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A question that is always present, for any translator: What is stylistic "equivalence"? Is "equivalence" even the right term? Translation Studies over the past few decades has taught us a lot about how complex that question always is.
Homer includes words from many eras and many dialects. It& #39;s regular metrical dactylic hexameter, not prose, and it comes from a time when prose didn& #39;t yet exist. Many formulaic elements. Many polysyllabic words. But syntactically v. easy, quick, fun and absorbing to read.
What is "equivalent", in a contemporary Anglophone context, to how all of this sounded in the Greek-speaking world of, say, the 6th century BCE? There& #39;s in fact no equivalent. We just don& #39;t have a text or a tradition that occupies the same cultural / literary/ poetic space.
I knew that I, like all translators, would not be able to create a Homer that would feel to English readers/ listeners exactly the same as Homer felt to ancient audiences -- not least because the ancients had been listening to Homer since they were toddlers. So it& #39;s impossible.
I used a regular meter, iambic pentameter, because it& #39;s the normal meter for narrative & dramatic verse in English; dactylic hexameter is normal for archaic Greece. Does that count as "equivalent"? Sort of. There& #39;s only ever going to be a range of different "sort ofs".
I used fewer dialect, weird and mixed-temporal words than the original, bc those risked costing the clarity that& #39;s also there in the original. I couldn& #39;t do both, writing Eng. now, tho& #39; the original can. I couldn& #39;t invent for English a literary tradition that doesn& #39;t exist.
I used fewer polysyllabic words than the original. I felt that the polysyllables of Homer have a beautiful resonance, but modern English verse with many polysyllabic words risks sounding awkwardly sub-Miltonic, which isn& #39;t what Homer sounds like. What& #39;s "equivalent"? Idk.
For instance: line 2 of book 1: the original says O. destroyed the ptoliethron of Troy. It& #39;s a 4 syllable word. I make it a 1-syllable word: "town". Should the translator match the syllable count of the original? I didn& #39;t. One could.
Homeric Greek didn& #39;t ever sound like normal speech. How weird shd the translation sound? I used regular meter, which is already a marked, maybe retro choice; most contemporary poets don& #39;t. How many extra markers of Poetic can my text afford, to reach equivalent level? Idk.
I can imagine doing it entirely differently, e.g. using a wildly varied range of different English dialect words from many different eras, Chaucerian plus Cockney etc., & many long fancy words like incarnadine. It will be super fun & read by nobody. I& #39;ll do it when I& #39;m 97.
People in modern Anglophone culture, inc. classicists, tend to be not very aware of the challenges of translation, eg issues with equivalence. So I think it& #39;s worth talking about, to try to make translation in general more visible.
If this is interesting to you: please read more translators, more translated lit., and translation theory, as well as more GR classics. For contemporary translated literature, I& #39;ve found many great reading suggestions from the site Words without Borders, https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/dispatches/article/women-translating-women-an-interview-with-literary-translators">https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/dispatche...
Another eternal translator& #39;s dilemma is this. The original doesn& #39;t read like a translation. So should the translation sound translation-y? Either option is both false and true. They are also not hard-and-fast alternatives.
Today I am working on a fantastic descriptive passage w/ lots onomatopoeia & sound-play. I can& #39;t use the exact same sounds b/c I& #39;m not writing the same language. I can use different ones (e.g. thinking about how to arrange & #39;fire/ afar& #39;, & #39;flight/light/ delight& #39;).
A lot of people, perhaps esp. classicists, imagine that there is such a thing as "the" literal translation. This usually means a translation that prioritizes syntax over all other elements of a text. Syntax is great! I love syntax! But it& #39;s not the only linguistic feature.
Same goes for word order. It& #39;s extremely important, and it& #39;s not the only extremely important thing.
If a student wrote on an exam, "Man to-me say, muse, much-turny, who very [as to] many-things was-foiled when of-Troy holy city/citadel [he] wrecked" -- I might pass it. But I& #39;d worry, because it would show no sign of more-than-syntactical comprehension.
