All that I know of have problems, the main one being loss of etymological nuances and a 'free' rendering which presupposes the homeric choice of words to be almost an accident. It is difficult (or maybe just impossible) for a translator to keep all these, and still translate Homer as a poem and not in prose.
For a more detailed presentation see www.ellopos.net/elpenor/lessons/lesson2b.asp">Achilles' Grief (2nd part), near the end of the text (chapter: "Translating"), where I locate in Butler's translation a characteristic example of such problems, where Homer is completely betrayed.
And if you, Melisma, see the two text at the same time and use the Perseus tools (the Greek text has links, with the LSJ Lexicon and other windows in which occurs the morphological analysis) may be you will appreciate much better the beauty of the Homer’s text (for example the alliteration of k in the Agamemnon’s insult with he hurls Odysseus: Il. Iv. 338, or the repeated sound-patterns in the Nereid-list at Il. xviii. 43 -45) and make your own home made translation.
The professor Griffin (Homer, the Odyssey, p. 41) says: A paraphrase in prose cannot be quite like that. And yet it is very hard to produce a translation into a modern verse idiom of such a long poem, or into any verse idiom of a poem whose range, of subject-matter and of style, is so wide
See also:
MINCHIN, Elizabeth: Homer and the Resources of Memory: Some Applications of Cognitive Theory to the Iliad and the ..., page 88 ff.
Homer translations
Posted - 22 Dec 2006 : 07:48:19
