Thanks for this — eye-opening. Now I better understand my frustration with the eddies, ripples and maelstroms on my library shelf, and how it makes me “delight my mind with lamentation.” Your insights into the daunting task of translation brought to mind Mark Twain: “A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.”
Thank you, and what a wonderful interweaving of Homeric sentiment! How very well it captures the experience of reading a beloved text in some translations, ha. The "daunting task of translation" was very much what I hoped to illuminate. The words of John Ciardi in the introduction to his Dante translation always come to mind, that translators can only hope for "the best possible failure."
Wasn't sure where you were going at first but 100% agree, for the most part, now I haven't read the first installment yet but I really do agree with you that I mean obviously we have to be well educated as to the period and the language and the author but you're right like our own influences our own feelings our own narrative invariably ends up in the translation but whether we couch that as part of the translation or admit that we purposely pushed it in a direction that we wanted it to go... that's the important part and it's honesty and and authenticity. If you do make a change you just have to be honest about it and I argue it should have at least a meaningful difference otherwise it's obfuscation? We all know that translation is as much interpretation.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts! Yes, even when we attempt the most literal possible translation, it's still not literally translated, in the sense that we can't have word-to-word correspondence, even at the denotative level of language. Even less can we control the connotative, much as we might try. But we can make good faith attempts to engage, research, represent :)
Emily Wilson now has 3 Contact Forms on her Website, for Speaking/Interview Requests, Reader Queries and ‘Misogynistic Trolling’. The latter form begins ‘I am outraged because….’ and includes a warning that Emily Wilson may reproduce the comment in full, with the sender's name and email address in talks and articles, and will refer threats to law enforcement authorities.
I assume this is a response to the online abuse Professor Wilson has long received from some people (‘Make Homer Great Again!’, ‘Dactylic Hexameter and the Second Amendment!’) but especially since Christopher Nolan's controversial ‘Woke’ casting decisions in his forthcoming Odyssey film.
Emily Wilson has no official connection to the film, but some see her as part of the same liberal feminist conspiracy, and Nolan worked from her translation.
Wilson and Nolan are both ambitious individual artists and performers, so perhaps theirs is a natural alliance. Personally, I would have loved to see an Odyssey film that leaned into the fragmentary nature of our Homer, the threads that stretch back farther than we can trace them, the reconstitution of epic in performance across the archaic/classical Greek world. There was an opportunity to do something unique and thought provoking. Alas.
Perhaps, but could you persuade Hollywood Moguls to invest the $Megamillions needed to make a film with all the costumes, special effects etc. necessary to create such a thing?
Would it cost more than the 250 million spent on the current project? I've never tried to fund a film so can only play "armchair quarterback" in this game :)
Thanks for this — eye-opening. Now I better understand my frustration with the eddies, ripples and maelstroms on my library shelf, and how it makes me “delight my mind with lamentation.” Your insights into the daunting task of translation brought to mind Mark Twain: “A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.”
Thank you, and what a wonderful interweaving of Homeric sentiment! How very well it captures the experience of reading a beloved text in some translations, ha. The "daunting task of translation" was very much what I hoped to illuminate. The words of John Ciardi in the introduction to his Dante translation always come to mind, that translators can only hope for "the best possible failure."
Wasn't sure where you were going at first but 100% agree, for the most part, now I haven't read the first installment yet but I really do agree with you that I mean obviously we have to be well educated as to the period and the language and the author but you're right like our own influences our own feelings our own narrative invariably ends up in the translation but whether we couch that as part of the translation or admit that we purposely pushed it in a direction that we wanted it to go... that's the important part and it's honesty and and authenticity. If you do make a change you just have to be honest about it and I argue it should have at least a meaningful difference otherwise it's obfuscation? We all know that translation is as much interpretation.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts! Yes, even when we attempt the most literal possible translation, it's still not literally translated, in the sense that we can't have word-to-word correspondence, even at the denotative level of language. Even less can we control the connotative, much as we might try. But we can make good faith attempts to engage, research, represent :)
Emily Wilson now has 3 Contact Forms on her Website, for Speaking/Interview Requests, Reader Queries and ‘Misogynistic Trolling’. The latter form begins ‘I am outraged because….’ and includes a warning that Emily Wilson may reproduce the comment in full, with the sender's name and email address in talks and articles, and will refer threats to law enforcement authorities.
I assume this is a response to the online abuse Professor Wilson has long received from some people (‘Make Homer Great Again!’, ‘Dactylic Hexameter and the Second Amendment!’) but especially since Christopher Nolan's controversial ‘Woke’ casting decisions in his forthcoming Odyssey film.
Emily Wilson has no official connection to the film, but some see her as part of the same liberal feminist conspiracy, and Nolan worked from her translation.
Wilson and Nolan are both ambitious individual artists and performers, so perhaps theirs is a natural alliance. Personally, I would have loved to see an Odyssey film that leaned into the fragmentary nature of our Homer, the threads that stretch back farther than we can trace them, the reconstitution of epic in performance across the archaic/classical Greek world. There was an opportunity to do something unique and thought provoking. Alas.
Perhaps, but could you persuade Hollywood Moguls to invest the $Megamillions needed to make a film with all the costumes, special effects etc. necessary to create such a thing?
Would it cost more than the 250 million spent on the current project? I've never tried to fund a film so can only play "armchair quarterback" in this game :)