As always I think your best move if you want to read a work with many translations available is simply to read the first 2-3 pages (or some other short identical segment) and see which one feels best to you. I have read several and I value them all for different reasons.
I love Pope but wouldn't read him for an "accurate" translation (he didn't know Greek!) and I like Butler's prose but it's a total transliteration, not poetry. My go-to recommendation is Lattimore (not Fagles, which I found dull), but now we have Emily Wilson in the mix too (with a great preface to boot).
Taste them all and go with whichever is best for you - you can always read another later, but your first time for a classic should be enjoyable and natural. Only you can say which one you enjoy most.
There's an enjoyably pessmimistic phrase in Italian - "traduttore, traditore" which translated(!) means "translator, traitor", emphasising the impossibility of an "accurate" translation.
I love reading translations, but would love to have the time to learn languages to read the originals. (I tried learning German for WG Sebald, but found it very hard, figured his writing was going to be pretty hard in and of itself, know that he worked closely with his English translators, and given he taught in an English university for decades figured they were going to be very "good").
This certainly is the case! Translation is a creative process, not merely transformative, let alone mechanical. Especially with classics, where much interpretation is needed. The very first line of the Odyssey is a perfect example - the word used to describe Odysseus famously has no direct translation, so everyone puts their own spin on it.
Reading the amount of thought that goes into a translation is always interesting to me - for instance the introduction to a Sir Gawain and the Green Knight I have really helped me understand how the alliterative style worked and why the translation was done in a certain way (and why it was so hard).
I think it would be much more deterministic/mechanical if we did translations of the words and didn’t touch grammar/structure, but that does not have mass-market appeal as the flow is disrupted and some words get denser.
OK, that may be a bit harsh. But the danger is that a translation that is out-of-date or badly done will turn you off the book. Many classic books whose translations are now beyond copyright are available for free. But these translations are, generally speaking, poor. To really appreciate these books, find a translation that is up-to-date and that suits your reading style.
I disagree, strongly. Most modern translations try to be "accessible" which means they're written in a lukewarm, boring style that avoids difficult (but artistically relevant) language. This is especially true with Victorian-era English, which is criticized for being overly verbose today. Sometimes, maybe that's true. But if say, Confessions of an English Opium Eater had been written in French and was only read as a contemporary translation, you'd completely miss the beauty of De Quincey's writing.
Everything is subjective, there's no bad opinions, but this comes close. To cast so wide a brush as to paint Lattimore, Fitzgerald, Fagles, Wilson, Mandelbaum, and other renowned modern translators as lukewarm and boring...
If you have some particular fondness for Victorian English, sure, read what you enjoy; but antiquated language doesn't make anything intrinsically better, and it takes the average modern reader further away from the work itself. These works weren't composed in a language that was, for their audience, hundreds of years out-of-date.
Moreover - particularly with ancient texts - older translators were typically writers first, scholars second. As pointed out elsewhere on this thread, Pope didn't even speak Greek when he "translated" the Iliad. The Butler translation here is prose. An approach to translation that takes fidelity seriously is a more modern invention.
You’re welcome to disagree with me, no problem. But is the passive aggressive side comment really necessary?
I have found that modern translations inject a “modernness” into the language that isn’t present in translations from a century or two ago. If that doesn’t bother you, then sure, pick up a recent translation.
'I have found that modern translations inject a “modernness” into the language that isn’t present in translations from a century or two ago.'
I'm completely baffled by this criticism in the context of a translation of a 7th Century BC text, particularly in terms of the notion of making the text 'accessible' to a modern reader.
If anything I'd argue that Butler's prose translation does far more violence to the original text. The idea that e.g. Lattimore is more accessible than Butler is remarkably strange to me. In particular, you mention that contemporary translations tend to avoid 'difficult' language, which is flat wrong in the context of Lattimore - his syntactic constructions, because they need to fit the poetic meter he uses, are frequently quite complex and nested. Nor is the vocabulary particularly simplified; I think Butler is much more watered-down in this regard.*
Can you elaborate on which 20th/21st century translations of Homer you are referring to?
