I want to start with the Greeks. I don't know how to read

Is Fagles really that bad?

>>9951946
> I have read parts of the Fagles translation and hated it
I think you just hate the Iliad

why are bunnies so cute?

>>9951946
Quicky, easy on the chocolate...

He is the brownest friend :)

>>9953115
Nah. I just found the way he wrote extremely stale and boring, and it didn't hold my attention. When I read another more poetic writer's translation I feel more engaged.

>>9951946
Lattimore's closer to the sound of the Greek original, while keeping the content of the poem.
Pope is beautiful poetry, but the translation strays so far from the original that it's not generally considered reading Homer so much as reading Pope.

If you just want the bare bones of the story, Butler's prose version cuts up the ordering and cuts out the lists etc to make it very straight forward. If you want to read Pope and this, you'd still be able to talk about it intelligibly but also have the pleasure of reading Pope.

Lattimore really is the best for hewing to the original in sound and content in English. It's probably your best course. Doing the Butler/Pope thing would make you weird.

If you want to actually learn Greek, Pharr's Homeric Greek was the standard starting point for that dialect. If you want to move on to Attic then, there's a lot of Xenophon's Anabasis readers in public domain too.

>>9953779
Thanks. That's the kind of response I was looking for. I was already leaning towards Lattimore, and I think I'll stick with that for now.

I wish the sticky would be updated with a FAQ where questions like these get answered with comparisons of different translations. Same with the regular "Which version of the Bible should I read?" threads and other major works.

>>9954297
Honestly, I agree with you. I don't think the sticky is all that great. It could be extensively improved.