I have been mostly off Twitter recently for mental health. I am in the midst of my current translation projects, and I would not feel comfortable creating comparative translation threads, looking at other people's work and treating mine as finished, when I'm in medias res.
But here are some scattered comments on my current challenges with the Iliad.
There needs to be big energy, the thrill & excitement & terror of storms, floods, great armies clashing, so many young men rushing, killing, dying. I need lots of words for noise & quick momentous movement. "Clash" & "Dash" are useful words. But I can't over-use them
So I tried to get some inspiration for vocabulary by re-reading the start of the Tempest, and realized that Miranda uses "dash" twice in four lines ("dashes the fire out... dashed all to pieces"). Unhelpful.
Why do men fight? This is an absolutely central important question in the Iliad, so it's important to get the language as "right" as possible. But the language and conceptualization of aggression and hostility is quite different in Gk vs. English.
Greek eris is usually rendered "strife". But "strife" is very C19, whereas the Gk word doesn't feel retro like that. Also eris suggests both specific occasions or acts of hostility, and also the underlying desire to get in a fight, which "strife" usually doesn't.
There aren't a lot of good words for "metal thingy fastened onto a shield or helmet", except "boss". But the English word "boss" connotes "person in charge at work", which the Greek words don't mean at all.
If there are 2 different words for "shield" in the original, ideally I want 2 different words in English. But English words for "shield", other than "shield", are few on the ground, and tend to be archaic. "Buckler" is a lovely word but v. Spenserian.
It's common in Homer to describe a killing with the verb luo, "to release": luse de guia, "he released his limbs". In English , we are not likely to imagine the parts of the body as a system of knots, untied at death. How much can I retain the foreign idioms?
The original isn't at all hard to understand; how much is it justifiable or desirable, for me in this particular translation project, to make the English more difficult and less idiomatic than the original?
In one of many great similes, the confrontation of the 2 armies is like 2 rivers coming down 2 mountains to clash and commingle. The rivers join in the dual form of the verb; there's no "2". But it matters that there are 2 rivers, and 2 sides in the war.
I need to put "2" in there somewhere, to make clear what is clear in the original. But if I say, "2 rivers, on 2 different but adjacent mountains", I'm spelling things out in an awful clunky way that will lose all the poetic oomph; and the oomph is the point.
I spent a long time worrying about whether the river Simöeis in modern English, must always be pronounced with 3 syllables. Cowper and Pope give it only 2. But I think it needs to be 3 for 2019 English, even if it's tough to get into the line.
There's never a right answer. Ideally, every choice has to make sense in itself & in the context of 10,000 other similar choices, in the larger quest to produce a text with a deep and detailed connection to the original, & with its own life and integrity in English.
I hope it doesn't sound as if I'm whining. I love how difficult this work is, and the way it has so many different types of difficulty. I love the way it engages so many different parts of the mind, ears, tongue. I love the sense of being in multiple worlds at once.
The Greek word "ponos", child of Eris, connotes labor, challenge, suffering, hardship; it's used for the work of war as well as peace-time labor, & the Labors of Heracles. It's painful, but not necessarily bad. The hardness of work makes you feel alive.