*(That is not to say there aren't any possible criticisms to be made of Lattimore in terms of anachronism - when Helen talks about her own conduct in the Iliad, Lattimore inserts some fairly harsh 20th-century gendered insults that are, as far as I can tell, in no way attested to by the original Greek)
I quite like Emily Wilson's recent translation of the Odyssey. I just wish she had kept "winged words" in, but that's a very minor thing.
For the Iliad, I have a preference for Richmond Lattimore. His is fairly true to the original and so it feels like an old story from far away, which I like. I think most people like Robert Fitzgerald better though?
I’m reading Wilson right now and was pleased to see that in at least one passage she let the winged words peek through. She’s open in her introduction about varying how she renders the repetitive epithets and phrases in the poem, a practice that dates back at least to St Jerome who translated ו (and) with around a dozen variations (et, atque, -que, come to mind off the top of my head) although digging into the Vulgate, my biggest takeaway is that Jerome was wild (but in a good way).
Butler: "My own wife, do not take these things too bitterly to heart"
It seems to me that most of the other translations I can find are closer to the Wilson translation. I don't know any version of Greek, but the name Andromache doesn't appear in that line (book 6 line 486) at all, and nobody else seems to interpret the line as a rhetorical question.
All this just to say, maybe Wilson's is closer to the original text?
On the other hand, sometimes newer translations do not justify the hype. I've put a lot of time into discriminating between available translations of stuff that I've read. People say, for example, you can't read The Count of Monte Cristo unless it's Buss's translation published by Penguin, or you can't read Garnett's Dostoyevsky. Well, okay, but when pressed about what the purportedly less faithful versions of Dumas get wrong, I've only ever heard mimetic regurgitation of nonspecific claims (on par with "don't read K&R; it's awful") or when someone actually articulates something concrete and falsifiable, it doesn't hold up—"That actually was in the 19th century translation that I read, so..." And notwithstanding whether Pevear and Volokhonsky's The Idiot was done by folks with more reverence for the original, theirs is basically unreadable from where I'm sitting.
It's also worth pondering whether the newer translations are riding on the coattails of their denigrated forebears—"would this have been as well-received and become a staple in the English-speaking world if the newer, purportedly better translation had been the only game in town from the beginning?"
I read Butler's Iliad (mercifully, with the gods' names restored to Greek by an editor) and concur—avoid.
It's often the case that there are multiple still-covered-by-copyright translations of ancient texts (and sometimes more-recent-than-ancient ones, as with e.g. almost anything Russian, or Jules Verne) that are better than anything PG has, by just about any standard of "better". Not their fault—that's just how it is. I'd definitely recommend anyone tackling these sorts of works shop for the best translation for their purposes—it can make a huge difference. Worth a trip to the library or a few dollars for a used copy, for something you'll spend hours with.
> I read Butler's Iliad (mercifully, with the gods' names restored to Greek by an editor) and concur—avoid.
Any specific reasons why?
> I'd definitely recommend anyone tackling these sorts of works shop for the best translation for their purposes—it can make a huge difference. Worth a trip to the library or a few dollars for a used copy, for something you'll spend hours with.
I definitely agree with this. Shop around for the translation that you like best where possible (for less popular texts you may have no choice). There are a lot of different possible "value systems" for evaluating translation quality.
I don't think it reads very smoothly, and Butler adopts a kind of archaic tone (even for the time, I mean—not just that the translation is, itself, now old) that does more harm than good to the text. Not literal enough to justify the clunkiness, not distinctive and skilled and poetically-sublime enough to be a great English work in its own right (see: Pope) despite putting some effort into it[1]—basically, just a rougher read than other options, without much benefit to offset that. It's not terrible, I'm just not sure there's anything to recommend it—I'd say read a different Homer, and if you want to read Butler, read Erewhon or one of his other novels.
[1] For instance, from the link:
"So saying she bound on her glittering golden sandals, imperishable, with which she can fly like the wind over land or sea; she grasped the redoubtable bronze-shod spear, so stout and sturdy and strong, [...]"
He's trying with all that alliteration and the meter, and at times it works quite well for the space of a few words, but the wider a view, if you will, one takes of it, and as one proceeds with the reading, the worse it looks—to my eye, anyway.
Seeing how we are reading, not reciting, these texts, I prefer to sacrifice meter for brevity and clarity. Have you any particular recommendations? I can read Greek and do speak a bit of the modern language (just from Duolingo) if that would be a consideration.
