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]

Ah, too bad. But thanks!

Tamussino: Thanks for the rec, but alas! I can't get an e-book copy, which is what I'm looking for right now. I'll keep it on my eventual list, though.

Scott vs. Amundsen: Not yet, solely because there's administrative overhead to each new work I transfer to my reader, which is why I'm currently going for several-hundred page works that will keep me occupied for weeks at a time. But I will read it at some point!

But Fouché is now on my short list, never fear! Purely because my needs have shifted: I used to need works where I was SUPER into the content, in order to motivate me to gird my loins and re-enter the fray with German day after day after day. Now that it's less of a battle, I'm specifically looking for things I'm only moderately interested in, so that constant Googling of super-interesting content doesn't distract me from reading as much as possible. Hence the Burgundians I'm getting close to finishing up and my eyeing of Charles V.

I might go for Montefiore's Romanovs next, since I know from his Potemkin book that I can handle his prose in German, the book is super long, and most of it is 19th and early 20th century, which I'm moderately interested in.

If I can get past this hump of reading moderately interesting things, I'm super looking forward to all those Fritz- and Katte-related books you summarized for us!

(Anything good on Louis XIII or Louis XIV? Your problematic stupor mundi fave? Other medieval or Renaissance faves? Preferably books written in the last 20 years or as popular as Zweig, so I have a chance of getting them in e-book format.)

[selenak]

My favourite biography of my problematic stupor mundi fave is unfortunately an older one from 1976, this one, but it is still available.

Renaissance: Kauf dir einen Kaiser by Günter Ogger, about the Fugger merchant dynasty (heavy emphasis on Jakob the Rich and his nephew Anton), is absolutely fascinating, but also old enough not to be on kindle.

Available as an ebook: Madame sein ist eine elendes Handwerk - Liselotte von der Pfalz by Dirk van der Cruyse. Has the downside of Liselotte's baroque German, but has connecting texts in modern German (basically a biography with lots of letters).

Online via Gutenberg: Genie und Charakter from 1924 by Emil Ludwig. Ludwig was the other bestselling biographie romancee writer of the early 20th century, Stefan Zweig's arch nemesis, and this was his attempt to write something like "Sternstunden der Menschheit" - twenty shorty portraits. The first one is of Fritz, later ones include Voltaire, Bismarck, Goethe & Schiller, Leonardo da Vinci, Byron, Rembrandt etc, also colonialists Carl Peters and Cecil Rhodes, and assassinated-by-Nazis minister Walter Rathenau (the most recently dead). Ludwig started out as an ardent national minded conservative (you can tell in his 1914 Fritz drama, which I've also read), became pro democracy through the shock of WWI, saw the Nazis for the scum they were from the start, emigrated when the Nazis came to power, and post WWII ended up on the other end of the ideological scale from where he started, declaring Germans were irredeemable and it should be the Morgenthau plan and also no more Wagner performances ever. "Genie und Character" is him transitioning, so you get emphatic language and admiration for male genius while also psychologizing. The Bismarck portrait contains the gem that Bismarck's idea of being a monarchist did include telling the Hohenzollern, repeatedly, that the Bismarcks had been in the Mark Brandenburg way longer than they had. Märkischer Uradel! Given the Bismarcks and the Kattes being related, I now wonder whether Katte ever teased Fritz with that. The Rhodes and Peters portraits among other things illustrate how you can write about two first degree colonialist exploiters without mentioning black people. At all. The Fritz and Voltaire portraits hold up reasonably well, minus the part where Ludwig, writing in 1924, had no idea about Voltaire/Madame Denis and thus buys that Voltaire just couldn't get it up anymore and that's why Émilie had over lovers.

Stefan Zweig: Die Welt von Gestern. Should be available in any format. These are his memoirs of his pre WWI youth in Vienna, written in 1942 shortly before his suicide, and they still count as one of the best portraits of Austrian, specifically Viennese society - as seen from a young Austrian-Jewish intellectual - of the era, the Habsburg world in its twilight years, and the Vienna that produced both Freud and Hitler and was irrevocably destroyed by the later.

I have one more ebook rec, which I'll mail to you since I can't give it here.

[mildred_of_midgard]

Ah, man, the Fuggers! They've been on my list to learn more about since before salon. Why must the the fascinating book be not digitized, while the one that's easily available to me is the one you said was Stollberg-Rilinger levels of dry. *grumble* (Theology isn't necessarily a turnoff, btw, given my interest in the history of Christianity, but if it's also dry, then no.)

I have bookmarked this comment and your email, thank you! If the day ever comes when I'm able to read German more or less comfortably, much of the credit will go to you. <3

[mildred_of_midgard]

Given the Bismarcks and the Kattes being related, I now wonder whether Katte ever teased Fritz with that.

Also, this is hilarious, and my new headcanon is that he did!