High school was a long time ago and I really want to go back and read the Illiad and The Odyssey with my current brain. What translation is the most highly recommended?
My personal favourite is the translation by E. V. Rieu, which is available from Penguin in an edition with revisions by Peter Jones and D. C. H. Rieu.
There is also an immensely popular translation from the last 10 years (or so) by Robert Fagles, also published by Penguin. This was the required translation for a university course I took about 6 years ago.
Of the two, I preferred the Rieu, but both read very well. I don’t have the Greek to comment on the accuracy…
Cool! Thanks for those suggestions. I’ll check them out (hopefully) at the library and pick the one that talks to me.
Clearly this calls for some kind of D’oh-setta Stone…
It’s funny 'cause it’s true!
I first encountered the Fitzgerald translation of the Odyssey. We used it in high school and in college. I particularly liked the way he transliterated the Greek names instead of using the Latin versions – Kirke (with circumflexes over the vowels) instead of Circe, Aias instead of Ajax. I also liked his blank verse, which was less forced than some other verse translations, and gave a better sense of phythm than the prose translations (like Rieu’s). I wanted to read his translation of the Iliad, too, but it hadn’t come out yet. Instead, I read Richmond Lsattimore’s, which I hated. As soon as Fitzgerald’s Iliad came out, I snatched it up.
When I got my audiobooks versions, I found that no one was doing Fitzgerald, so I got the Fagles translation noted above. (The Odyssety is unabridged, but for some reason they only sell an incredibly abridged version of his Iliad. O n the plus side, Derek Jacobi reads it. Ian McKellan reads the Odyssey). I like it very much.
If you’re looking for the weirdest translation, have a look at Christopher Logue’s. The man just died this past year. He spent the past half century translating the Iliad, and still didn’t finish. But his book-by-book translations, published over the years,are off the wall.
Here’s a bit from the obituary noticed I placed here on Dec. 4:
Here’s Achilles’ prayer to Zeus from Book 16 (The Patrocleia):
Here’s an obituary:
CalMeacham - love it. after I do the serious study I think I will check out the Logue for fun. And thanks for the audio book tips. My husband is thinking of doing this with me so we can discuss it over coffee and has to drive several hours to work every week so those might be great for him.
Any opinions on the Great Courses dvd for these books? I own a few of the courses that I really enjoy and thought I might get them after the first reading.
I studied the Rieu at school, and have read it several times since. It’s a beautiful translation.
I like Fagles for it’s plain, direct quality, but Fitzgerald really has some choice turns of phrase in his Iliad (I think “beg me no beggary” is Achilles to Hector, maybe? I still get a bit confused in some of the great battles). Can’t really remember Fitzgerald’s Odyssey too well, but I haven’t read The Odyssey since middle school – Iliad all the way for me. Agree that it’s kind of nicer to have pretty close transliteration from the Greek, but I think Fagles does that too, IIRC, or at least somewhere in the middle. Which is closer to the Greek? That’s really hard to say, especially going from memory of these translations, but that probably isn’t the way a translation should be judged. The Greek is very direct, though, and unsparing is probably a pretty good word to describe the Iliad.
Is Logue that guy with the crazy typefaces and stuff? That was a riot, the one book of his I read. Had no idea he was actually going for all of the Iliad. Thanks above for the links about Logue.
Didn’t Stephen Mitchell, rockstar translator of the Tao, Rilke’s poems, etc, just tackle Homer?
Eta: yep, he did. It’s on amazon and getting rave reviews.