Heh—my favorite prose Odyssey's kinda a bad one, from many perspectives, as it's an even less a literal rendering than most: TE Lawrence's 1932 translation (publishing as TE Shaw—you might find it under either name). It's not so far off it'd be at all fair to call it a retelling, but it's also less-close to the original than most translations. It's also guilty of some of the deliberate archaism in its language that I just accused Butler of, but is more to-my-taste regardless—I make no claim to consistency :-)
I find it clean, unassuming, and to read at a nice modern-feeling (but not too modern-feeling) clip without resorting to abridgment.
My opinion is that any ancient writings are best read in a bilingual edition (like those of the Loeb collection), even when you do not know well or at all the original language.
When you also have the original text, whenever there is a more interesting or obscure paragraph you can look to see what was really said, possibly with the help of a dictionary.
Even when the translation is good, the translator cannot stop at each sentence and explain why certain English words have been chosen, which may be the closest to what was said, or they may be not, but the translator has thought that the chosen translation is easier to understand for an average reader.
The older translations (and perhaps the future translations, taking into account the current trends) also avoided to translate whatever words were considered offensive when the translation was done.
Pretty impossible (in a static text) for an English speaker reading ancient Greek unless they're familiar with Greek or Cyrillic letters. Otherwise a block of text is just going to be totally inscrutable and having the "original" (which, to be clear, is never going to look like an original inscription for ancient Greek) is not likely to add any value.
Much more people are familiar with the Greek letters (e.g. from mathematics or physics) than with the Greek language.
Knowing the letters is enough to allow the use of a dictionary to find most words, i.e. most nouns. Searching for verbs in a dictionary can be more difficult without knowing the grammar, as it may not be obvious which is the dictionary form that corresponds to a verbal form in the text.
I have read many Greek and Latin bilingual books and I have always found the original text to be of great value. The English text is very useful for reading quickly in order to have a general idea about the content of the original text and for searching quickly things in which you are interested.
Whenever you want to know anything certain about the content of the original text, the only way is to look at the original language. It does not matter if the original text looks like the original inscriptions. The original text may be shown in a one-to-one transliteration into Latin letters, without losing any information.
On the other hand, I have never seen any reliable English translation, i.e. any translation where after seeing twice the same English word in the translation you may conclude that the Greek author used the same word in both cases or that the author meant the same thing in both places.
Moreover, almost all translations that I have seen contain some anachronisms, i.e. modern words which do not really have any exact correspondent in the ancient languages, so when looking at the original you can see that the Greek or Latin words actually meant something else. Because of this, I have seen papers in which wrong conclusions were affirmed about what some ancient authors have said, due to the fact that some translations were accepted as being true literally, without checking the original words.
> familiar with the Greek letters (e.g. from mathematics or physics)
I think, if you've studied classics, you should know that seeing a few greek letters in a mathematical formula and mispronounced is nowhere near being able to parse a word written in Greek letters.
> I have read many Greek and Latin bilingual books and I have always found the original text to be of great value.
You've misunderstood, though. The latter is true because of the former. The comment I replied to specifically referred to people who don't know the language.
> The original text may be shown in a one-to-one transliteration into Latin letters, without losing any information
Not exactly true because our alphabet doesn't have standardized stress marks, aspiration marks, or even standardized 1:1 transliterations of the characters. But in general I think you're correct that transliterating it could be helpful.
> On the other hand, I have never seen any reliable English translation, i.e. any translation where after seeing twice the same English word in the translation you may conclude that the Greek author used the same word in both cases or that the author meant the same thing in both places.
I am pretty sure I have, but I don't have any references on hand.
> Because of this, I have seen papers in which wrong conclusions were affirmed about what some ancient authors have said, due to the fact that some translations were accepted as being true literally, without checking the original words.
You've definitely hit an important point here. Even without having studied classics very intensely, I can almost immediately spot bullshit peddlers when they reference "the Greeks" and quote some passage completely out of context. But most of the time, it's less about the translator's word choice and more about ignorance of the society in which the original was written. That's not something you're going to get anyway from laying the original text next to the translation.
Wiktionary is really good for this as it has entries linking back to the main text for conjugated verbs (and in the rare cases when it doesn’t, full text search finds the verb thanks to the conjugation tables).
