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]

I still didn't completely hate it, because it was a book

Whereas I am perfectly capable of hating a book if I don't understand it and I'm supposed to have Deep Thoughts about it, and my GPA is riding on my ability to convince my teacher/professor I have Deep Thoughts. :)

However, what seems to have been different from your experience is that we were not told we were wrong about anything;

Our essays would come back in a sea of red ink! I still remember my draft of a 5 paragraph essay in which the 3 middle paragraphs were entirely scratched out by the teacher and the first and last were heavily annotated. This shows you I was trying to do something that I didn't know how to do, not even a little bit, because I had never seen it done!

I learned to write literary criticism when I, gasp, started reading literary criticism.

passively rather than actively pedagogically bad? Like my US history teacher who just sometimes didn't come to class and told us to write outlines of our history book chapters which as far as we know she never looked at.)

Omg. I had one math teacher who phoned it in as best she could, but even she never did that! All my teachers were at least *trying*. Wow.

The flip side of all that trying is that they were constantly frustrated and we were constantly stressed.

Yeah, I tend to retain a lot more from fiction. Like, a month after having read them both at approximately the same time, I am retaining a lot more about Jemmy and Charles from The King's Touch than I am about the queens in A Game of Queens. But that of course is also a function of not knowing very much history :)

Exactly! Like Selena, I remembered *way* more from fiction until I was about 20. That's why I read historical fiction avidly as a teenager! But now that I can read nonfiction and follow along, the information per page is a whole lot denser, and thus I have a more rewarding experience and thus my brain is willing to put in the effort.

To our gracious hostess, writer of much historical fiction outside of Fritz and siblings that I have not read: it's not you, it's me.

I will say that tying what I'm reading to a fanfic, even one I'm almost certainly never going to write, helps with long-term retention. There's a reason I'm still focused on plotting my fix-it fic: I remember far more of the nonfiction I worked into my abandoned novel twenty years ago than the nonfiction I just read without using.

...Oh man, this phrasing hit a bell in my head: this is the Rozetta Stone style of learning languages

Oh right, I remember that! Ugh. I'm glad you found her a way of learning that worked better for her!

Although in a social, non-academic context I do like guessing about what's going to happen next in media

Oh, that's fine, I have no problem with that. See below.

Ironically, I'm also fine with guessing what a German word means, because I know it's okay if I'm wrong, because I'm learning the language. This is the exact thing we weren't allowed to do in language studies: we had to know every word in every sentence perfectly before we could move on to the next sentence...which is the exact wrong way to learn a language. *headdesk*

Being wrong was also not okay in literature: it meant red ink and a lower grade, which meant risking scholarship money, etc. (My parents were sure as hell not paying for my college, so my ability to go and then to stay was riding on my GPA in high school and then in college.) Which is why I was perfectly capable of hating a book that was stressing me out this much.

He laughed pretty hard at me, because I was not right even a little bit :)

Lol, that's funny!

They probably did expect me to guess what happened next, but I couldn't!

Oh, sorry, I wasn't clear. We weren't ever expected to guess what happened next. We were expected to guess how to do literary criticism, and how to write an essay on literary criticism, without ever having seen it done. Not knowing what happens next was only a small part of the problem (basically it made it even harder to follow a work that was over our heads and to develop insights as we went). Even once we'd finished what we were reading, or if it was a short story that we read in one go, we still didn't know how to do literary criticism at the level we were expected to.

(It wasn't that hard once I had READ SOME LITERARY CRITICISM, omg. Ditto how I learned to write an academic article. Not in grad school, when I was expected to write and publish academic articles and revise according to advisor and peer reviewer feedback, but afterward, when I was an independent scholar doing research projects that involved reading a bunch of other people's work. Suddenly all the things my profs had been trying to get me to do made sense, because as a consumer of academic articles, I now understood the reader's needs and could judge for myself how well I was meeting them. Previously, I had been writing as a student whose need was to please the professor or peer reviewer, and a lot of guessing was involved. It's very backwards, making us producers before consumers.)

A perfect example of the kind of thing we were expected to do is in Lois Duncan's YA novel Killing Mr. Griffin, about a bunch of high school students who kill their English teacher because they are fed up with exactly this:

"Mechanics okay," Griffin had written on one paper [that got a C]. "You have a grasp of grammar and punctuation, but the writing itself is shallow. There's nothing to it. Don't parrot back my lectures. Get under the surface. Tell me something about Hamlet I don't already know."

"Something he doesn't know!" David had exclaimed in frustration when that paper was returned to him. "He's supposed to be the expert. I'm just a student."

This was us! We were expected to have Deep Original Thoughts about literature and to articulate them in a scholarly manner, without a) understanding the works we were reading, b) having ever seen what literary scholarship looked like. By guessing. And being corrected. And guessing some more. And being corrected. I learned how to fake it for the grade, until I actually encountered examples in the wild and then started to *understand* how it all worked.

This is the exact equivalent of me asking you to analyze military tactics when all you've encountered is one description of a battle and you have never actually studied military tactics and you possibly never wanted to, and even if you did, also aren't invested in the War of the Spanish Succession and would rather be studying a different war. (A key part of me learning to do literary criticism was when I started doing it on works I wanted to read and think about, like the Aeneid, and not the stuff I was assigned, which I would never in a million years have read on my own and was bored by).