One of the most beautiful of many sublime similes in the Iliad is the moment at the end of book 8 when the Trojans, awaiting a great victory in battle the following day, light watch-fires all over the plain -- and it's like the bright moon surrounded by stars... As with other great similes, there are multiple points of comparison: the fires are bright and numerous, like stars; the Trojans are happy, like the shepherd; and this is a time of revelation, for good and ill.

I wrote about approaches to translating the Iliad in English, with a few different versions of the heartbreaking last meeting of Hector and Andromache.

https://twitter.com/nytimesbooks/status/1674100384447463431

I was so grateful to have the opportunity to do this piece, to invite engagement with the Iliad and with issues of translation. I will add a few more thoughts and a few more examples of translations of this same passage here (some now, more to come once I am not traveling).

What I enjoy most about the reception of the beginning of my Odyssey translation is how often it's misquoted. People don't realize it's iambic pentameter, if they don't read past the first line or two. So they misquote it so it doesn't scan. I love that because the effect is Odyssean.

Everyone is always seething with red-hot rage. Everyone is always broken by overwhelming grief. Everyone is obsessed with celebrity and status and public image. Everyone is terrified of being publicly shamed and cast out of society.

A classic translator's dilemma, which presumably applies for any language pair: what to do about the fact that languages individuate the world differently. One language makes a distinction where another makes none. One area where this often happens is family relationships. Many languages distinguish between different types of cousin (father's side/ mother's side) or different types of in-law (a sister's husband, versus a wife's brother). Others, like English, don't.

A long geeky aporetic thread about a current translation dilemma that I have not solved, though I am having a lot of fun spending many hours obsessing about it. Sharing to give a sense of the kind of problems all literary translators experience. In the Iliad, an eagle flies past the Trojans, dropping the snake he carried -- & so gets home empty-beaked and wounded. Polydamas says, plausibly, this sign means the Trojans should pull back from attacking the Greek wall: casualties will be too high, and gains few.

Odyssey Book 17. Here is the dog. Most readers seem to get upset about the poor old dog, and not so much about the human suffering (slavery) evoked in the same passage. Here's a thread I wrote a while ago about this bit of the poem, & translation thereof.

Niche interest, because people ask me about process sometimes: I’m using an old notebook and it has a few pages of early drafts for the Odyssey. Here is a single line from book 6. I didn’t use any of these in the end. One of the things I struggled with in this line, as you can see, is what to do with "pompe". It's a very important word in the Odyssey, a noun cognate with the verb "pempo", "to send". It suggests providing a traveler with a good "sending", aid to continue in the onward journey

Most cruel plague is driving through the city
and emptying our houses, while black Hades
grows rich on cries of grief and lamentation.

(Oedipus Tyrannos) Priest, to the leader:
You hold the power now;
if you would go on ruling, it is better
to govern in a populated city
than emptiness.

If you are, for any reason, in the mood for a long poem about the abuse of power, I'd like to recommend Ovid's Metamorphoses. I spent the last month rereading the Met. and writing an introduction for a Norton reissue of the Charles Martin translation, which I like. I want to give a shout out for how great Ovid is, before I move back to the Iliad next week.

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.

My transatlantic flight was cancelled and I was, with a plane full of other people, stuck at heathrow airport overnight. I know people will comment on the Odyssey. I’m thinking about how many different types of travel, its contents as well as downsides, are are in the poem. There’s the frustration of being a privileged, voluntary traveler like me, finding oneself stuck and temporarily disempowered, longing for home — like Odysseus with Calypso, crying to be back in a place of belonging and control.

There was a young man called Telemachus
who was bullied and in a dilemma 'cause
he missed his lost dad
and his mom made him mad
and he almost got killed by Eurymachus.

https://twitter.com/nolapfau/status/1177288962492129280

A majestical goddess, Athena,
swooped down from the sky -- you'd have seen her
as some kind of bird ¬–
when she gave the word,
men's yearning for fighting got keener.

I put "NOT the first woman to publish a translation of the Odyssey" on my twitter-bio, after seeing it asserted for the gazillionth time. Here is why. It's factually not true. Many women have published translations of the Odyssey (and Iliad) into modern languages: French, Italian, Turkish, Greek, Dutch, etc.. Anne Dacier did it into French prose 400 years ago.

Why and how might a man slaughter large numbers of his fellow human beings? It's a terrible topic. I don't think there are any exact parallels in other cultures to the situation in the US right now. The shocking recent shootings have culturally & politically specific causes. But FWIW, the Homeric poems are also deeply interested in a version of this question. Odysseus and Achilles both go on killing sprees, and slaughter not only those who have hurt them, but also bystanders: Lycaon pleading for his life, Amphinomos the suitor who tried to run away.

Rereading Spenser's Fairie Queene, which I haven't read since grad school. I have three little things I want to say about it. 1. It is fabulous. Everyone should read it, or reread it. The rhymes, the alliteration, the proliferation of layers of allusion, literary theft, invention, multiple allegorical/ political/ theological meanings: it's all just extremely enjoyable.

There is a wonderful section from Louis Macneice's Autumn Journal that I often think about.
"and lastly
I think of the slaves.
And how one can imagine oneself among them
I do not know;
It was all so unimaginably different
And all so long ago." Translation can be a way of enabling the reader to imagine herself among them: the unimaginably different cultures that exist both now and long ago. But we can never really know. Translation can and should also be a way to reinforce distance.

One of the most powerful features (tropes? modalities?) of Homeric verse is the juxtaposition of one POV with another. Maybe the most famous instance is when Helen at Troy wonders where her brothers are -- and they are lying dead, in the "life-giving earth". Or Andromache, making a lovely hot bath for her husband Hector, not knowing that he has already been killed by Achilles.

In the spirit of Oprah: here are 2 things I know about translation, from my experiences of years of doing it and thinking about it and reading about it. 1. It's interpretative. You can have a more or less responsible interpretation, as with writing history, or lit. crit, or journalism, or science; you can be sloppy, ill-informed, muddled, make mistakes, ignore things, etc. But there's not a single right answer.

I've been asked/praised/scolded/mansplained/ ad norovirus nauseam about my rendition of the first line of the Odyssey. So I was happy to get a message today asking about my rendition of line 1.10. Yay, moving on! The Greek is this:
τῶν ἁμόθεν γε, θεά, θύγατερ Διός, εἰπὲ καὶ ἡμῖν.
My rendition is:
"Tell the old story for our modern times. / Find the beginning".

One of the most fascinating and heart-rending characters in the Odyssey is Penelope & Odysseus' only son, Telemachus, who has grown up bullied by his mother's suitors, fatherless, aimless, without positive male mentors until Athena helpfully shows up in the guise of Mentor. How immature is T, at the start of the poem, and what does maturity mean for Homer? Does Telemachus ever grow up? Those are open interpretative questions. Translators & interpreters can veer one way or another.