Dear Elucubrare, I have a question and only you can answer it! I'm going to Sicily for a week soon, so of course I've decided I should read the Odyssey to prep for SEA and SANDCASTLES and RAFT BUILDING. I grew up in Italy where our proprietorial relationship with the classics means every translation is a verse translation, but I am now in London, and flabbergasted at THE SHEER amount of PROSE! I'm a bit at loss at what's the best English translation- everyone seems to go for Fagles but IS IT?
First, I hope Sicily is wonderful! Raft building sounds amazing (and Homer can give you advice on that!).
Second, it’s a hard question. It really depends on what you’re reading for and the feel you want to get from it. The most prominent translations are Fagles, as you know, Lattimore, Fitzgerald, Stanley Lombardo, and now Emily Wilson (a lot of people like her translation, but she makes a lot of choices I don’t really like; that said, a lot of them are probably more things you’d only care about if you’re doing actual academic work on it – I’m thinking of translating the epithets differently, which I don’t approve of). I’ll post the beginnings below, though they’re fairly similar:
This is fine – readable and fairly faithful, though “Launch out on” for a story about seafaring seems a little precious, and ἀφείλετο, which he translates as the vivid “blotted out” is really just “take away.”
The problem with Lattimore is that he tries very hard to be faithful to the Greek, which sometimes causes his English to suffer. “From some point here” in line 9 is weak; “hard though/he strove to” feels slightly awkward to me; “driven/far journeys” strikes me as ungrammatical.
I think I might actually go with Fitzgerald – he has a good sense of a line and is fairly close to the Greek; my only quibble is with “townlands,” because it might be an archaism in English but it doesn’t really feel like one.
I remember liking Lombardo’s Iliad, but this seems over-written, really. I’m specifically looking at “the minds he grasped,” “the suffering deep in his heart at sea” and “that god snuffed out.” That said, his verse has movement and cadence, so it would at least be readable.
I’m biased against hers from the start by “complicated” – πολύτροπον, which it’s supposed to be translating, is hard to find equivalents for, I admit - it’s literally “much-turning,” but that’s awkward; still, it’s an epithet that’s not solely applied to Odysseus, but is pretty much confined to wily people and other tricksters in the wider Greek corpus, and to Odysseus in Homer. “Complicated” is much too common and colloquial a word to be a good translation. That sets the tone: I think her register is off.
She wants to simplify and modernize, which is fine if you call it a “version” rather than a translation, but the problem with modernizing translations of Homer is that, while it’s true that Homer was originally (probably, insert disclaimer here) fireside entertainment, the language was never colloquial or demotic: it’s a separate dialect created for the purpose of telling these stories.
So! that’s a lot of words, apologies, but if you want a recommendation I’d say Fitzgerald; you can judge from these excerpts if you agree.
I close as I began: I hope you have an amazing time in Sicily!