, although I do have a BA in literature from a third-tier college, which probably doesn't give me much credibility here. Your opinion is pretty close to my own. The only thing I might disagree with you on is that I'm not as attached to the (mildly) archaic language. I think modern English can serve a mythic function; it just doesn't really work for me in Wilson's translation. By the way, if anyone wants to compare, here are three versions of that one line:
Pope
> Wandering from clime to clime, observant stray’d, Their manners noted, and their states survey’d.
Fagles
> Many cities of men he saw and learned their minds
Wilson
> and where he went, and who he met
(On this one, Pope is my favorite too.)
That being said: this is all literature! It's mostly a matter of taste and opinion. And if Wilson's writing helps anyone get something new out of the Odyssey, I'm all for it. I'm genuinely just curious what that is.
Yep, it can be a matter of taste and opinion. Wilson is certainly more accessible, and has a lower chance of making a high school student hate literature for life. :)
But when so much detail is lost, one begins to wonder if it should be called an "abridged edition", even if it preserves the number of lines.
I've read the Fagles' translation of The Iliad, but the only Odyssey translation I've read is Wilson's.
Fagles is my favorite of the two, because he gave me more of what I wanted: high diction and mythic tone. Wilson's translation was great, and evidently captured the spirit of the Greek much better, but I wasn't really looking for that. I'm not a classicist, I don't read Greek. I want my blood to be stirred by evocative lines that transport me into a non-existent past. I don't think that's what Wilson was trying to accomplish, so it's no surprise she doesn't succeed at it.
But, to answer your question, one advantage of the Wilson Odyssey is that it is a really fast, fun translation to read. Whereas I found Fagles to be more of a study, Wilson was practically a page-turner. I'm not saying it was dumbed-down in any way! It's an amazing achievement to have maintained fidelity to the source text while also writing something approachable and engrossing for popular audiences. When she finishes translating the Iliad, I will buy that too, and probably give both her translations to someone I want to have a good experience with Homer. I wouldn't do that with Fagles.
> Fagles is my favorite of the two, because he gave me more of what I wanted: high diction and mythic tone.
Fair :). Lol I’ve been constantly re-reading The Lord of the Rings for the same reason :). And I’ve read (Fagles, I think) The Iliad for the same reasons.
You may have already, but if not check out the Seamus Heaney translation of ‘Beowulf.’
He doesn’t do “high diction” or “mythic tone”, but, imho, he’s managed to give the story a quite “epic tone” in a very contemporary and earthy fashion.
I had three false starts with Fagles but just tore through Wilson’s translation. Her introduction is really good, too.
A fun postscript is Atwood’s “The Penelopiad.” It’s short and really entertaining.
“Let me add that meat was highly valued among us – the aristocracy ate lots of it, meat, meat, meat, and all they ever did was roast it: ours was not an age of haute cuisine. Oh, I forgot: there was also bread, flatbread that is, bread, bread, bread, and wine, wine, wine. We did have the odd fruit or vegetable, but you’ve probably never heard of these because no one put them into the songs much.”
Pimping my favorite translator of the Illiad, EV Rieu, though I guess I need to try Emily Wilson. I have his version of the Odyssey but haven't read it yet.
The Literature and History podcast has great coverage of the Illiad and Odyssey, and reads from Wilson in addition to Fagles, Rieu, and others. The podcast itself is exceptionally good if you are into the history behind the writing.
I agree. It is first time I actually enjoyed old text. Plus the introduction into cultural and historical context is great. Plus, the threads about translation itself she wrote were interesting too.
The Odyssey was not translated by Alexander Pope, but by a ghostwriter Pope hired to translate it under his name. He did this to cash in on the enormous popularity of his translation of Homer's Iliad, compared to which the ghostwritten work pales.
Pope's translation of the Iliad is one of the most amazing books I've ever read. Highly, highly recommended if you want to experience stunningly beautiful and powerful language.
Back stories help, and so with the Odyssey it really helps to have read the Oresteia (yes, Aeschylus is writing later) before the Odyssey, in my opinion, this helps more than having read the Iliad. It helps because the Telemachy (the first four books with Telemachus) compares Telemachus (he's such an entitled twerp) to Orestes and then in the 11th book Odysseus descends into the underworld and questions Agamemnon. So it helps to know what they're talking about.
