A great read. Gets directly to the heart of the problem of ideation of authorship through deep time of an oral tradition transcribed. I can't see Homer as a singular, but I wonder which scribe cast the language strongly into a form modern ancient Greek scholars most recognise. We must be working back through fifth and sixth generation retakes on the ur-texts. Qualities of poetic form and things like alliteration go to "one hand not many" a bit.
I like how in the Persian/Indian tradition the voice of the author comes out "I, Rumi say this to you." We could do with a bit more of that. People write papers on the presence or absence of "he said"
The quality of the pot drawings (exemplified here) amazed me. Look at that bandaging! Nobody who has ever bound a wound would fail to see that as a faithful representation.
I struggle with why we can so easily cast the Illiad, Gilgamesh into one box, and put the Abrahamic/Judeo-Christian/Islamic into another box of literal received wisdom. Faith demands it, but logic about what we say regarding the passage of a song saga or poems across time distinct from the red letter word of God is entirely missing. Its anathema to cast these as "the same" but as an athiest I cannot say there are insurmountable differences. (The new testament has obvious differences noting it draws on the old, but is within the cast of written history where Troy stands before writing was strong in the western world. Certainly before maps were any good. We don't have a reliable contemporary place marker)
Schliemann wasn't helpful. I have a kids introduction to archaeology by C.W. Ceram (not unfree of a bad past, a pseudonym adopted to get distance from his Nazi PR job) which talks a bit about that, and how the post napoleonic French butchered rolled up papyrus to extract words from shards which modern xray machines would get as whole texts. Schliemann destroyed everything he touched looking for gold, basically.
You might be surprised at just how much the old Greek stories and the Abrahamic ones cross over actually.
For example, the story of a sheepherder who kills an elite pre-Greek warrior with the cast of a stone. In the Bible you have David killing the sea person Goliath (though elsewhere it mentions another killed him, and some scholars think the story was reappropriated to the Davidic dynasty). In the Argonautica you have the story from the perspective of the people traveling the sea. Both stories take place after a prophet named Mopsus/Moses dies in the desert as wandering by foot back from a conflict in North Africa.
The recent finds of very early Iron Age Aegean style pottery made with local clay in Tel Dan is particularly interesting in this context, especially given the lead researcher's belief it strengthens an earlier theory that the Denyen sea peoples in Adana, Anatolia were the Biblical Dan who stayed on their ships in Judges 5, what's considered one of the oldest parts of the Bible. The Denyen/Hiyawa are also the people who had 8th century bilinguals claiming their ruling dynasty owed itself to a House of Mopsus' similar to how the tribe of Dan received Moses's descendent as priest (counter to rules elsewhere) in Judges 18.
Connections between Moses and Greek history didn't escape various Greek historians either. Atrapanus of Alexandria claimed Moses was the Argonautica figure Museus and taught Orpheus the mysteries. Hecataeus of Abdera claimed many different people came out of Egypt including Greek heros like the Phonecian Cadmus or the Lybian/Egyptian Danaus, brother to the Pharoh with 50 sons (Ramses II had either 48 or 50, and in his forensic report was identified as appearing to be a Lybian Berber).
You even have Odysseus telling of attending a one day battle against Egypt immediately after Troy which they lose and leads to a seven year captivity until "a certain Phrygian" shows up and tries to ransom him to the Lybians.
Sounds a lot like the battle of Ramses II's son Merneptah against the Lybian/sea peoples coalition that happened in a single day and seven years after which an usurper takes the throne, nicknamed Mose and allegedly putting into place very Phonecian sociopolitical changes.
There's so much more to the stories than I think most people might suspect. Even just the history of Troy, into the hands of the Mycenaean fleet in the late bronze age as demonstrated by the Hittites asking Aegean cooperation in handing over a fugitive that fled there, but then into Hittite hands until conquered again by a battle leaving an archeological mark in the early Iron Age.
The medieval Book of Jashar claimed Moses joined a 9 year siege to retake a city which had been stolen away from a king who eventually appoints him their leader.
A somewhat similar story to that of Eumolpus, put in the water as a babe, raised by another family until leaving North Africa to become appointed king of the Thracians (in the Troad during the time of the Trojan War per Strabo). Or Danaus, brother of Pharoh and appointed king of the Ahyawa upon arrival.
