| ▲ | gjm11 12 hours ago | |
You're making two separable criticisms: (1) that Fable's translation is a mere "mishmash of Lattimore and Fagles" and (2) that it's a crappy one. I'm not seeing, from what you quote, how this is more "mishmash" than "translation of the same underlying text as them". As for whether it's crappy, that's a pretty subjective matter; for what little it's worth "of many turnings" doesn't seem particularly dreck-y to me; it seems in fact a rather literal rendering of "polytropos" and -- as Fable's footnote says -- one that maintains some of the ambiguity between "one whose paths have turned many ways" and "one with a twisty-turny sort of disposition". I am no scholar of ancient Greek and there's no reason why anyone should pay particular regard to my tastes on this; but what is asserted without evidence may be controverted without evidence. (The one thing in those three lines that I would describe as dreck is "driven far journeys" which to me seems barely grammatical. "Secret" seems like a weird choice, too.) | ||
| ▲ | suddenlybananas 12 hours ago | parent [-] | |
>driven far journeys" which to me seems barely grammatical "Tell me the man" and "of many turnings" sound far, far worse, not to mention the egregious em-dash. Obviously there's no way to really _prove_ what is good taste, but I would be quite surprised to hear you really think that Lattimore is worse than Claude here. >"Secret" seems like a weird choice, too This seems to be an OCR error from the source I copied online! Digging up a real copy, it's sacred rather than secret! I've since corrected this. | ||