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What is the best translation of The Iliad, in your opinion?
Showing all 19 replies.
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>>25326087
Fagles is the best. Thought-for-thought gives allowance to phrases in English which reflect the richness of the Greek. And not in a bizarre Emily Wilson way.
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>>25326093
I found his Iliad dull. For Homer I prefer Lattimore, but Fagles' translations of Sophocles are outstanding.

>OEDIPUS:
>>Oh Theseus,
>>dear friend, only the gods can never age,
>>the gods can never die. All else in the world
>>almighty Time obliterates, crushes all
>>to nothing. The earth’s strength wastes away.
>>the strength of a man’s body wastes and dies—
>>faith dies, and bad faith comes to life,
>>and the same wind of friendship cannot blow forever,
>>holding steady and strong between two friends,
>>much less between two cities.
>>For some of us soon, for others later,
>>joy turns to hate and back again to love.
>>And even if all is summer sunshine now
>>between yourself and Thebes,
>>infinite Time, sweeping through its rounds
>>gives birth to infinite nights and days ...
>>and a day will come when the treaties of an hour,
>>the pacts firmed with a handclasp will snap—
>>at the slightest word a spear will hurl them to the winds—
>>some far-off day when my dead body, slumbering, buried
>>cold in death, will drain their hot blood down,
>>if Zeus is still Zeus and Apollo the son of god
>>speaks clear and true.
>>Enough. It’s no pleasure
>>to break the silence of these mysteries.
>>Let me end where I began.
>>Just defend your word to the last, and you
>>will never say you welcomed Oedipus for nothing,
>>a useless citizen in this land of yours,
>>unless the gods defeat my dearest hopes.
>>
I don't get Fagles or even Lattimore. You can easily search up how inaccurate they are and they're not poetic recreations either. For accuracy: Verity or Green. For poetry, Pope or Chapman.
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>>25326087
Imagine thinking reading the fucking Illiad is cool. It's shit for high school history class. Grow up, you're not some tasteful intellectual.
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>>25326087
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>>25326169
One rep max bench?
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>>25326169
How would I know that if I haven't read it?
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>>25326170
>Chapman believed he was divinely inspired by Homer and aimed to capture the spirit of the original
based retard
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>>25326169
Post tits.
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>>25326174
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>>25326173
Fuck off, Emily.
He succeeded where all others failed.
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>>25326174
anon delivers. Juicy, don't you think?
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>>25326087
The recent feminist translation finally gets it right.
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>>25326087

The one which deviates from the text by having Thersites successfully convince the men to get back on their ships and just fuck off back to Greece because after all we've been out here for nine-ish years and really, who cares about someone else's bitch, thereby sparing us one of the most tedious and thoroughly overrated narratives ever told. This obviously severe truncation also serves a further useful purpose to the thoughtful reader: it was clear from the first several lines that a story, some sort of dramatic conflict, had been about to unfold, but reason defeated and pre-empted the spinning of the fiction that we had initially expected, thus denouncing the pointlessness of fictional narrative in general. This is the value of the "anti-story".
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>>25326087
>>25326093
I used to like Fagles but then I read the Aeneid in Latin and his translation just takes too many liberties and is way too long-winded. He will interpret and if something can be translated differently he will just include both. I can't speak for his Greek translations but his Aeneid isn't good.
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Chapman
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>>25326202
The Venus of the Intensive Poultry Unit
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>>25326087
I like Fitzgerald
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Chapman if you are good enough. Keats even wrote a poem about it.

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