I suspect 'Homer' is a version of the history combining a Mycenaean catalogue of ships taking Anatolia in the LBA with a later siege of Hittite controlled Wilusa in the early Iron Age.
Herodotus's comments on Helen having been in Egypt when the Memphis temple of Astarte is built (18th dynasty) is particularly interesting with this consideration, as around the time of that conquest is when "beautiful woman who arrived" is in Egypt, married a Pharoh of the 18th dynasty, was the only woman ever depicted in the smiting pose, has 6 female children in a row (1% chance randomly), and during whose time Egypt is transformed into a solar cult where she communed with the god directly without her husband (so transgressive records of it were later defaced). And a woman whose only recorded relatives were a wetnurse and a sister, much like Helen with Theseus's mother and sister.
It's more fundamental than that. The jewish god is just zeus stolen right out of greek mythology literally atop a mountain slinging lightning.
Exodus 20:18 - "When the people heard the thunder and the loud blast of the ram’s horn, and when they saw the flashes of lightning and the smoke billowing from the mountain, they stood at a distance, trembling with fear."
The twelve olympians from greek myth became the twelve tribes of israel with became the twelve disciples of christ.
IIRC yahwism came from the canaanite polytheism and while that god is very similar to zeus it is actually a different and unrelated tradition.
Similarly certain numbers and especially the flood theme recur across mythologies that are proven to be unconnected.
You can't take even very clear similarities and use them alone to draw connections between traditions like that. In fact the allure and inevitable failure of this approach was at one point enough of a cliche that the reader's awareness of it is assumed for a major plot point in the novel middlemarch, written 150 years ago.
None of it is "stolen", any more than the mythology of Zeus is stolen from Vedic tales. None of it is re-imagined, but re-articulated. If you are looking for evidence of a cultural crime, you haven't begun to get it with all due respect. This is about truth telling, not ownership of the truth. As always, the truth is always re-articulated across cultures. Generally, embedded in a manner that makes it maximally difficult for liars to corrupt it. Pointing at its articulation in various cultures as theft is, in fact, evidence that its defense system works.
That review was a lot of words saying nothing much.
On the topic of Iliad, I always found it puzzling that the (supposed) war started at the wedding of Achilles' parents, i.e. before Achilles was born. Yet Achilles apparently participated in the war as an already grown and famous man?
And then later on in the story, the son of Achilles (Neoptolemus aka Pyrrhus) hides inside the wooden horse and helps sack the city. How old was Achilles, really? What's the timeline here?
Of course, a part of the answer is fiction being fictitious. But some classical authors assume more nuance to the chronology, with there being two Greek expeditions – first floundered – so the whole enterprise took 20 years rather than the popular 10; Achilles fathering Neoptolemus at the age of 13; etc:
https://www.reddit.com/r/classics/comments/kza1ji/achilles_a...
Science needs objectivity but it demands passion - a scientific life is hard, painstaking and long, that without something driving the scientist the effort is too much. Yes money helps, but most could make more elsewhere.
This balance takes us to odd places. Announcing super conductors that aren't quite there, seeing one author through words glanced sideways, but also studying worms in English gardens or photographic plates of stars for months on end, the same passions and the same failings lead us to success or failure
> But according to Lane Fox he was not simply a poet. He may have been a charioteer – ‘I like to believe he drove a racing team himself’ – a hunter, even a ‘putative gardener’. In fact, as he sharpens into focus, this Homer increasingly becomes a mirror image of Lane Fox, himself a great horseman
who also writes a gardening column.
Quite amazing what he believes he has uncovered.
> Homer increasingly becomes a mirror image of Lane Fox
Apparently there's a new translation of the Iliad coming out. A thread on it came up on twitter. The thread author strongly dislikes the new translation - be that as it may, author seems a bit biased tbh. But the thread has images of the same passage from multiple translations. It is interesting to see the differences!
The oral tradition roots of these texts makes translating them for modern readers a challenge. Religous texts are likely similar.
"Completely ignorant of the topic" is more accurate than "a bit biased." Most of those threads are partisan BS with absolutely no knowledge of (or real interest in) Ancient Greek, Homer, poetry or translation in general. Abysmal idiocy.
