[suddenlybananas]

Oh I totally agree there is a place for more accessible language, but my point is that Wilson argues that archaic language is no more faithful. Whether a translation should be faithful or not is another question.

>“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.”

However, I think this is mistaken if Homer himself was writing in an archaic style at the time (which seems to be the case looking at the literature). If he's writing in an archaic style, then a faithful English translation ought to try and capture that aspect of the poetry.

[TheCoelacanth]

I don't think Homeric Greek was archaic at the time it was composed. It would have been by the time it was finally written down instead of being passed down orally.

There is a lot of archaism in the content, though much of it is fake archaism that doesn't reflect actual history.

[suddenlybananas]

There were artificial archaisms in Homer, like the inconsistent use of the digamma. It wasn't written in normal everyday language.

[TheCoelacanth]

Where are you getting this information?

Everything I can see puts that development well after the poems' composition around 800-700 BCE, though perhaps before they had been fully written down.

If I understand correctly, it's a minority but not completely fringe opinion among historians that a major motivation for inventing the Greek alphabet in the first place may have so that they would be able to write down Homer.

[suddenlybananas]

The digamma was never used in Homer's written form, but the poetic metre in some place is done such that there would be a digamma there and in some places, they don't modify the metre to adapt to the digamma.

[TheCoelacanth]

There's a two-hundred year gap been it bring composed to capturing it in written form. It was in oral form and didn't written down (outside of some short fragements) for the ~200 year.

When the The Odyssey was composed, widespread use of digamma sound was still a big thing.

I can easily believe that anachronistic language was added in the process of writing them down, but the original audience wasn't people reading in a book; it was people who were listening to a poem that had never been written down.

There is a huge amount of anacronistic content, but when it was first performed, language was relatively contemporary at the start.

[KaiserPro]

> However, I think this is mistaken if Homer himself was writing in an archaic style at the time (which seems to be the case looking at the literature)

Now that is a debate for the ages!

There is an argument that its was written in that style because that's how it was sung/spoken. In the same way that the king james bible was poetic, but not archaic (thats an assertion that I haven't got direct evidence to back up, apart from it was radical to not have it in latin.)

However to us the king james verse: "And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep." sounds majestic where as a more modern version: "Now the earth was without shape and empty, and darkness[h] was over the surface of the watery deep" doesn't

Now if we were to move to more secular texts, part of the appeal of brigerton, apart from the sex, is the funny language. But at the time it wasn't archaic.

The same with raymond chandler, his novels were fast rolling and hard hitting police procedurals, but now the language is the part that evokes the atmosphere.

I think I agree with wilson, largely. Culture has a half life, some of it shorter than others. Part of the reason that the greek myths have endured is because they have been re-interpreted so often. After all a lot of later interpretations are mashed together from the entire canon, so are not "accurate" in any sense of the word. Also they are myths. The interpretation of them says almost as much about us as it does the greeks. Like how scifi is almost always social commentary.

tldr: yeah we pretty much agree.