With the Iliad, it helps to know about the Judgment of Paris but I think my prof at Berkeley simply recited it. I don't know what the 'classic' telling would be.
Of course it helps to have read the Iliad and the Odyssey before the Aeneid. The first half, the Odyssean half, is just a lot more fun because of Dido. She's like Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet. But when Dido does what Dido did then in the Iliadic second half you're stuck with stoic Aeneas (and Turnus) and Aeneas is just not that interesting.
I would say:
1. Judgment of Paris (somehow, somewhere, Robert Graves?)
2. Iliad (I'm a huge fan of Lattimore)
3. Oresteia (at least Agamemnon)
4. Odyssey
5. Aeneid
I could never get into Joyce but I may give him another try.
Joyce’s great novel has nothing except the most tenuous and inessential connection with the Odyssey, despite the title. Joyce removed the chapter titles that had referred to the Odyssey after the first edition, and said that he regretted ever having put them in there, because they had misled readers and critics into imagining parallels to the Greek story that did not exist. The main character does wander around, though.
> Joyce’s great novel has nothing except the most tenuous and inessential connection with the Odyssey
Joyce’s own chart of the construction of the book[0] features the Odyssey chapter titles as prominently as any of the other issues. Certainly there is an "essential" connection to the Odyssey, though it is just one rich ingredient for this masterpiece among others. Joyce’s later regret can be chalked down to people imagining parallels that he didn’t intend, but I don’t think there’s a scholar around who doesn’t believe that Joyce wrote the barmaids as a parallel to the sirens, or the Citizen to the Cyclops.
Sure, but those are the kinds of things that I was calling a tenuous connection. All I meant was that a scholarly familiarity with Homer is not necessary to appreciate Joyce’s book.
This is a good thread to ask: Who reads Homer in your country, and why?
I'm currently learning ancient Greek as my "Corona project": purely for fun, and mainly because I'm interested in Greek philosophy and culture.
That said, I feel a bit lonely in my country in pursuing this. Sweden has no strong history of classical studies. Some high schools may offer a course in latin, but it's getting more and more rare, and as far as I know there are not even courses in university because the interest is too low. I don't know anyone and I don't know _of_ anyone in Sweden who actually reads/knows the language.
When I talk to friends in the US, the UK and the Netherlands on the other hand, Greek and the classical Greek works (including Homer, of course) seems to be much more popular and also part of normal young adult education. One of my friends, an American in his late 20:s, had to read the Odessey in high school. My fiance from the Netherlands was offered either latin or greek in high school as well. Most of my textbooks in greek are written by American, English and Dutch authors. So these nations seem to have a stronger tradition in classics.
Can anyone care to elaborate the situation where you live? I'm very curious what motivates people to learn dead languages and read books thousands years old.
In the US, pretty much everyone with a high school education reads at least some Homer in translation.
> I'm very curious what motivates people to learn dead languages and read books thousands years old.
You're conflating learning Ancient Greek with reading Homer, but most of us read Homer in translation. Having read at least a little Homer is very common in the United States, having learned Ancient Greek or Latin is more unusual.
The two obvious reasons for reading Homer: it's a good story, and it's foundational to our culture. I guess you could dive into what makes it a good enough story to keep it around for thousands of years, or why knowing anything about culture is important... you don't believe you're going to get an adequate explication of those matters in a short HN comment, do you?
Here are some personal data points from Australia and The Netherlands:
Australia:
* My high school in Melbourne had one class (15 people) learning Latin to year 12 level. Funnily enough, almost all of us also studied advanced math, and more than half were left-handed. By the end, we were reading the Aeneid, Catullus and Cicero.
* Why did I pick Latin? Well, at my school, two foreign languages were compulsory for years 7-10, and optional for years 11 and 12. In year 7 and 8, everyone had to do Latin, and either French or German. In year 9, around half switched from Latin to Mandarin.
* Two of my friends also did Ancient Greek. They were taught by the school headmaster, who was a Classics scholar.
