Good Translations

Robert Fitzgerald and Allen Mandelbaum are by far the best translators of the Aeneid; I highly recommend reading both. Mandelbaum was multilingual, and his Odyssey and Divine Comedy are both very good as well.

I’ve only read a few translations of the Iliad and haven’t read Horace at all, so I can’t help you with those.

Definitely avoid W. H. D. Rouse.

By the way, I also find the feast scenes strangely evocative. As Byron wrote of Homer, “His feasts are not the worst part of his works.”

You might find your favorite among these. I counted at least 7 editions with at least 5 authors/translators.

http://gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=the+odyssey&submit_search=Search

Project Gutenberg often has multiple scans/submissons of the same edition, and multiple editions of the same work, so it’s a bit extra effort to cover all the bases. They don’t put enough identifying/distinguishing info on the search results page. But one click gets you to the item page where you can see all the necessary stuff, and take side note with pen-paper (catalog # is a good ID).

Then one more click pulls up the Html, and you can search for your fave passages.

Lawrence Auster recommended Richard Lattimore’s translation of The Iliad.

That’s Richmond Lattimore. I haven’t read his Iliad, but he’s a good translator.

The 2nd item in the search results, the Alexander Pope translation, has 8 occurances of “beeves.” The 1st and 3rd items do not include beef nor beeves.

—
Now all accesses to the dome are fill’d;
Eight boars, the choicest of the herd, are kill’d;
Two beeves, twelve fatlings, from the flock they bring
To crown the feast; so wills the bounteous king,
—
“With prayer they now address the ethereal train,
Slay the selected beeves, and flay the slain;
The thighs, with fat involved, divide with art,
Strew’d o’er with morsels cut from every part.
—

I stand corrected.

Joe H, I also thought his name was Richard Lattimore for the longest time and have written about this phenomenon here:

https://wmjas.wordpress.com/2011/11/14/seeing-what-you-expect-to-see/

For the Iliad, the Robert Fagles Iliad is in meter and is approachable, but loosely translated. It is the text I use with high school students. For my own edification, I personally prefer Caroline Alexander’s translation. Akexander got her BA in classics or what have you and then went on to become an award winning writer of narrative nonfiction–I think her first bestseller was an account of some failed arctic expedition. She has a rare ability to meld together both literal Greek meeting with poetic sense. (The Lattimore translate mentioned above is very literal, but not at all poetic).

I have not read straight through, but do often consult, the George Chapman translation of Homer. That is the one Milton would have read, and that Keats wrote a poem about. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_First_Looking_into_Chapman%27s_Homer )

Thanks, T. Greer.

In other news, I picked up The Scholars on your recommendation. I love it. But about 1/3 through, I’m bogged down trying to remember who is who.

G.– Don’t worry about it! Every 3 chapters or so are meant to be stand alone stories, with a minor character of the last story becoming the major character of the next round. The guys you meet in the opening chapters don’t ever come back once they are left behind. So all you have to remember is whoever is in the story you are now reading. Different from Dream of the Red Chamber where people from 2 volumes back suddenly return.

Phew! Because I started to think that some of the new characters were actually people that had been brought on in the beginning and I was missing out on some amazing plotting.

an extremely readable book.