Yeah - I should probably have pointed out more clearly that the author there seems to be a bit of a partisan jerk... I did see it, and I did try to point it out, but obviously not well enough.
The point I was trying to make was that there are such large differences in between the translations, and the thread does contain the same passage from multiple translations.
But, again - poor choice of link to illustrate it with.
One big reason is that her threads are rather emotionless, difference in translation is something to analyze rather then get outraged about. While they show different choices and compare them to original text, she is not insulting other translators nor getting offended over nor calls their existence a crime. She even praises other translators in various threads, there is actually no war between her and them.
Even when she criticizes the other translations for inaccuracy, from the more of feminist point of view, she argues more by text, reading of original poem and meaning then by feeling outraged (unlike the original thread listed here): https://twitter.com/EmilyRCWilson/status/971823043512360960
I don’t agree with the Twitter thread, but I do think there are fair criticisms to be made of Wilson’s translation, one of which is that she stretches the meaning of the Greek – up to and including just ignoring certain lines – in order to present a particular view of Odysseus.
There's fair criticism to be made of most translations.
The fallacy begins when one assumes that there is some kind of perfect ideal translation that exists somewhere, that translations can be compared to. Translation, especially literary translation, always involves some amount of arbitrary, artistic parti pris.
Wilson's translation involves a lot of formal (preservation of the number of lines, iambic pentameter) and rhetorical (modernization of the vocabulary) constraints that require sometimes wide deviation from the original. That's inevitable.
What's interesting however is to look at those deviations as an opportunity for conversation, not as an opportunity for correction, which is just nonsensical in the context of a translation that doesn't aim primarily at accuracy. Except for clear mistakes, most of the choices Wilson made were made in complete awareness of the trade-offs they involve.
The Twitter discussion fantasizes about a translation where no such trade-offs exist, which tells you enough about how much translation experience the authors have (none).
Whitaker's review is a good academic review that doesn't at least fall for those beginner misconceptions and recognizes trade-offs explicitly: "Both Green and Verity use a long, six-beat line. This has the advantage for them that they can translate almost every word of the Greek original. But it also, sometimes, leads to a wordiness, a certain turgidity in their versions that makes one sigh for the concision of Wilson."
According to the review linked above (the one by Whitaker) Wilson's text is not so much a translation as a reinterpretation of the Odyssey, as far as I can tell intended to influence modern political debate:
>> The two great novelties of Wilson’s Odyssey are the way she represents a group of characters that we might term ‘underdogs’ – notably the Cyclops, and the suitors and their allies – in a sympathetic light,6 while representing
Odysseus as, on balance, reprehensible. The big problem, however, with Wilson’s heterodox approach to the characters of the Odyssey is that she can sustain it only by distorting and misrepresenting what the Greek text says.
"Distorting and misrepresenting" an original text to make it sound like its author was saying what the translator wishes to say is not the result of a trade-off like the one you describe and there's no excuse to be found in the absence of a "perfect translation", when nobody ever claimed that absence is a surprise.
Thread author finds the word "complicated" offensive. Which is pretty weird thing to take offense about. The rest of it seems to be taking offense on quite random translation choices ... while not understanding what the original says.
Which amounts to what I wrote. He also claims his criticism do not require any knowledge of the Greek ... despite complaining about words selection in translation.
Also, the author of the thread has pretty odd reading of texts in English.
Tangentially, I'd like to just plug the translations Robert Fitzgerald made of the Iliad and the Odyssey in the 1960s and 70s. Your experience of these books will very much come down to the translation you choose. In America at least, his are not the most commonly found in the classics section of a bookstore. I'm told he plays a bit loose with Homer's word choice (I don't read Ancient Greek), but personally I don't mind. Pasternak, when reproached for his loose translation Shakespeare, responded: "Who cares? We're both geniuses."
If you were in grad school (or maybe even undergrad) 30+ years ago, you read Fitzgerald.
Period.
It's the fundamental translation. Everything new is judged by Fitzgerald's version.
That said, I just finished the Lombardo translation for the Iliad -- and, yeah, it's good. Modern, quick, sweeping. But Fitzgerald's echoes are hard to silence.
