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January Meme: Hooked on Translations
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cahn asked me: What Classics works (to be read in English translation) would you recommend to hook someone who doesn't know anything about it? (Aside from the Illiad/Odyssey/Aeneid -- but would also be open to interesting translations of those!) (And especially for someone who preferred the Aeneid to the Illiad and Odyssey?)With the caveat that different things work for different people, and also my knowledge of good English translation is limited because I read most of those works in German (and/or had to translate them in school, like Cicero's speeches against Catilina and Sallust's work about the conspiracy), here are some recs I would go with. Note that they aren't literal translations but poetic ones, much like the Faust translation by Howart Brenton I recced to
cahn where he had someone do the literal prose translation for him first so he could be sure about the literal meaning and then put it into verse. They're also by terrific poets, which means when you read these works in English, you get something of the visceral excitement and beauty of the originals, not a sense of dutiful bland dictionary (or worse, bowlderized) rendition. 1.) Ted Hughes: Tales from Ovid (i.e. a selection from Ovid's Metamorphoses). Praise, quotes and explanations why I think that's an awesome book to read here.
2.) Ted Hughes: Alkestis by Euripides. The last thing he ever published, shortly before his death, with a theme of personal relevance. Hughes and Euripides were as good a match as Hughes & Ovid. More praise and quotes here.
3.) Roz Kaveney: Catullus. Lots of well deserved praise and buying link here.
Now as I said elsewhere, I've been hearing good things about Emily Wilson's translation of the Odyssey, so it's definitely on my to read list, but I haven't gotten the chance to yet. And with Cicero's letters and speeches, Suetonius, Plutarch, Herodotus etc. I don't know any English translations, since, see above, I read them in German (or in Cicero's case translated some of the speeches in school and read the rest in German).
The other days
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Uh, now I can name at least one black individual in historical Europe, but because of you and
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(But seriously: my mother said to me once, when I complained* that I didn't get to learn a second language as a child (despite living in Japan for 4 years!), that I should just be grateful that I was ahead of the curve in learning as a child that other languages existed. "Most kids in this country don't know that!")
* Me, complain about my education? ;)
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Basically, what we learned about black people in European history in the 1970s and 1980s at school: Slave Trade evil, all European nations involved. Colonialism evil, Germany a late comer to the scene and mainly trying to get colonies because Willy had a hang up about his British relations. (BTW, a ridiculous simplifaction, and one that I know is taught differently these days, not least because the genocidal actions towards the Herero by German colonists in the early 20th century became a big subject in Germany in the 1990s (I actually know the publisher who published the first extensive study of the Herero genocide in German), but I was in my 20s then and no longer anywhere near school.) And that was it. People like the first African-German attendant of and lecturer at a German university (18th century, Anton Wilhelm Ano, who taught at Halle), or Angelo Soliman (Austrian-African valet, teacher and leader of the Vienna Free Masons, also chess partner of Joseph (II), but after his death Franz II (reactionary nephew who was Emperor by then) ordered his body was to be mummified and exhibited as an "African Savage"), or Alessandro de' Medici, or the fact that the Alexandres Dumas (grandpère, pére et fils) or Pushkin were mixed race, or that Joseph Bolougne, the Chevalier St. Georges was one of the most successful fencers and composers of the 18th century and the son of a slave, that was all something I learned about after school.
(In fairness: the other reason why kid!me tended to associate "African" with "-American" was that my hometown had one of the largest US garnisons in Bavaria. So the black people I saw as a child in rl, not on tv, were all either Americans or children of Americans. Again, that was a middle sized provincial Franconian town in the 1970s - it would have been already different in larger cities like Berlin, Munich or Hamburg, and by now it's very very different.)
Otoh, different languages are something that's self evident (and self evidently useful) when you live on a continent where lots of them are spoken and where if you don't go on holidays to Austria or the German speaking part of Switzerland you have to speak a different language. The US is so gigantic and continent-spannig that you can live our your life there, experience very different climates and sceneries and still never leave the country and its linguistic sphere. I remember how shocked I was when I participated in a German/American student exchange program and found out a lot US people not just my age but way older didn't have a passport, because they never needed is. this was before the EU came up with the Schengen agreement, so I had needed a passport at the latest when we did one week skiing trips at school, and later at 11th grade the trip to Berlin (still a divided city, which meant you had to cross GDR territory, which definitely meant a pass port). (I had one before because my parents had travelled with us outside the country before. What I mean is that even if you had parents who never holidayed outside of Germany for economic reasons, you would have needed a passport at seventh or eigth grade when school trips across the borders started.)