If we needed it, more evidence that the role of translator is so underappreciated! When I'm reading a novel in translation, I tend to give all credit to the novelist and rarely look up the name of the translator, as though they were just laboriously and uncreatively substituting words. Your detailed insight into the process is enough to snap anyone out of that lazy thinking. I never imagined, for example, that the translator of the first line of the Odyssey would have to worry about allusions to Shaft 😂
I think people struggle with the realization that translation isn’t a simple 1:1 decoding exercise, especially if it’s their first encounter with a translated work. Or they maybe think that it COULD be a 1:1 decoding exercise if only the translated were rigorously honest enough.
This has been a bit of a struggle with my 10 year old — we not infrequently encounter different translations of things (the Iliad, the Bible, etc) and he really wants one translation to be “correct” compared to the others, which are perhaps creative retellings but not “the original.” (I think the people who simply insist that the KJV or Douay-Rheims translations of the Bible are the “correct” ones are sort of thinking like this.)
It took several days of intermittently returning to the conversation, but I eventually convinced him by walking him through a few sentences in a French novel. By the time we got to me pulling Houllebecq off the shelf (wouldn’t be my choice for a child it was just on hand lol) I was more than a little exasperated that he *just wouldn’t believe me* — but tbh upon further reflection I remembered thinking that way myself when I was about his age. I wonder if I too would still sort of unconsciously assume that language worked like that if I’d never really tried to learn another language. And I wonder if that’s where some of the more obtuse criticism comes from.
Well put. Many people far older than 10 still have that yearning for THE translation, and that notion of the 1:1 decoding. How very brave, to read Houllebecq with a child – it could have gone very badly indeed.
What, do you mean that King James's Authorised Version of the Bible is not, as I had always thought, the Real and Proper Bible, as translated by God from the original Latin?
It was very eye-opening to me, years ago, to sit in synagogue and hear my rabbi translate seconds of the Torah on the fly, straight from the Hebrew. When you lose the flowery, Renaissance era English, you hear the more ancient wording and word play, where meaning can be more allusive and slippery, and like poetry, can be suspended between possible interpretations.
I don't know, TBH. But Chistian translators have certainly interpreted certain words differently than Jewish ones have. I know (or, at least, recall from what I was told) that the lack of vowels and punctuation in Torah Hebrew, and the range of different words that can be built from a basic three-consonant structure, allow for a lot of interpretation, where context and "this is how we've always read it" play a large part in determining what the word actually is.
i loved the word “complicated” because it caught me so off guard which honestly is what i felt odysseus did for a large part of the odyssey. thanks for sharing the logic!
I hit that word and sat on it for the rest of my reading of your translation. Hugh Kenner comments that “Odysseus has a near-monopoly on the Homeric epithets to poly-.” and yet for us to easily walk the invisible 3d maze that is this work is itself Odyssean. In a life story of a man who survived the many obstacles set up by the gods, limitations erect themselves whack-a-mole word after translated word. Yep, The job of a translator is “complicated”. From where I sat, you breathed life into a work situated in a world that is both humanly translucent and culturally opaque. Thank you.
Absolutely fascinating! What a joy to be enlightened on the sheer complexity (can’t think of a better word right now) of translation.
I’m currently reading Lattimore’s translation of The Iliad and you’ve really encouraged me to take more care appreciating the nuances behind the descriptions of characters.
After reading your first three posts, I ordered your Odyssey translation, the Norton Critical Edition. It came Saturday and I was so glad to see that you are the volume's editor too. I have something to look forward to.
Thank you so much for sharing your translation process! I think if more people studied Ancient Greek and/or meter “complicated” wouldn’t be such a controversy. Stephen Fry’s book “The Ode Less Travelled” has a nice tutorial on writing in iambic pentameter and it’s not easy!
I tried different translations for decades to get through it, but never could.
Yours I went through in less than a week!
You had me at the first line. "Complicated" resonates with people in this day just as much as "polytropos" would have back then. And it is very intriguing, making you want to read on.
As someone who both studied ancient Greek and went to see Avril Lavigne in concert a mere week ago (her first record is over 20 years old, HOW), this post *delighted* me!
