I just caught an early screening of the new Ralph Fiennes movie that adapts the part when he returns to confront Penelope’s suitors, which I really enjoyed and deliberately sought out and remember as an interesting part of the text along with the Telemachiad, and yet I have no real memory of the text qua text itself nor any interest in revisiting it. so I think my point stands insofar as a work that’s been adapted so many times and so many ways is effectively metabolized into the culture to the point where even its nuances and their derivatives are sufficiently intriguing and readily available without really needing the original text.
I also readily admit that I find epic poetry significantly less engaging on a word by word basis than modern MFA prose, so take that as you will, I just do not think that reading the odyssey is actually that straightforward a response to finding yourself ignorant of it
Should come as no surprise that I disagree completely. In my opinion by far the best way to engage with any text is simply to read it. All the forewords and scholar’s notes and author biographies can come after, if you want, but you will always do best by just reading the thing, especially if you lack vital context. You have to bathe before you can become clean.
I think this is absolutely true for most texts(/movies/plays/whatever)! but with stories whose outlines are so well understood, and whose original form isn’t even really meant to be read per se so much as narrated, I think it’s honestly just as good to understand that you can add pathos and depth to that outline wherever you want and produce an intelligible story. otherwise you are basically doing close reading of a classics curriculum, which is of course interesting in its own right but is imo not really comparable to recommending someone any other book
like, trying to isolate the exact metaphors being invoked by Scylla and Charybdis is maybe useful if you are trying to understand the context of Homer. absent that, attaching new metaphors to them, as actual children’s cartoon adaptations have done, is literally just as good
i was sadly brought up on beckett, jarry and michaux, which has left me rather insensible to the singsongy grandiloquence of english verse. i’m the sick one here.
b-but isn’t this exactly what’s fun about reading ancient litterature?? you want to feel that people three thousand years ago existed in as much of a real way as you’re existing right now.
(though yeah i agree that this wouldn’t be what’s generally meant as “knowing the odyssey”)
yeah I am just skeptical of intellectual aspirations to doing a very incomplete and half-informed close reading when a lot of other ways to approach this material actually give more to work with
Pope is the only translator whose verses equal the musicality of the original. It’s not ‘just reading pope’ it’s reading someone who took the challenge of translating poetry seriously, and the only other translator who even considered this part of the work afterwards was Fitzgerald
And Fitzgerald is great, a very good 20th century translation, but as far as mastery of poetry goes, Fitzgerald is no Pope.
You might not like it, you might not have a taste for heroic verse, but to say that it’s bad is just stupid.
this is extremely eye roll, but arguing about translations of the odyssey is already the philological equivalent of Is Videogame Art?, so let’s leave it at that.
