During the fair weather this week I have been reading The Iliad in Emily Wilson's translation on the front porch.
My interest in Wilson's translation was piqued by ill-informed criticism of her work online and further stimulated by reading David Stuttard's Hubris: Pericles, the Parthenon, and the Invention of Athens, part art history and part political and cultural history.
So to Wilson's Iliad: Fifty pages of introduction (much of it familiar), an explanation of her approach as translator, a formidable apparatus of informative endnotes, and 600 pages of iambic pentameter verse. It is a surprisingly fluid read. (Some years ago I started Robert Fitzgerald's translation but ground to a halt.) Though the occasional word choice sounds prosaic, the extended metaphors and repeated titles and phrasing keep the music. The violence and brutality come through with impact. I am half a dozen books in and eager for more.
Each translation of Homer fits its time--think of Alexander Pope rendering The Iliad in rhymed couplets--and Wilson's seems to match ours.
So why, at seventy-five, am I finally picking up Homer?
First, do not be deceived by the way people talk in English department graduate lounges; nobody has read all the great books, and everybody is faking it. We pick up allusions and quotations in other works, acquiring an acquaintance that is no more than a shallow literacy.
But the great books are there, to be picked up and savored whenever it occurs to us to look into them.
And at seventy-five: Franklin Roosevelt paid a courtesy call on Oliver Wendell Holmes and found the ninety-two-year-old reading Plato. "Why are you reading Plato, Mr. Justice?" he asked. "To improve my mind, Mr. President," Holmes answered. I am largely on the shelf, retired, doing a little occasional copy editing for The Baltimore Banner, but no longer teaching, no longer conducting workshops on editing, no longer hiring and supervising other editors--past it, as the British say. Even so, my mind remains, still subject to improvement, and my curiosity is not extinguished.
I am currently reading "A Thousand Ships" by Natalie Haynes, which retells the Trojan War from the women's perspective. It's wonderful.
ReplyDeleteI'm about 30 pages into the hefty, three-volume "Kristin Lavransdatter" by Sigrid Undset. We'll see how far I get.
ReplyDeleteThere's apparently one translation people prefer, by Tiina Nunnally. I gave up on it, but it was a pretty ambitious read for me.
DeleteYes (@Craig), Haynes is excellent. Haven't tried the Wilson Homer yet, but have somehow managed to get the impression that she's equal to all the idiotic blatherings about her work.
ReplyDeleteI was a graduate student in classics for many years and have read both The Iliad and The Odyssey in Greek. Richmond Lattimore’s translations are the most literal. Very readable and great when I got stuck translating a passage from the Greek. Robert Fagles’ translations are excellent and were the rave beginning in the 90s. Fitzgerald came to read at my university in the early 80s. His translations are insufferable. When my son was in high school, that was what they were going to read. I intervened and the school district sprung for Fagles. I could not have my child hate Homer off the bat!
ReplyDeleteI did not love Wilson’s Odyssey, but I respect what she was doing. I might give it another go.
I used to read the opening in different translations to the classes I taught of both The Iliad and the Odyssey. The students were astounded by the variation.
The three books I would take to a desert island: The Iliad, The Odyssey, and Virgil’s Aeneid (in English, my Greek and Latin skills are not what they were). I reread at least one of the epics every year. They never grow old.
Love this blog and post. But FDR died at age 63. Maybe I misunderstood the post, though.
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