January Meme: Hooked on Translations

[selenak]

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

Comments

[mildred_of_midgard]

*stares* But not combining Sallust & at least one of the Cicero speeches makes no sense!

That's what I said at the time! Why do you think I spent half my reply to your last Classics post ranting about my love-hate relationship with my Classics education? Love (most of) the material, hate the way it was taught.

Very emblematic of the problem was this exchange I had in college, with my medieval philosophy prof.

Me: I'm doing an independent study in the Classics department next semester, and I'd like to read some medieval philosophy in Latin. I was hoping you could recommend an interesting text.

Prof: *recommends some things*

Prof: But really what you should do is look at some works in English first. Get a sense of what's out there and what might be of interest to you, and pick something you liked.

Me: Ah, no, see, I can't do that. If I'm familiar with the text at all, then it's cheating. I have to go in completely blind, or it doesn't count as reading Latin.

Historical facts were doled out in dribs and drabs, orally, by the professor, *after* we had struggled through the Latin passage the night before and come to class in complete confusion. Which is why my knowledge of 100 BCE - 100 CE is so spotty.

[felis]

I'm not a hundred percent sure if my school Latin was taught this way or if I simply wasn't interested enough to retain anything, but I strongly suspect the former, given that my working knowledge of Roman history from that time is basically zero, as is my memory of anything we translated, including Cicero and Ovid. It's rather annoying in retrospect.

[mildred_of_midgard]

I remember quite a lot of what I was taught, but my memory is limited to what I was taught. Case in point: reading the Pro Caelio one sentence at a time, taking 8 weeks to do it, and never being allowed to look at the text in English, means that by the end of the 8 weeks, I no longer remembered what the speech said at the beginning. I never had a holistic picture of the case: what was at stake, what they were arguing about, who was involved, etc.

I wrote a post a while back comparing this experience to playing a piece on the piano, one note at a time, over the course of 8 weeks, never hearing it, never playing it again, never building up proficiency in it, and then saying that you've "played that piece." It is technically true that I "read the Pro Caelio." But did I understand it as a work? No. Did I learn the Latin language in a way that enabled me to read other speeches? No.

This is why I phrase it as, "We were required to do everything the hardest possible way, otherwise we might accidentally learn something."

See also: what I am not doing in salon!

[selenak]

Given that the Pro Caelio is essentially Cicero getting a young guy who was at least as shady as any of Catilina's crowd off the hook for murder and attempted murder by slut shaming his mistresss on a spectacular scale, making anyone translate it one sentence a time feels like Clodia Pulcher's posthumus revenge on Cicero for the relentless slut shaming in question...

[mildred_of_midgard]

And this is why Classics salon is going to be way more educational!