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The Seldom Killer:
Just finished Tears of the Giraffe by McCall Smith and Blood Hunt by Ian Rankin. Reckon I'll follow that up with Her Fearful Symmetry by Niffeneger. I really enjoyed The Time Traveller's Wife and I reckon this should stack up. Nothing too taxing my reading recently, although I'm quite close to splugging on the new William Gibson.

Inlander:
I'm refreshing my brain a little now by reading the new Iain M. Banks, then it's going to be into my Christmas read -  the Iliad. I always have trouble deciding which translation of classic literature to read, but I picked up the Robert Fagles translation published by Penguin because it's just such a beautiful object.

Joseph:
If you get a chance, find the Robert Fitzgerald translation and read through that a little. It's the one I read in the fall, when I wanted to go over The Iliad again, and it was wonderful. Easily the most lucid and compelling Homer I've looked through, and the one favoured by such discerning critics as Guy Davenport and James Laughlin. The edition which is in print now isn't so very pretty, but I found a first edition of his Odyssey in a used bookstore, and it's stunning. Going to be reading that once I'm through with exams.

smack that isaiah:
I gotta say though, the Fagles translation is amazing.  I have a set of both of his translations for The Iliad and the Odyssey, bound in a fake leather.  They are wonderful, and the margins are full of my little notes from the very many times I've read them.

I've also read a translation that was something like from Greek to Chinese, then to English (the book had the Chinese on the left and English on the right), and all the flavor and elegance was lost in the double translation.  (on the order of "Antilochus, Nestor's son, threw his spear and killed the first Trojan captain."  very bland)

Joseph:
It's worth noting that there are very many translations which manage to mangle the verse without needing to go through the steps twice.
It's also worth noting that the first of Ezra Pound's Cantos is, primarily, a double translation of the Odyssey, being a translation into English of a Renaissance Latin translation by Andreas Divus. And it is incredibly striking in its language:


--- Quote from: Ezra Pound ---And then went down to the ship,
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and
We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,
Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also
Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward
Bore us onward with bellying canvas,
Crice's this craft, the trim-coifed goddess.
Then sat we amidships, wind jamming the tiller,
Thus with stretched sail, we went over sea till day's end.
Sun to his slumber, shadows o'er all the ocean,
Came we then to the bounds of deepest water,
To the Kimmerian lands, and peopled cities
Covered with close-webbed mist, unpierced ever
With glitter of sun-rays
Nor with stars stretched, nor looking back from heaven
Swartest night stretched over wreteched men there.
The ocean flowing backward, came we then to the place
Aforesaid by Circe.

--- End quote ---

Guy Davenport - the remarkable poet, story-writer, critic (of culture and literature), translator, and an all around astute man - has a very good essay (which predates Fagles translation, to be fair) on the merits of various tranlations of Homer. It's called "Another Odyssey", and is in his large book of essays The Geography of Criticism, alongside pieces on the work of Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Louis Zukofsky, Charles Olson, Jonathan Williams, and many other remarkable things. You can read most of the essay here. The Davenport book really is worth tracking down though, as is pretty well everything else he wrote or translated; over the past year, he has perhaps been the writer I've been returning to the most often.

Honourable mentions to Vladimir Nabokov, Robert Bringhurt, Jan Zwicky, Hilary Mantel, Dennis Lee, Jane Austen and Marilynne Robinson though.

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