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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
That's an interesting take. In England, for O level (hence a few years younger than college age) we did both Plato and Homer as set books. I think the reasoning was that yes the language differences are challenging, but it's important to encompass both to really appreciate the language and culture.
I'm (intermittently) trying to read the Iliad using the Loeb side-by-side text, i.e. try to figure out the Greek and use the English on the facing page as a (frequent) crib. It's very hard work, even though the English is a fairly literal translation, but at the same time very rewarding: it's true that you can only really appreciate poetry in the original.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> men can be faithful too, and women author originals
Both true, but in practice and looking at history, not just today, there have been few women authors and far more expectation for women to be faithful (and chaste). The prodigal son's return is a celebration, but a prodigal daughter?
Look at Odysseus and Penelope: One roamed for 10 years, sleeping with sea nymphs and witches, and was celebrated for his genius and courage; the other was expected to wait faithfully - your spouse leaves for 20 years (including the war), you have no idea if they are alive and have no sign from them at all, and you just sit there waiting for their hoped-for return, spending 20 years of your life weaving and unweaving a veil - and she was celebrated for that.
The 'unfaithful' female servants who slept with Penelope's suitors were summarily and cruelly executed.
Here "original" is probably "The Odyssey", not a generic original work. I read that as Wilson highlighting the gender roles embedded in Homer's writing.
https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0393089053