Claude repeats man twice like Fagles, despite that not being in the Greek. Using driven and wandering is a weird repetition rather than just using "made to wander" which is a more natural way of directly translating the passive. Claude uses the "driven" in both Fagles and Lattimore. It also drops the "very" for no apparent reason (also not present in Fagles or Lattimore). Claude uses "once he had sacked Troy's holy citadel" mirroring Fagles's phasing, when you could just translate it "after he sacked the holy city of Troy". It also uses citadel rather than city, copying Lattimore.
Vis-à-vis polytropos, I just think that "man of many-turnings" sounds god-awful, but the similarity was mostly the fact it uses the construction "man of x" like Fagles and Lattimore rather than a normal adjective like in the Greek.
(Note: I'm sorry, I'm now realizing that my glosses were really bad, they provide a common basic meaning but that isn't always the sense that they have in the text, think "to bear arms" and "to bear a burden" in English having the same root and related meanings but different connotations)
Claude repeats man twice like Fagles, despite that not being in the Greek.
This style is not unique to Fagles. In Greek poetry modifying words (polytropon, for preceding andra ...) can be in apparently insensible locations not found in prose and speech, but accepted in poetry for the sake of meter and poetic style. In Greek, this heritage makes it acceptable, and the marked cases provide redundancy that allows the very flexible poetic word order. Here, there is a choice to capture the sense putting "man" before Muse as the focus of the sentence as in the Greek, and then repeat "the man" again before "of many turnings" because it is otherwise more ambiguous to just say "of many turnings" after "Muse".
Using driven and wandering is a weird repetition
I don't think it's negatively weird, it's a choice that tries to capture the range of senses that a Greek might associate with it.
It also drops the "very" for no apparent reason (also not present in Fagles or Lattimore)
Lattimore doesn't really capture this. Fagles captures this by using a more expressive "time and again" for "far"/"many".
Maybe one can argue that Claude choses to reflect extremity in this by giving both "driven" and "wandering".
once
This is a very understandable gloss that I had chosen to supply "after" instead. It is not an innovation by Fagles, but a choice Fagles from a small range of valid common choices.
It also uses citadel rather than city
I think citadel is altogether an appropriate general translation as well. It is described as "holy", and the Greek is a Homeric "ptoliethron" that everyday Attic/Ionic speakers would consider an archaic word, where the everyday word is the "polis" that you and I are familiar with.
If your opinion is that Claude does not have a consistent editorial voice that is preferable for translation, sure I agree. If your opinion is that it translates while being aware of and perhaps taking cues from prior translations, sure I agree, with the caveat that it also sees dictionary definitions, the Homeric Greek itself, common ways Homeric is translated, and more literal glosses, and it seems to me in fact to take more influence from these (at least, just by looking at this first line). But it is difficult for me to agree that it just mashes up two prior translations.
As for the criticism of editorial voice I wonder if it can be solved by a matter of prompting with expertise.
Comments
Claude repeats man twice like Fagles, despite that not being in the Greek. Using driven and wandering is a weird repetition rather than just using "made to wander" which is a more natural way of directly translating the passive. Claude uses the "driven" in both Fagles and Lattimore. It also drops the "very" for no apparent reason (also not present in Fagles or Lattimore). Claude uses "once he had sacked Troy's holy citadel" mirroring Fagles's phasing, when you could just translate it "after he sacked the holy city of Troy". It also uses citadel rather than city, copying Lattimore.
Vis-à-vis polytropos, I just think that "man of many-turnings" sounds god-awful, but the similarity was mostly the fact it uses the construction "man of x" like Fagles and Lattimore rather than a normal adjective like in the Greek.
(Note: I'm sorry, I'm now realizing that my glosses were really bad, they provide a common basic meaning but that isn't always the sense that they have in the text, think "to bear arms" and "to bear a burden" in English having the same root and related meanings but different connotations)
This style is not unique to Fagles. In Greek poetry modifying words (polytropon, for preceding andra ...) can be in apparently insensible locations not found in prose and speech, but accepted in poetry for the sake of meter and poetic style. In Greek, this heritage makes it acceptable, and the marked cases provide redundancy that allows the very flexible poetic word order. Here, there is a choice to capture the sense putting "man" before Muse as the focus of the sentence as in the Greek, and then repeat "the man" again before "of many turnings" because it is otherwise more ambiguous to just say "of many turnings" after "Muse".
I don't think it's negatively weird, it's a choice that tries to capture the range of senses that a Greek might associate with it.
Lattimore doesn't really capture this. Fagles captures this by using a more expressive "time and again" for "far"/"many".
Maybe one can argue that Claude choses to reflect extremity in this by giving both "driven" and "wandering".
This is a very understandable gloss that I had chosen to supply "after" instead. It is not an innovation by Fagles, but a choice Fagles from a small range of valid common choices.
I think citadel is altogether an appropriate general translation as well. It is described as "holy", and the Greek is a Homeric "ptoliethron" that everyday Attic/Ionic speakers would consider an archaic word, where the everyday word is the "polis" that you and I are familiar with.
If your opinion is that Claude does not have a consistent editorial voice that is preferable for translation, sure I agree. If your opinion is that it translates while being aware of and perhaps taking cues from prior translations, sure I agree, with the caveat that it also sees dictionary definitions, the Homeric Greek itself, common ways Homeric is translated, and more literal glosses, and it seems to me in fact to take more influence from these (at least, just by looking at this first line). But it is difficult for me to agree that it just mashes up two prior translations.
As for the criticism of editorial voice I wonder if it can be solved by a matter of prompting with expertise.