What's the best translation of the Iliad/Odyssey for the first read? Is the guide right in choosing Alexander Pope?
Also, does anyone know what translation the Penguin version in pic related is?
Get Fitzgerald or Lattimore if you're a LAD; Chapman if you a CHAP
THIS IS LITERALLY THE THIRD THREAD IN TWO DAYS
>translation
just thought i'd get this one out the way
>Is the guide right in choosing Alexander Pope?
If this hasn't been written a billion times already: no. Pope's verse is spectacular but the text itself strays away from Homer too much. Read Pope, but only after you've read an another, more faithful, translation.
The translation you posted is by Rieu
>>7638465
Fitzgerald is probably the best. I have the Fagles which is decent. There's a new Oxford translation, which I haven't read but it looks good, and the notes are always a bonus.
>not listening to the fagles translation read by ian mckellan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgB9vxYT9kw
mckellan puts so much emotion into everything. it's jaw-droppingly good. really makes me feel like i'm listening to a pre-classical bard. i'd go as far as to say this is the way it was meant to be experienced.
At Uni we read the Lombardo translations. They made for easy reading and were very fluid. Also he keeps the original verse structure , which the penguin classic in your pic did away with.
bump. i'd love to see some books about the Greeks to give further context and background.
Rieu is the definitive prose translation
>>7639169
>Reading a poem
>As prose
Isn't this a bad idea?
>>7639818
There is a really good explaining as to why it's not as bad as you'd think I'm the other iliad thread. I have the exact version in op pic as well as fagels.
>>7638719
Lombardo does look good, shit. I just bought Lattimore. did I flub it, anon?
>>7639860
>There is a really good explaining as to why it's not as bad as you'd think I'm the other iliad thread. I have the exact version in op pic as well as fagels.
This is an English board.
>>7639892
No Lattimore is fat better than Lombardo.
Lombardo makes it sound like it's set in the early 90s.
>>7640001
ah, relief. I was just looking at aesthetics anyway, i compared the fagles, lattimore, and fitzgerald, and just liked the lattimore the most of any of them, but i looked at Lombardo, and it definitely has a current tongue flow. but going back and comparing them, i think i made the right choice.