Fascinating how _tropos_ came down to the Slavic languages as тропá (path), as well as to the English as "trope"; in current parlance _polytropos_ could be rendered as "multivectoral" (admittedly not poetic at all)
I'm still inclined to think that the text was heavily shaped by the demands of those repetitive puzzle pieces to fit dactyllic hexameter, and it is possible that Greek, in its flexbility, allowed for the construction of words from combining simple roots on the fly. It's possible that Homer meant it in multiple ways and the quality of expression was sacrificed for metric consistency, and we can't expect to understand what common Attic speech was like based on metered poetry, nor can we judge conversational language by such poetry and its constraints and inventions to fit the constraints.
I think the relationship between Odysseus and Athena illuminated an internal conflict in the personality of Odysseus that had to be resolved in his hero's journey. If Achilles' life is the thesis of Western virtue - better to live a short courageous life than a long life as a coward - Odysseus by contrast encounters a heroic resolution through a long journey where he learns that he is at the mercy of divine providence and cannot outsmart it, for all his tricks. Otherwise his story would be a refutation of Achilles' heroism. So "complicated" with him as the object of the description rather than the agent is not uncalled for, especially at the beginning before the lesson has been learned.
Again, the source material is not necessarily unreproachable prose. Imagine how the King James translation must have elevated the prose of some of the more practical epistles of the New Testament or the law code of Leviticus and Numbers. It was out of reverence for the text, but originally those texts would have been of a lesser literary quality because of their genre. KJV is known to be linguistically beautiful but as a translation, inaccurate.
It's interesting to get the insight of a translator on the process of choosing words, so thanks for sharing that.
If we needed it, more evidence that the role of translator is so underappreciated! When I'm reading a novel in translation, I tend to give all credit to the novelist and rarely look up the name of the translator, as though they were just laboriously and uncreatively substituting words. Your detailed insight into the process is enough to snap anyone out of that lazy thinking. I never imagined, for example, that the translator of the first line of the Odyssey would have to worry about allusions to Shaft 😂
I think people struggle with the realization that translation isn’t a simple 1:1 decoding exercise, especially if it’s their first encounter with a translated work. Or they maybe think that it COULD be a 1:1 decoding exercise if only the translated were rigorously honest enough.
This has been a bit of a struggle with my 10 year old — we not infrequently encounter different translations of things (the Iliad, the Bible, etc) and he really wants one translation to be “correct” compared to the others, which are perhaps creative retellings but not “the original.” (I think the people who simply insist that the KJV or Douay-Rheims translations of the Bible are the “correct” ones are sort of thinking like this.)
It took several days of intermittently returning to the conversation, but I eventually convinced him by walking him through a few sentences in a French novel. By the time we got to me pulling Houllebecq off the shelf (wouldn’t be my choice for a child it was just on hand lol) I was more than a little exasperated that he *just wouldn’t believe me* — but tbh upon further reflection I remembered thinking that way myself when I was about his age. I wonder if I too would still sort of unconsciously assume that language worked like that if I’d never really tried to learn another language. And I wonder if that’s where some of the more obtuse criticism comes from.
Well put. Many people far older than 10 still have that yearning for THE translation, and that notion of the 1:1 decoding. How very brave, to read Houllebecq with a child – it could have gone very badly indeed.
lol I screened the sentences before parsing them for him 🤣 perfectly innocent exercise in “presque” and “jusqu’à”
What, do you mean that King James's Authorised Version of the Bible is not, as I had always thought, the Real and Proper Bible, as translated by God from the original Latin?
It was very eye-opening to me, years ago, to sit in synagogue and hear my rabbi translate seconds of the Torah on the fly, straight from the Hebrew. When you lose the flowery, Renaissance era English, you hear the more ancient wording and word play, where meaning can be more allusive and slippery, and like poetry, can be suspended between possible interpretations.
If the meaning of the original Hebrew is harder to pin down, have wars been fought or sects divided over the ambiguities?
I don't know, TBH. But Chistian translators have certainly interpreted certain words differently than Jewish ones have. I know (or, at least, recall from what I was told) that the lack of vowels and punctuation in Torah Hebrew, and the range of different words that can be built from a basic three-consonant structure, allow for a lot of interpretation, where context and "this is how we've always read it" play a large part in determining what the word actually is.
i loved the word “complicated” because it caught me so off guard which honestly is what i felt odysseus did for a large part of the odyssey. thanks for sharing the logic!