This is useful with something like the Canterbury Tales where an average reader can puzzle out the proto-English, but with Ancient Greek it's pretty useless. I love Loebs but I think their translations are very dry and academic, sometimes to good purpose (I love their Hesiod) but not always.
> obscure paragraph you can look to see what was really said, possibly with the help of a dictionary
I pretty much guarantee that unless the translation is completely atrocious, what you will gain from this will be even worst. Languages just don't work like that. Trying to fugure out nuance or meaning from word for word dictionary analysis just don't work.
If trying to figure the meaning from a dictionary may be difficult, trying to figure the exact meaning from almost any translation that I have ever seen is completely hopeless.
For some of the ancient texts there are editions with commentaries, which include both the original text and an approximate translation for it and in which most of the less usual words and phrases are discussed in detail, to establish their most probable meaning.
While such a commented edition may be the best tool, what they add over a bilingual edition and a dictionary is much less than the difference between the latter and an English-only edition.
The English translations may be more acceptable for literary fiction (where for many people it matters more to be entertained than to know what the ancient author truly said), but they are particularly bad for any text that has any scientific value, e.g. Aristotle, Plato, Pliny, Herodotus and so on, because the translator normally lacks expertise in sciences and is unable to identify the appropriate English words.
Even in Homer, there are many names of animals, plants and minerals, or even of colors, which are normally mistranslated into English.
> they are particularly bad for any text that has any scientific value, e.g. Aristotle, Plato, Pliny, Herodotus and so on, because the translator normally lacks expertise in sciences and is unable to identify the appropriate English words.
I agree. With the current technology this should be the way to go, and we should be able to lookup the the translation on the fly. A simple static translation is no longer enough
>But these translations are, generally speaking, poor.
I think that's an unfair characterization - Benjamin Jowett's translations of Plato's dialogues are decent and readable (these are readily available online). I also liked H.G. Dakyn's translations of Xenophon's The Memorabilia and The Symposium:
And Jowett's translations are explicitly not recommended for anyone trying to study Plato's thought, which is what most people read Plato for (the same goes for all public domain translations of philosophy). At least with outdated translations of literature you can argue for some kind of added value: people don't read Chapman's or Pope's Homer for their accuracy. But philosophy is another matter.
I'm sure there are better, more recent translations, but I've read Plato: Complete Works (John Cooper) and a reasonable bit of Jowett's translations, and in my (layman's) opinion, if newer translations aren't available, Jowett's will do just fine.
I'm not saying they're awful, just that you're better off getting a reputable 20th century translation. Even a lot of the translations in the Complete Works you mention are getting on in years but it is the best complete edition...
You don’t need a translation for hundred-year-old poetry. You might need a dictionary, mainly for archaisms (and I mean words that were already archaisms at the time). That said, I don’t like this translation.
I can't speak to the quality of this version or what is considered 'out-of-date', but I don't think a translation necessarily needs to be recent to be well done. I recently read the A. T. Murray translation of the Odyssey from 1919 and enjoyed it immensely. I can also heartily recommend the Lattimore translation of the Illiad from 1954, though the more recent Fagles translation is great too.
> OK, that may be a bit harsh. But the danger is that a translation that is out-of-date or badly done will turn you off the book.
There are a lot of "new translations" whose only purpose is to generate money for the "translator". They must be different from the old ones and most are generaly poor.
+1 to this for translations of Russian literature by Constance Garnett. She was prolific and her works are now out of copyright, but more recent translations will be more pleasant to read and generally be truer to the source material. Personally, I’m a fan of Pevear & Volokhonsky, but a cursory search will reveal a massive controversy over whether they’re great or awful. I suspect this is true of most translators of for languages as well.
When reading works in translation, the translator is just as important as the author of the source material. Do your research!
>The [International Booker Prize] celebrates the vital work of translators, with the £50,000 prize money divided equally between the author and the translator.
Get bent. This was the first translation I read of the Odyssey, it took some work to read, and I loved it. This is how translations ought to be, in my view - as close to a transliteration as possible without being grammatically incomprehensible. If I need to consult a dictionary or reference material to supplement my understanding, that's just fine.
The modern style of translations-as-rewrites that aim to meet readers in their comfort zones are terrible, the literary equivalent of shitty dub tracks on foreign video media.