* That year, in the whole state of Victoria, the total number of year 12 students taking Latin and Ancient Greek were 70 and 6 respectively.
* At university, my engineering school required us to take one subject in a non-technical faculty. I chose Ancient Greek, to complement my Latin from high school. That class had around 60 students. 2/3 of them were of Greek descent and already spoke modern Greek.
* The only Greek word I remember now is κῠβερνήτης (helmsman). You may recognise it as Kubernetes :)
Netherlands:
* My partner, who is Dutch, studied Latin at high school there.
* His school was a "gymnasium", a category of very academic high schools which traditionally taught Latin and Greek. Check out [1] for the background to these gymnasium schools in the Netherlands and various countries.
My school experience sounds exactly like yours—including the gay and Catullus bits—except it was Adelaide so the state had 10 Latin students instead of 70.
I first read the Illiad (Fagels) by torchlight, in a tent by a campfire in a muddy field, next to a cliff where I was risking my neck each day to impress the other boys in the university mountain club. As everyone should.
My American education touched on the Greeks and the Romans, and we did read the Odyssey; however, as I recall, we quickly jumped to late-Medieval (post-Norman-conquest) England. I always wondered what was in England before these medieval kings and queens. I began learning about the Norman conquest, the Viking invasion, the Anglo-Saxons, the Roman invasion and Romanization of England, the native Celts and so on. Then I began to inquire about those people; what were their homelands like, how did they arrive in their homelands, how were their languages interrelated, and so on. The etymology in particular fascinates me (and I highly recommend the podcast "The History of English"), notably how one language family spread throughout most of Eurasia (from Britain in the North-West to India and Western China in the East). I also highly recommend Jean Manco's books (https://www.amazon.com/Jean-Manco/e/B0034P5S3C?ref=sr_ntt_sr...) as her histories incorporate the latest information from many fields including history, archaeology, and the rapidly evolving field of ancient genetics. I haven't read many ancient texts yet, but I really want to if only to get a sense for how ancient people saw themselves and their world. Some day...
In Greece it is of course mandatory reading in junior high-school but not in ancient Greek. There are other ancient Greek texts though which are mandatory reading and learning ancient Greek is mandatory as well.
As someone who always means to learn a bit of Latin and Ancient Greek, this is a very cool looking site -- the inflection tables and diagrams are an especially nice touch. One addition that I'd love to see (if technically feasible) would be some sort of drilling or practice mechanism, e.g. a cloze-completion generator (a la Clozemaster or Lingvist, or the I think quasi-defunct Readlang).
By the way, if you're ever considering classical languages further east, I'd call your attention to ctext.org -- it doesn't do anything particularly fancy with its UI, but it has a lot of classical / premodern Chinese texts, and classic English translations (largely Legge) of some of the major ones.
In France less than 4% of high school students learn Latin or ancient Greek, 3 hours weekly. Only one high school out of four has a teacher available for one of these languages. It has strongly receded over the last decade.
The schools follow a chronological program which means youngsters will study Antiquity while in middle school and recent centuries while in high school. Those who specialize in humanities will also go back in time while in high school. So I suppose a large majority of students reaching eighteen have absolutely no memory of reading or studying Homer.
I've enjoyed very much reading Homer. I found the Odyssey very moving and beautiful — not all translations are equals, I read two and you should find the one that suits you. Another obvious pleasure with reading classical works is the myriad of references to them in our culture. Apart from this, I like traveling in space and time through these texts. For example, the Iliad is very different from the Odyssey, and it looked older to me; at a times were gods were among people and human heroes could fight them, like Gilgamesh insulting Ishtar or Jacob wrestling with Yahve. In the Odyssey, the main gods have retreated from the world, and the focus is on human torments and fabulous encounters.
Sweden has certainly produced an immense amount of classical scholarship and saw a lot of Latin teaching. I think that the decline in classical studies is due to the drastic social changes of the mid 20th-century that completely changed Swedish society and education. But if you just visit a university library, you’ll find plenty of evidence for the tradition that existed up to the first several decades of the last century.