I've always liked the quote from Borges, which I hope is not apocryphal, that 'The original is unfaithful to the translation.'
I'm not sure I buy his analogy that multiple drafts of a single work are like translating the initial version into subsequent ones, only in the same language. But I appreciate it as a marvelous idea!
This romanticization of a single genius creating or arranging this work 2500 years ago never stuck with me. Obviously, this seems an anachronism of violently imposing the modern concept of authorship. I wouldn't go so far as to declare "The Death of the Author"[0] but I find it a provocative stance against the over-reliance on the supposed, hidden or even unaware intentionality of an author.
While it is certainly interesting to entertain the idea of an author it can only be a rudimentary and fragmentary picture at best, given the discontinuity of the text itself, its sources and the time which had since passed.
What I find more fascinating than the search for a single authorship is how the written sources give us a peek into a lively oral tradition.[1]
What we understand today as "texts" must have been radically different back then, for the vast majority of people at the time there was no such thing as a final reference in the form of a written text, the presenter itself was the source.
Infamously in the western tradition Socrates introduced by Plato is known for his refusal to write things down, the arguments given in Phaedrus against writing can be easily discarded today, but I think the effort put into the mastery of the spoken word in order to tell captivating 'stories' (or like in the case of Socrates engaging in arguments) must have been extraordinary to witness back then.
32 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 64.1 ms ] threadI like how in the Persian/Indian tradition the voice of the author comes out "I, Rumi say this to you." We could do with a bit more of that. People write papers on the presence or absence of "he said"
The quality of the pot drawings (exemplified here) amazed me. Look at that bandaging! Nobody who has ever bound a wound would fail to see that as a faithful representation.
I struggle with why we can so easily cast the Illiad, Gilgamesh into one box, and put the Abrahamic/Judeo-Christian/Islamic into another box of literal received wisdom. Faith demands it, but logic about what we say regarding the passage of a song saga or poems across time distinct from the red letter word of God is entirely missing. Its anathema to cast these as "the same" but as an athiest I cannot say there are insurmountable differences. (The new testament has obvious differences noting it draws on the old, but is within the cast of written history where Troy stands before writing was strong in the western world. Certainly before maps were any good. We don't have a reliable contemporary place marker)
Schliemann wasn't helpful. I have a kids introduction to archaeology by C.W. Ceram (not unfree of a bad past, a pseudonym adopted to get distance from his Nazi PR job) which talks a bit about that, and how the post napoleonic French butchered rolled up papyrus to extract words from shards which modern xray machines would get as whole texts. Schliemann destroyed everything he touched looking for gold, basically.
The religions of Homer and Gilgamesh faded away a very long time ago, leaving only their myths behind.
For example, the story of a sheepherder who kills an elite pre-Greek warrior with the cast of a stone. In the Bible you have David killing the sea person Goliath (though elsewhere it mentions another killed him, and some scholars think the story was reappropriated to the Davidic dynasty). In the Argonautica you have the story from the perspective of the people traveling the sea. Both stories take place after a prophet named Mopsus/Moses dies in the desert as wandering by foot back from a conflict in North Africa.
The recent finds of very early Iron Age Aegean style pottery made with local clay in Tel Dan is particularly interesting in this context, especially given the lead researcher's belief it strengthens an earlier theory that the Denyen sea peoples in Adana, Anatolia were the Biblical Dan who stayed on their ships in Judges 5, what's considered one of the oldest parts of the Bible. The Denyen/Hiyawa are also the people who had 8th century bilinguals claiming their ruling dynasty owed itself to a House of Mopsus' similar to how the tribe of Dan received Moses's descendent as priest (counter to rules elsewhere) in Judges 18.
Connections between Moses and Greek history didn't escape various Greek historians either. Atrapanus of Alexandria claimed Moses was the Argonautica figure Museus and taught Orpheus the mysteries. Hecataeus of Abdera claimed many different people came out of Egypt including Greek heros like the Phonecian Cadmus or the Lybian/Egyptian Danaus, brother to the Pharoh with 50 sons (Ramses II had either 48 or 50, and in his forensic report was identified as appearing to be a Lybian Berber).
You even have Odysseus telling of attending a one day battle against Egypt immediately after Troy which they lose and leads to a seven year captivity until "a certain Phrygian" shows up and tries to ransom him to the Lybians.