Anybody who disparages you for liking Butler is being a bit of a dingbat. But,
"This is how translations ought to be, in my view - as close to a transliteration as possible without being grammatically incomprehensible."
Butler is emphatically not this, though - It's a prose adaptation of a poem, and thus in many ways quite far from a "transliteration" compared to e.g. Fagles, Lattimore, Fitzgerald, etc.
I'd argue that Butler's translations are absolutely "translation(s) aiming to meet readers in their comfort zones," by his own admission.
From the preface to Butler's Iliad:
> It follows that a translation should depart hardly at all from the modes of speech current in the translator's own times, inasmuch as nothing is readable, for long, which affects any other diction than that of the age in which it is written.
And later
> I very readily admit that Dr. Leaf has in the main kept more closely to the words of Homer, but I believe him to have lost more of the spirit of the original through his abandonment (no doubt deliberate) of all attempt at stately, and at the same time easy, musical, flow of language, than he has gained in adherence to the letter — to which, after all, neither he nor any man can adhere.
For anyone who wants a "retelling" of the Iliad rather than a translation, I can't recommend highly enough War Music by the British poet Christopher Logue. It made me fall back in love with the classics. (I also read the Fagles and Wilson translations, both of which I enjoyed for different reasons). You can get a sense of it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Music_(poem)
Rat,
pearl,
onion,
honey:
these colours came before the sun
lifted above the ocean
bringing light
alike to mortals and immortals.
And through this falling brightness
through the by now
mosque,
eucalyptus,
utter blue,
came Thetis,
gliding across the azimuth,
with armour the colour of moonlight laid on Her forearms,
palms upturned towards the sun,
hovering above the fleet,
Her skyish face towards her son,
Achilles...
To throw a little shade on you translation nerds, I thought to mention a few things.
Greeks were all illiterate at the time of the Homeric composition. They didn’t start reading/writing again for about fifty years. Arguably, these stories made the Greeks reintroduce writing.
There is the argument on who’s that Homer anyway, and my conclusion (after studying the Epic cycle for some years) is that the Iliad was the composition of ~800 years of oral tradition. The Odyssey was produced in a short time afterwards. Homer had a school of acolytes who composed The Odyssey together. No one who has read The Odyssey more than three times will say with confidence that the whole composition is produced by one person. The narratives among the books are too different. It was a tomb for relating to the way Grecians once were … before the Dorian invasion which hobbled them all back into illiteracy, and how they should live once more. Soon after these works came the “golden area” of philosophers.
Oh yeah, the actual Trojan war occurred ~800 years before Homer composed the Iliad! Soon after this epic blood letting the Dorians (some illiterate inland tribal peoples) walked right over them, causing the gap between ancient and classical Greece. Perilous time for Humanity.
The Epic cycle was actually a dozen or so comparable stories, only Homer’s survived in full. Interesting side stories include that of Iphigenia, which explains Clytemnestra’s betrayal more than the woman hating rhetoric spewed by Agamemnon (in hades) or other accounts.
The Homeric Question [1] generally centers on whether the Iliad and the Odyssey were written by primarily one person (Unitarian) or by different people (Analytic). Butler has another theory, that the Odyssey was written by one person, a woman in Sicily, which he published in the The Authoress of the Odyssey [2]. Basically, Butler was describing the Odyssey as fan fiction, as a Mary Sue [3].
I find the theory that the Odyssey has not been composed by Homer (by "Homer" meaning the author of the Iliad), but by some woman belonging to his family, perhaps a daughter, granddaughter or niece, much more plausible than the alternatives.
The Iliad and the Odyssey use very similar artificial poetic languages and vocabularies (though some words appear for the first time in the Odyssey and most of them are words that are expected to be more recent words).
Even so there is a very noticeable difference in style between the two works, and the easiest way to describe this difference is to say that the Iliad seems masculine, while the Odyssey seems feminine, i.e. the former is like an action movie, which spends a lot of time with the description of matters interesting for males, e.g. about efficient ways of killing or maiming your opponents or of gaining glory on the battlefield, while the latter is like a chick flick, where the main interests are about love and romance, stories about powerful independent women, descriptions of various female skills, clothes, food and gardens, and it includes even feminist complaints about the lack of equality between sexes.