I was fortunate to have gone to a good high school at a time when the family was poor. It offered Latin and Greek (I don’t recall if it was ancient or not) intro courses. I don’t believe the HS offers that any more and those teachers were old then and now retired or dead.
Unfortunately as many a Highschool student are wont to do, I sadly ignored the opportunity to learn as it would help my curiosity now.
> Can anyone care to elaborate the situation where you live? I'm very curious what motivates people to learn dead languages and read books thousands years old.
I'd guess religion is one driver. My impression of Sweden is that it's not a terribly religious country, so interest in languages like Latin or Koine Greek might be less compared to countries where religion has a deeper hold like the US.
It could also simply be a question of population size: more people suggests more people might share those interests.
It might also have to do with foreign language learning. I don't know about Sweden, but my impression of the Netherlands is that they teach foreign languages very early (e.g., my Dutch professors all sounded mostly American). It may be that if you have early language learning, the barrier to entry is lowered for subsequent languages.
> I don't know about Sweden, but my impression of the Netherlands is that they teach foreign languages very early
I don’t think this is the case. I believe it’s all Dutch, all the time through primary school. They don’t dub anything though, everything is subtitled whether it’s in English, French, German or something else. And Dutch is the closest living language to English unless you count Scots. Dutch people speaking great English is as surprising as Portuguese speaking great Spanish, except English is a great deal more useful.
"And Dutch is the closest living language to English unless you count Scots."
Dutch is from a different branch of Germanic than English. The "closest relative" is typically held to be Frisian, which is part of the same Germanic subgroup as English.[0]
In the US. I took Latin in high school and translated classics like Ovid and Catullus. I wouldn't be surprised if Latin was less popular now even though it's only been a few years. It seems like the feeling is that so few Americans who have been here a few generations speak a second language that it's a waste to learn a dead language.
I will say that having to use Latin conjugation really improved my English grammar and understanding of sentence structure. I don't know if this is a typical effect of studying a second language from an outsider perspective (instead of just going by what sounds right in your native language) or if the simplicity of an older root language like Latin helped.
Hard to say. I read Homer when in college in Robert Fitzgerald's translation. After college, I learned a little bit of classical Greek, then worked my way through Clyde Pharr's Homeric Greek, which takes one through Book I of the Iliad, then later worked through the Odyssey and the Iliad.
My impression is that a fair number of people who went through liberal arts programs in college have read Homer in translation. But I've never taken a poll.
A classics professor I know says that all her department's graduates have job offers, because Latin has made a modest comeback. One child on my street attends a Latin charter school.
Here in Denmark, at the turn of the century, I took a 'classics' class in our equivalent to high school.
A bit of Plato and Socrates, a bit of ancient Greek / Roman architecture (different types of columns?), a smidgen of archeology review.
I imagine it was some kind of condensed and simplified remnant of the broad set of classics courses that would have been compulsory in 'high school' before the democratization of secondary education here (i.e. ~50 years ago our 'high school' was mostly populated by future academics and the children of the upper-middle classes).
In my Russian school back in Lithuania we had a very limited course covering classic literature as a part of a bigger generic literature course: I remember reading Odyssey, Iliad, etc
My colleague from Austria had a course in Latin back in school, and he mentioned that he read /Commentarii de Bello Gallico/ in the original language.
Oh, and I study Ancient Egyptian right now. Not too many - none - people support me in this endeavor. But in general it feels that in UK it is relatively easy to find people interested in those things.
Yes! I recall reading "Commentaries on the Gallic Wars" (Commentarii de Bello Gallico) in Julius Caesar's original Latin in high school and being thrilled to be able to actually understand his account nearly 2000 years after he wrote it. 56 years after encountering it in Miss Shaw's Latin class, I can still recall the beginning of the first sentence:
I studied Latin to Ordinary Grade and (Classical) Greek to Higher Grade at school in Glasgow decades ago. This included reading, in Greek, Odyssey 9 and Iliad 6. Other set texts included works by Plato, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Euripides. Latin and Greek are still taught at the school.
I have the Loeb Classical Library version of the Odyssey, which has the Greek on one side and a prose English translation on the other.