Sounds a lot like the battle of Ramses II's son Merneptah against the Lybian/sea peoples coalition that happened in a single day and seven years after which an usurper takes the throne, nicknamed Mose and allegedly putting into place very Phonecian sociopolitical changes.
There's so much more to the stories than I think most people might suspect. Even just the history of Troy, into the hands of the Mycenaean fleet in the late bronze age as demonstrated by the Hittites asking Aegean cooperation in handing over a fugitive that fled there, but then into Hittite hands until conquered again by a battle leaving an archeological mark in the early Iron Age.
The medieval Book of Jashar claimed Moses joined a 9 year siege to retake a city which had been stolen away from a king who eventually appoints him their leader.
A somewhat similar story to that of Eumolpus, put in the water as a babe, raised by another family until leaving North Africa to become appointed king of the Thracians (in the Troad during the time of the Trojan War per Strabo). Or Danaus, brother of Pharoh and appointed king of the Ahyawa upon arrival.
I suspect 'Homer' is a version of the history combining a Mycenaean catalogue of ships taking Anatolia in the LBA with a later siege of Hittite controlled Wilusa in the early Iron Age.
Herodotus's comments on Helen having been in Egypt when the Memphis temple of Astarte is built (18th dynasty) is particularly interesting with this consideration, as around the time of that conquest is when "beautiful woman who arrived" is in Egypt, married a Pharoh of the 18th dynasty, was the only woman ever depicted in the smiting pose, has 6 female children in a row (1% chance randomly), and during whose time Egypt is transformed into a solar cult where she communed with the god directly without her husband (so transgressive records of it were later defaced). And a woman whose only recorded relatives were a wetnurse and a sister, much like Helen with Theseus's mother and sister.
Exodus 20:18 - "When the people heard the thunder and the loud blast of the ram’s horn, and when they saw the flashes of lightning and the smoke billowing from the mountain, they stood at a distance, trembling with fear."
The twelve olympians from greek myth became the twelve tribes of israel with became the twelve disciples of christ.
Noah's flood comes from the flood of gilgamesh.
It's all stolen and reimagined myth.
Similarly certain numbers and especially the flood theme recur across mythologies that are proven to be unconnected.
You can't take even very clear similarities and use them alone to draw connections between traditions like that. In fact the allure and inevitable failure of this approach was at one point enough of a cliche that the reader's awareness of it is assumed for a major plot point in the novel middlemarch, written 150 years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenite_hypothesis
The Kenite Hypothesis says God came from the South. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenite_hypothesis
On the topic of Iliad, I always found it puzzling that the (supposed) war started at the wedding of Achilles' parents, i.e. before Achilles was born. Yet Achilles apparently participated in the war as an already grown and famous man?
And then later on in the story, the son of Achilles (Neoptolemus aka Pyrrhus) hides inside the wooden horse and helps sack the city. How old was Achilles, really? What's the timeline here?
Of course, a part of the answer is fiction being fictitious. But some classical authors assume more nuance to the chronology, with there being two Greek expeditions – first floundered – so the whole enterprise took 20 years rather than the popular 10; Achilles fathering Neoptolemus at the age of 13; etc: https://www.reddit.com/r/classics/comments/kza1ji/achilles_a...
This balance takes us to odd places. Announcing super conductors that aren't quite there, seeing one author through words glanced sideways, but also studying worms in English gardens or photographic plates of stars for months on end, the same passions and the same failings lead us to success or failure
who also writes a gardening column.
Quite amazing what he believes he has uncovered.
> Homer increasingly becomes a mirror image of Lane Fox
https://www.ft.com/robin-lane-fox
https://www.ft.com/content/363b4fc4-6ace-11ea-a6ac-9122541af...
The oral tradition roots of these texts makes translating them for modern readers a challenge. Religous texts are likely similar.
https://twitter.com/mualphaxi/status/1695481359072964734
Here's another one:
https://twitter.com/WhoresofYore/status/1419239552133304323
The point I was trying to make was that there are such large differences in between the translations, and the thread does contain the same passage from multiple translations.
But, again - poor choice of link to illustrate it with.
