In high school, we were assigned to compare Alexander Pope's translation of the Iliad to Fagles et al, but I really missed out by skipping Pope's foreword—all the eighteenth century 🔥 dunks on his predecessors!!
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"Hobbes…is now and then guilty of mistakes, into which no writer of his learning could have fallen, but through carelessness. His poetry, as well as Ogilby's, is too mean for criticism." 💀💀
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😀I have a weird hobby of reading translations of the Odyssey and comparing them with the original. So far, this one is my favorite:
bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2018/2018.10.5
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It's easy to find fault with almost any translation of poetry. But as poetry often transcends the mere denotational semantics of what is being said, so sometimes foreign readers transcend the mushy blanket of translation to reach the beating heart of the original.