Hungary, Europe. Homer is standard in high school (Odyssey and Illiad) along with Sophocles (Antigone and Oedipus Rex). And there are more obviously too
Hi, also from Sweden. Yes, in högstadiet/high school I think it is rare to offer classical Greek or Latin. Even Italian is rare. But there are definitely Latin and Greek courses at universities. I studied 7,5 points of Latin last semester. I know Uppsala University offers a 30 point course. I'd recommend looking at antagning.se, if you want to make it more than a fun side project :-)
> When I talk to friends in the US, the UK and the Netherlands on the other hand, Greek and the classical Greek works (including Homer, of course) seems to be much more popular and also part of normal young adult education.
In the US they are all read in translation unless you are in a classical studies University program, which is an area few pursue, or attend an old elite private primary or secondary school.
In the US, knowledge of Latin and ancient Greek is about as rare as what you describe in Sweden. It might be taught at a few private schools but it is definitely not mainstream. However, the Odyssey (in English translation) is commonly read in schools.
I actually have a few original sets of this collection (second edition), and then a few later prints of both Iliad and Odyssey (A set from ~1730, and another from the 1770s, the latter binding is lovely, early copies tend to be in worse condition unless you have chunks of cash to spend).
IMHO the Iliad is far more fun than the Odyssey regardless of translation, it also features much better in the wider Hellenic corpus as a reference point if you like to see how it influences wider classic drama.
I became a little obsessed with him for a while because he became a millionaire in his time by essentially inventing DLC: His courtly friends would buy each volume of the books in advance, so he generated a solid stream of revenue so long as he hit his deadlines. For a poet that's good going.
His Greek wasn't particularly good, so it's suggested that quite a few people helped him, which makes the translation itself inaccurate, but there's no denying his poetic flair.
If you're looking for classic Pope I'd say look at the Rape of the Lock (which most folks read in school), and some of his satires - like Dante though they require some historical knowledge because he was very much a satirist and political commentator and used poetry as a means of expression rather tyhan art.
Bonus fact: did you know he invented the insult "namby pamby", it's derived from a nickname he came up with for one of his literary and courtly rivals.
I studied engineering in undergrad, and have only become interested in "classics" for the past couple of years. Homer is great. I've only read Fagles' translation, but plan on Pope next. I've been amazed at how much reading the classics has affected the way I view the world. I find stories and references popping into my head all the time, and when they do you feel this great connection to centuries (millenia!) of humanity.
I look forward to expanding a bit outside of the Western Canon. Also, one wonders about the many stories that have been lost over the centuries.
If I recall, there are only a handful of fragments from Sappho that survived. Is this what you were referring to? (Or perhaps I a mistaken and the collection I had only included a few.)
This is the first transcription of Bryant's translation available online, and it was very well regarded in its day. Like Wilson's translation, it's in iambic pentameter. It still reads really well, considering its age!
Pope’s translation (the linked one) is the best, bar none. While some may find the language overdone or question its accuracy, I think the quality of the writing makes up for it. Besides, unless you’re reading it in Ancient Greek, a translation is still a translation.
The purpose of reading the Iliad is so that you can then read the Odyssey, so that you can then read the Aeneid. Dante's Inferno is in some respects explicitly connected to the Aeneid, so we have a literary connection spanning literally millenia...
If we just had a good translation of the Aeneid. Fitzgerald's is okay. CS Lewis's book one is wonderful. But Virgil's poetry carries the Latin in a way that the subject matter really struggles to do without.
I am, however, incredibly happy that we have Clive James's translation of the Divine Comedy.
A must-read for anyone who appreciates The Odyssey is by Nikos kazantzakis, a Greek himself and perhaps one of the best (and least well-known) of the past 100 years. Nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature, he wrote a truly amazing book called The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel. [0]
Even translated into English, the language is indescribably entrancing. I won't try to do it justice here. Thematically, it picks up where Homer left off: Odysseus, genius & trickster, covered in the blood of those who sought to take his home & wife, is home after 20 years of war and strife with gods & monsters. How can such a man return to a normal life?