And comparative thread of other translations: https://twitter.com/EmilyRCWilson/status/1093157738857811968
One big reason is that her threads are rather emotionless, difference in translation is something to analyze rather then get outraged about. While they show different choices and compare them to original text, she is not insulting other translators nor getting offended over nor calls their existence a crime. She even praises other translators in various threads, there is actually no war between her and them.
Even when she criticizes the other translations for inaccuracy, from the more of feminist point of view, she argues more by text, reading of original poem and meaning then by feeling outraged (unlike the original thread listed here): https://twitter.com/EmilyRCWilson/status/971823043512360960
Richard Whitaker‘s review (published in Acta Classica 63 (2020), pp. 1-15) is quite good on this (as well as on other problems with Wilson’s translation): https://casa-kvsa.org.za/legacy/AC63-Whitaker-18DEC2019.pdf
The fallacy begins when one assumes that there is some kind of perfect ideal translation that exists somewhere, that translations can be compared to. Translation, especially literary translation, always involves some amount of arbitrary, artistic parti pris.
Wilson's translation involves a lot of formal (preservation of the number of lines, iambic pentameter) and rhetorical (modernization of the vocabulary) constraints that require sometimes wide deviation from the original. That's inevitable.
What's interesting however is to look at those deviations as an opportunity for conversation, not as an opportunity for correction, which is just nonsensical in the context of a translation that doesn't aim primarily at accuracy. Except for clear mistakes, most of the choices Wilson made were made in complete awareness of the trade-offs they involve.
The Twitter discussion fantasizes about a translation where no such trade-offs exist, which tells you enough about how much translation experience the authors have (none).
Whitaker's review is a good academic review that doesn't at least fall for those beginner misconceptions and recognizes trade-offs explicitly: "Both Green and Verity use a long, six-beat line. This has the advantage for them that they can translate almost every word of the Greek original. But it also, sometimes, leads to a wordiness, a certain turgidity in their versions that makes one sigh for the concision of Wilson."
>> The two great novelties of Wilson’s Odyssey are the way she represents a group of characters that we might term ‘underdogs’ – notably the Cyclops, and the suitors and their allies – in a sympathetic light,6 while representing Odysseus as, on balance, reprehensible. The big problem, however, with Wilson’s heterodox approach to the characters of the Odyssey is that she can sustain it only by distorting and misrepresenting what the Greek text says.
"Distorting and misrepresenting" an original text to make it sound like its author was saying what the translator wishes to say is not the result of a trade-off like the one you describe and there's no excuse to be found in the absence of a "perfect translation", when nobody ever claimed that absence is a surprise.
Thread author claims to have had one full year of ancient Greek at Stanford.
Also, the author of the thread has pretty odd reading of texts in English.
If you were in grad school (or maybe even undergrad) 30+ years ago, you read Fitzgerald.
Period.
It's the fundamental translation. Everything new is judged by Fitzgerald's version.
That said, I just finished the Lombardo translation for the Iliad -- and, yeah, it's good. Modern, quick, sweeping. But Fitzgerald's echoes are hard to silence.
https://gwern.net/doc/borges/1932-borges-thehomericversions....
I've always liked the quote from Borges, which I hope is not apocryphal, that 'The original is unfaithful to the translation.'
I'm not sure I buy his analogy that multiple drafts of a single work are like translating the initial version into subsequent ones, only in the same language. But I appreciate it as a marvelous idea!
BTW, I don't know why Gwern has so many Borges texts on their website, but for sure I am grateful!
While it is certainly interesting to entertain the idea of an author it can only be a rudimentary and fragmentary picture at best, given the discontinuity of the text itself, its sources and the time which had since passed.
What I find more fascinating than the search for a single authorship is how the written sources give us a peek into a lively oral tradition.[1]
What we understand today as "texts" must have been radically different back then, for the vast majority of people at the time there was no such thing as a final reference in the form of a written text, the presenter itself was the source. Infamously in the western tradition Socrates introduced by Plato is known for his refusal to write things down, the arguments given in Phaedrus against writing can be easily discarded today, but I think the effort put into the mastery of the spoken word in order to tell captivating 'stories' (or like in the case of Socrates engaging in arguments) must have been extraordinary to witness back then.
[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_Author
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral-formulaic_composition