HN

Comments (62)

• asimpletune
  I could be misremembering this but I think Lattimore and Lombardo were once good friends until they had a falling out. I think Lattimore was so bothered by Lombardo's translation of either the Iliad or Odyssey, that he set out to do his own translation of both.At any rate Lattimore's translation of Odyssey is beautiful.
• Menu

  branon
  I got Robert Fitzgerald, wish it would tell me which passages were by which authors after I finished thoughah, it does, to an extent at least - about 2/3rds down the front page, ctrl+f for "opening"
• Menu

  npinsker
  “How much you enjoy the prose” doesn’t really seem like the metric by which we should rank these? I’d prefer to read whatever’s most faithful to the original, which isn’t measured here.
• Menu

  faldor20
  I enjoyed this but wanted to browse all the options. I made a site that has all the options for browsing and you can even play the game again selecting your favorite from all the options.https://odyssey.elidowling.com/
• Menu

  Chinjut
  Homer's original won a blind writing test.
• Menu

  oliculipolicula
  Sorry this could be offensive didn't mean to be.. Any Greek speakers who studied Homer in school here can share what are your favourite English translations?Prefer Lattimore or Fitzgerald as being closer to original?
• faldor20
  I did this twice and got completely different results. Seems very dependent on which passages you happen to see.I found some hard because they don't seem to even conform to the description given. Particularly many of the lotus eater passages leave out the information the description stays they should be portraying.
• lordleft
  Fagles was what I read when I first read the Iliad/Odysseus years ago, and I was happy to see him pop up as my revealed preference via the test. I'm also a big fan of Lombardo.
• ZeroGravitas
  Maybe I'm less of a fan of epic ancient poetry translated from dead languages than the average man in the street but none of these make me interested in reading on.
• Menu

  comrade1234
  At this point I don't think I'll see the movie because I don't want it to ruin the good memories/scenes I have in my mind from the book I read a few years ago. Maybe someday but I think I'll reread the book before then.Also, there was too much data n the linked article. :)
• Menu

  RobLach
  Useful and interesting but it is not the primary purpose of a translation to read the most pleasantly.
• Menu

  al_borland
  Standard eBooks has a translation by William Cullen Bryant. I was hoping that would be in the rankings to see how it compared.
• Menu

  asibahi
  I read the article and I still dont understand what a blind reading test is.
• odyssey7
  It was fun going through the comparisons. My results settled on Lattimore.
• the__alchemist
  Fagles. Maybe Wilson if you like plainer writing.Fagles narrated by Ian McKellen is peak.
• comrade1234
  Were those all poetry versions? Were any prose?
• tokai
  The Italian Donald Duck one from the 90s is the best.
• Menu

  suddenlybananas
  >Do readers prefer archaic language?>Emily Wilson argues that readers may mistake archaic language for authority or authenticity [..] Among translations published since 1960, it nearly disappears. Readers were not simply choosing the oldest-sounding English.I don't think this necessarily follows, a translation written in 1960 can have a more contemporary English than one written in 1980.That being said, I don't really understand why Wilson argues against an archaizing register---the poems themselves were archaizing. Homer or whatever bards actually composed it were writing about something that allegedly happened hundreds of years earlier and using language/style that was itself archaic at the time.
• jeffbee
  It's pretty wild that 99% of participants came from Instagram, Facebook, or Tiktok. It never escaped that bubble? The other platforms, Reddit, YouTube, word of mouth only amounted to 1%?