I don’t think that’s totally fair. Lattimore completely reordering the first line to fit his own peculiar meter is a greater change than putting Homer into heroic couplets
Similarly, there are moments where Lattimore strays further from the original intent than any other translator, contemporary or past.
Why I keep recommending Pope: he is one of the few translators of the Iliad whose work stands so well on its own that if you were to, in a Borgesian manner, take his translation and translate it back into Greek, taking similar liberties in the reversed direction, you would end up with something closely resembling the original Iliad.
That’s a pretty bold statement for a dude who doesn’t study Greek. Unless you do?
Anyway, pointing out that “original intent” is, even beyond the death of the author, a weird quality to attribute to some dug-up written version of an orally descended epic (not that I’m at all familiar with the archaeotextual history of the Iliad, that’s not how I care to engage these things) which may not have even been singly composed by a dude named Homer anyway. Rather I prefer to judge the quality of a translation by what it sacrifices and what it keeps.
Lattimore’s meter makes it feel the most like the Greek feels to be read, on a rhythmic level. That’s very important to me. It sucks to move Menin off the first word, but I appreciate the drive for purity. Pope’s translation is richer English poetry, but it makes the thing feel like Shakespeare. It’s all pros and cons.
My mentioning of original intent was a gaffe, yes.
I haven’t studied greek (besides passively being able to muddle through a little bit of it from years of nerdery). as that one essay T. posted points out, all translators seek to be ‘faithful’ to the source text, it is just a matter of defining what it means to be faithful
I have to admit I’m not too familiar with the genre as a whole (as contentious as it is) but I have read a lot of Lord Dunsany, and can recommend Charon as an exemplary prose poem.
ulysses is written in Every Way, rather than A Way. some of it is a series of newspaper headlines. about 200 pages are a play with very excessive costume descriptions. about 100 pages are a scholastic disputation. 90% of it is making fun of other writers, with the other 10% a skittish love of Shakespeare. but I guess you could call the dominant mode ‘playful,’ which I can read as impressionistic. certainly it is a work of style, which is an overused term that will, as a result, immediately lose all meaning for you after you read ulysses
The biggest thing to reading Ulysses is finding the right level of giving a shit about the details. Do you care what writers he is specifically parodying in Oxen of the Sun? No, you don’t (almost nobody does, he was parodying the English lit canon as it existed in like 1900, so most of them nobody reads any more anyhow). But you might care about the various piece of Catholic and Irish identity that Joyce liked to poke and prod at, or not. There’s just a fuckton of stuff in that book, so if you try to care about it all, you’ll never get through.
Honestly, the biggest help is having someone around who has read it before, and probably a copy of Ulysses Annotated if you really want, just to look random shit up. Also just be sure whatever version you are reading starts with a giant letter S on the first page, as that is the edition largely referred to in most books about it, so your pagination will be OK then. Also Joyce was hell of particular about how he liked his books paginated and printed (looking over the proofs for the book is hilarious, specifically on the page in one of the last proofs where Joyce circled a O with no notes, and you have to stare at it for a bit to realize that why he circled it is that it is in the wrong font because the printer ran out of O’s for that page).
ulysses is great! i got bogged down somewhere in the middle but i still remember some of the turns of phrase from the first chapter: “you jejune Jesuit”; “the snot-green sea, the scrotumtightening sea”