Q&A …

… The Best Books on The Odyssey | Five Books Expert Recommendations. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

I didn’t look at other translations while working on mine, because I wanted to try my very best to do some fresh wrestling with interpretative and translatorly problems. Since I’ve published my own, I’ve looked more at little bits from different translations, and actually, it’s been a bit disappointing to realize how many similarities there are between them. For instance, if you compare the poem’s opening in Lombardo, Fagles and Fitzgerald, you’ll notice a lot of verbal echoing from one to the other that isn’t necessary. As in, if you looked at the Greek without looking at earlier translations, you wouldn’t replicate verbal echoing to such an extent as this. The echoing effect isn’t merely about gender. It’s not that a man necessarily reads differently from a woman. It’s just that once you’ve looked at other translations, you might end up reproducing them—even if you didn’t want to do that.