(unliked, but no one had any specific complaints about any of the characterisations... And I'm still curious about the downthread sensus tactilus, if anyone has any pointers.)
From the introduction:
“Scepticism has attained its culminating point with respect to Homer, and the state of our Homeric knowledge may be described as a free permission to believe any theory, provided we throw overboard all written tradition, concerning the author or authors of the Iliad and Odyssey. What few authorities exist on the subject, are summarily dismissed, although the arguments appear to run in a circle. “This cannot be true, because it is not true; and that is not true, because it cannot be true.” Such seems to be the style, in which testimony upon testimony, statement upon statement, is consigned to denial and oblivion."
The introduction to the Robert Fagles' translation of the Iliad has a fascinating, and more up-to-date, essay about the authorship of the Iliad and the Odyssey---the so called "Homeric Question."
More evidence, from archeological digs and from the text itself, has come to light and I think there is less skepticism these days in general.
I urge everyone with even a passing interest in Greek mythology to check out The Song of Achilles (2011) and then Circe (2018), both by Madeline Miller. She perfectly combines ancient stories with modern prose, and these are two of my favorite fantasy novels.
I find the entire concept of an epic poem covering the events of one of the many wars of the Bronze Age Collapse absolutely riveting - that we have such a thing, such a record, even if through the lens of fictionalised drama, is remarkable.
The Iliad actually covers only a small part of the Trojan war. There's a whole corpus of ancient literature that treats various aspects of the war. The famed Trojan Horse incident happens between the events of the Iliad and the Odyssey and is mentioned in the latter but the most complete accounting is in Virgil's Aeneid.
Honest question, how does one get past the idea of reading this (to say that one did so and because one respects people who have done so and the authors themselves) and the actual act of doing so, which can take several hours and become on occasion dare I say it boring?
You should not be reading the Illiad to check a box. My advice is to approach it as a serious historical work and engage it with a mindset of trying to understand a culture that is very distant while providing clues of similarity to modern life.
As an example, the boring part in the beginning is the names of ships and tribes enlisted to sail to Troy. What I am thinking while reading these parts is why this list was so important and the sheer complexity of organizing all of it. You are talking about months if not years worth of preparation and yet it's reduced to this almost data-like catalog where you can get the sense that the message is: "We have a lot of friends... and we are coming."
And this isn't to say that you should hold it as Truth. What I am saying is that this work had a profound cultural impact over the course of hundreds of years similar to the The Bible today. It will take work to enjoy it and you should only approach it if reading literature of this kind is of interest to you in general.
Great answer and compelling thanks. However, ouch, you used the B word. I also read the Bible for the cultural relevance. I found it to be incredibly boring as well. I do not feel better off having read it. For contrast, reading Harry Potter (just as an example) does not enlist such a feeling of monotony and dread. It generally just hums along and is mostly enjoyable. I have often heard this 'canon' argument ie. If it survived this long, and was so influential, it must be worth reading. However precisely this argument unravels for me when reading the Bible itself in its entirety. On the contrary, if one is like me one becomes convinced of humanity's inability to select valuable work for lasting significance, and even more doubtful of the Canon as a great starting point. It seems to be like a 3500 year old imdb with a really inconsistent voting mechanism, if the analogy makes sense.
I'm not sure I understand what you are asking if anyone actually likes reading the Iliad. I can't speak for others, but I enjoyed it thoroughly. It vividly paints the horror and the glory and beauty of war.
Read a bit further every night. If you don't get into it, then stop. Maybe find something else you vibe better with from the foreign country that is the past.
Robert Fagles is one of the most famous English translators of the Odyssey, but I find Wilson's to be more fun to read.
I think one reason why I enjoy Wilson's translation more is because she translates each line using iambic pentameter (like how Shakespeare wrote). The original is in six-footed lines (dactylic hexameters). This is an important style choice because dactylic hexameter was a great choice for poets in the ancient Greek language, but a poor choice in English. The translation into English using iambic pentameter gives the poem a natural flow in English.
What's most impressive is that Wilson's translation is the same length as the original, with exactly the same number of lines while changing the meter from dactylic hexameter to iambic pentameter!