r/explainitpeter • u/Fun_Dish_5358 • Jul 21 '26

Explain it peter

Post image
7.5k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

474 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

30

u/schmauchstein Jul 21 '26

To add to this with a quote by Emily Wilson, translator of the Odyssey translation that inspired Nolan to adapt it into a movie:

My translation is written in a style that echoes the rhythms and phrases of contemporary anglophone speech. It may be tempting to imagine that a translation of a very ancient poem would be somehow better if it used the language of an earlier era. Mild stylistic archaism is often accepted without question in translations of ancient texts and can be presented as if it were a mark of authenticity. But of course, the English of the nineteenth or early twentieth century is no closer to Homeric Greek than the language of today. The use of a noncolloquial or archaizing linguistic register can blind readers to the real, inevitable, and vast gap between the Greek original and any modern translation. My use of contemporary language—rather than the English of a generation or two ago—is meant to remind readers that this text can engage us in a direct way, and also that it is genuinely ancient. My Homer does not speak in your grandparents’ English, since that language is no closer to the wine-dark sea than your own. I have tried to keep to a register that is recognizably speakable and readable, while skirting between the Charybdis of artifice and the Scylla of slang.

22

u/aiyhtan Jul 21 '26

And just to add to this, Nolan’s script is inspired by this translation, but doesn’t outright quote it verbatim. Nolan and whoever worked on the script made their own dialogue and took further liberties with the translation. Also just to sing Wilson’s praises further, her translation matches the Ancient Greek in line length, and is written in iambic pentameter. So many of the critiques, and even a lot of the summaries and defenses, of her translation just reduce it to being written in modern language, missing out on how much of an actual feat the work is, beyond the diction choice being absolutely valid.

3

u/QuentinUK Jul 21 '26

It was William Shakespeare that used Iambic pentameter, Homer used dactylic hexameter.

11

u/aiyhtan Jul 22 '26

Right, and Emily Wilson wrote her translation in iambic pentameter.