I loved reading this and your explanation for choosing the word "complicated"!
I hit that word and sat on it for the rest of my reading of your translation. Hugh Kenner comments that “Odysseus has a near-monopoly on the Homeric epithets to poly-.” and yet for us to easily walk the invisible 3d maze that is this work is itself Odyssean. In a life story of a man who survived the many obstacles set up by the gods, limitations erect themselves whack-a-mole word after translated word. Yep, The job of a translator is “complicated”. From where I sat, you breathed life into a work situated in a world that is both humanly translucent and culturally opaque. Thank you.
Thank you for this essay; it's a wonderful look both into the process and the range of alternatives.
I admit, since you mention song lyrics, the word "complicated" echoes reminds me of the line from the Barenaked Ladies song, "The Flag"
"They're complicated people / Leading complicated lives / And he complicates their problems / Telling complicated lies"
It has that echo for me too. The Flag is one of my favorite Barenaked Ladies Songs. And I think it enriches my experience of The Odyssey.
But when are you going to translate the Shaft theme into Homeric Greek?
Thank you so much for this - and I absolutely adore your reading of Odysseus against Avril Lavigne's lyrics!
Absolutely fascinating! What a joy to be enlightened on the sheer complexity (can’t think of a better word right now) of translation.
I’m currently reading Lattimore’s translation of The Iliad and you’ve really encouraged me to take more care appreciating the nuances behind the descriptions of characters.
I’ll be straight onto your Odyssey afterwards.
After reading your first three posts, I ordered your Odyssey translation, the Norton Critical Edition. It came Saturday and I was so glad to see that you are the volume's editor too. I have something to look forward to.
Thank you so much for sharing your translation process! I think if more people studied Ancient Greek and/or meter “complicated” wouldn’t be such a controversy. Stephen Fry’s book “The Ode Less Travelled” has a nice tutorial on writing in iambic pentameter and it’s not easy!
I tried different translations for decades to get through it, but never could.
Yours I went through in less than a week!
You had me at the first line. "Complicated" resonates with people in this day just as much as "polytropos" would have back then. And it is very intriguing, making you want to read on.
As someone who both studied ancient Greek and went to see Avril Lavigne in concert a mere week ago (her first record is over 20 years old, HOW), this post *delighted* me!
Makes my head explode. The only alternative I could come up with is “man with many moves.”
> “man with many moves”
That's actually not bad.
Not metrical, but not bad.
Fascinating how _tropos_ came down to the Slavic languages as тропá (path), as well as to the English as "trope"; in current parlance _polytropos_ could be rendered as "multivectoral" (admittedly not poetic at all)
That would certainly be an unusual word to find in the first line!
pathfinder
I'm still inclined to think that the text was heavily shaped by the demands of those repetitive puzzle pieces to fit dactyllic hexameter, and it is possible that Greek, in its flexbility, allowed for the construction of words from combining simple roots on the fly. It's possible that Homer meant it in multiple ways and the quality of expression was sacrificed for metric consistency, and we can't expect to understand what common Attic speech was like based on metered poetry, nor can we judge conversational language by such poetry and its constraints and inventions to fit the constraints.
I think the relationship between Odysseus and Athena illuminated an internal conflict in the personality of Odysseus that had to be resolved in his hero's journey. If Achilles' life is the thesis of Western virtue - better to live a short courageous life than a long life as a coward - Odysseus by contrast encounters a heroic resolution through a long journey where he learns that he is at the mercy of divine providence and cannot outsmart it, for all his tricks. Otherwise his story would be a refutation of Achilles' heroism. So "complicated" with him as the object of the description rather than the agent is not uncalled for, especially at the beginning before the lesson has been learned.
Again, the source material is not necessarily unreproachable prose. Imagine how the King James translation must have elevated the prose of some of the more practical epistles of the New Testament or the law code of Leviticus and Numbers. It was out of reverence for the text, but originally those texts would have been of a lesser literary quality because of their genre. KJV is known to be linguistically beautiful but as a translation, inaccurate.
It's interesting to get the insight of a translator on the process of choosing words, so thanks for sharing that.