It is very unlikely that we will ever know anything certain about the identity of the authors of the Homeric poems, but reading carefully the two texts, especially in original, gives the appearance of two closely related authors, but nevertheless of different sex.
Even if the Odyssey is arguably a relatively paler reflection of the Iliad in terms of mythological weight across the western corpus (ie: centrally important myths reflected within other myths), while still being a monster in its own right, it would be a monumental lifetime feat for one woman to acquire the deepest mythological and even religious (apocalyptic) knowledge it would have taken to write the Odyssey. It's still an incalculably skilled work.
In all, I'd lean against the one woman theory. But it wouldn't surprise me either. Authors and artists often had advisors on classical subject matter that would have been mostly mastered by those with expensive educations.
Homeric Question and historicity:
No one who is a serious student of mythology thinks that there is a real controversy over whether or not works such as the Iliad fall into dichotomous categories of true or false. What these myths are meant to describe are archetypal repeating events. That is, they are both true and myth. As is the case for most long persevering myths. No one should allow a little bit of allegory to fool them.
Ancient tradition unanimously ascribed the authorship of the Iliad and Odyssey to Homer. We know nothing about Homer, except that he likely lived around the area of Smyrna and that he may have been blind.
Butler's theory is nice and all, but I would give significantly more weight to what ancient writers had to say about Homer.
There were all kinds of competing legends about Homer back in ancient times. Many cities claimed that he had once lived there. And there was even an ancient legend that both the Iliad and Odyssey were written by a woman named Phantasia, said to have been the daughter of Nicarchus who lived in Memphis. She supposedly left the texts of the two epic poems in the library of Memphis where Homer found them and then took credit for them as his own. This legend was brought to Samuel Butler's attention following the publication of his theory, but he insisted he hadn't been aware of it.
I can't wrap my head around the Romanized gods, having grown up on the Greek names. Speaking of, this youth edition is still my favorite version; the illustration is especially great. Unfortunately it seems it was never widely translated. https://www.amazon.it/Odissea-avventure-Ulisse-Miti-oro-eboo...
I'd like to plug two podcasts by professional storyteller and contemporary bard Jeff Wright, who does a modern retelling of the two stories. [1][2]
As another commenter mentioned, both the Iliad and the Odyssey were passed down via oral tradition. If you want to be "pure", the best way of consuming the stories are to hear them.
Additionally, the stories were always meant to be told, retold, remixed, etc. It is very much in the spirit of the original stories for new bards to add their own spin to it. Don't be turned off by the fact that Jeff doesn't read verbatim a translation of the original texts. He adds a lot of extra context you wouldn't otherwise get from just reading the books (context that every other listener in Ancient Greece would have already had that we don't).
People are saying don't read this translation or read that one or whatever. My opinion here is, there isn't really a "good" translation of the Odyssey, but there also isn't any bad ones either. It's a cool story, the themes and characterization is maintained in basically any translation you would read. The beauty of the meter, the style, the subtleties, is lost, and can't be recovered. It's just the same way that it is lost in any translation of Kalidasa, or any great classical author: its the same reason Shakespeare is great, because of those small details (speaking of Shakespeare, he parallels, or even eclipses any of the classical authors, but Sophocles and Homer are still great in their own way.)
Remember that each translation has its own style and twist. Some authors will be shits (for the illiad akeles having a wank over Penthesilea in one re-telling vs weeping over her death, vs Penthesilea wracked with grief committing suicide)
Having first read Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose, I suspect that this and similar works have been twisted into unrecognizable states vs. their bases in the glories and depravities of antiquity, whilst under the custody of 2000 years of Christianity (regardless of which English translation we choose).
The gods and titans are made so puny and pathetic that Odysseus the mere mortal can outwit them and best them by strength. Odysseus blinded the son of Poseidon and lived at sea for years without being brutally struck down, Poseidon being so pathetic himself as to be held in check by Zeus.
That said, agreed that picking a readable translation is key.
I'm close to the end of Peter Green's translation of the Iliad, and though hard to plough through at times, the style was not as drab and "old" as I would have expected; the difficulty was mostly due to scenes often being kind of long, essentially bullet point lists and/or with strange content -- i.e. content more than form.
I'd be interested to know what people have to say about that translation, and the one of the Odyssey by Green too.
Do you need a working knowledge of Greek/Roman history to enjoy this? A few sentences in and I'm overwhelmed with names of gods I barely know anything about.
At first glance I thought this was the same translation I read from Standard Ebooks, but in fact I believe that was by William Cullen Bryant.[0] Both translations use the Roman names of the deities rather than the Greek. I found this odd and more than a bit confusing, but from reading the preface to the Bryant translation it seems that this approach was chosen because the Roman names were, at the time, much more recognisable to the English-speaking public. This seems strange to me now--while the names of the Roman deities are familiar to us because of the planets, I think most people would be more familiar with Zeus and Poseidon as deities than Jupiter and Neptune.
Bryant's defence of the approach is interesting:
> In the Preface to my version of the Iliad, I gave very briefly my reason for preserving the names derived from the Latin, by which the deities of the Grecian mythology have hitherto been known to English readers —that is to say, Jupiter, Juno, Neptune, Pluto, Mars, Venus, and the rest, instead of Zeus, Herè, and the other names which are properly Greek. As the propriety of doing this is questioned by some persons of exact scholarship, I will state the argument a little more at large. The names I have employed have been given to the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece from the very beginnings of our language. Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and the rest, down to Proctor and Keats —a list whose chronology extends through six hundred years —have followed this usage, and we may even trace it back for centuries before either of them wrote. Our prose writers have done the same thing; the names of Latin derivation have been adopted by the earliest and latest translators of the New Testament. To each of the deities known by these names there is annexed in the mind of the English reader —and it is for the English reader that I have made this translation —a peculiar set of attributes. Speak of Juno and Diana, and the mere English reader understands you at once; but when he reads the names of Herè and Artemis, he looks into his classical dictionary. The names of Latin origin are naturalized; the others are aliens and strangers. The conjunction and itself, which has been handed down to us unchanged from our Saxon ancestors, holds not its place in our language by a firmer and more incontestable title than the names which we have hitherto given to the deities of ancient Greece. We derive this usage from the Latin authors —from Virgil, and Horace, and Ovid, and the prose writers of ancient Rome. Art as well as poetry knows these deities by the same names. We talk of the Venus de Medicis, the Venus of Milo, the Jupiter of Phidias, and never think of calling a statue of Mars a statue of Ares.
> For my part, I am satisfied with the English language as it has been handed down to us. If the lines of my translation had bristled with the names of Zeus and Herè, and Poseidon and Ares, and Artemis and Demeter, I should feel that I had departed from the immemorial usage of the English tongue, that I had introduced obscurity where the meaning should have been plain, and that I had given just cause of complaint to the readers for whom I wrote.
I find rather sad that the Romans themselves have reused the names of their traditional gods as names for the Greek gods.
Because this unification of the Roman and Greek gods has happened a little earlier than the time from which we begin to have preserved Latin texts and because the Greek gods came with a huge number of stories attached to them, unlike the Roman gods, which previously were mentioned mostly in rituals and prayers, we have extremely little information about the traditional Roman gods.
With the exception of Jupiter/Zeus, most of the Roman gods had been very different from the Greek gods who replaced them and it would have been interesting to know more about their original roles.
For instance the Roman Mars was extremely unlikely the Greek Ares. Mars was a beloved god, the most important protector of the Romans, who defended them against various kinds of bad things, like a COVID pandemy or climate change. He was not a god of war, even if his protector role meant that he could also help the Romans in wars. On the other hand, the Greek Ares was a god of destruction who was feared and hated. The Greeks sacrificed to him mostly to avoid his anger, but when they wanted help in war they usually turned to other gods, e.g. to Athena, which is why in the Iliad Athena gives some good beatings to Ares.
As am I! I'm hoping for an audiobook (that's how I took in her translation of the Odyssey) but I'm not seeing any indication of that yet, so I may just have to read the thing with my eyes.
I love Pope but wouldn't read him for an "accurate" translation (he didn't know Greek!) and I like Butler's prose but it's a total transliteration, not poetry. My go-to recommendation is Lattimore (not Fagles, which I found dull), but now we have Emily Wilson in the mix too (with a great preface to boot).
Taste them all and go with whichever is best for you - you can always read another later, but your first time for a classic should be enjoyable and natural. Only you can say which one you enjoy most.