- Title Pages
- Acknowledgements
- List of Illustrations
- Notes on Contributors
- Prologue
- Introduction
- Proemion
- 1 Fuzzy Connections
- 2 Pope’s Trojan Geography
- 3 Sophoclean Journeys
- 4 Cicero: Gentleman and Orator
- 5 Eating Eumolpus
- 6 After Freud
- 7 The Price of the Modern
- 8 Composite Cultures, Chaos Wor(l)ds
- 9 Time, Free Verse, and the Gods of Modernism
- 10 Lost in Nostalgia
- 11 No Consolation
- 12 The Abject Eidos
- 13 What’s Hecuba to him…that he should weep for her?
- 14 Modernism’s Nostalgics, Nostalgia’s Modernity
- 15 Mediating Trauma
- 16 History as Traumatic Memory
- 17 Reading the Invisible with Cees Nooteboom, Walter Benjamin, and Alberto Giacometti
- Conclusion
- Epilogue
- Index
Proemion
Proemion
Translating a Paean of Praise
- Chapter:
- (p.29) Proemion
- Source:
- Tradition, Translation, Trauma
- Author(s):
Frederick Ahl
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
This chapter presents the author’s account of the challenges of translating works such as the Odyssey and the Aeneid. It argues that a translator’s first concern in translating a famous Classical poem is not loyalty to original wording, but conformity with the consensus interpretation. The second is to simplify or remove ‘unnecessary complexities’ — a duty interpreted broadly if poetry is, as some believe, over-elaborated prose that can be pruned without loss.
Keywords: Aeneid, Odyssey, translation, epic poetry, translators
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- Title Pages
- Acknowledgements
- List of Illustrations
- Notes on Contributors
- Prologue
- Introduction
- Proemion
- 1 Fuzzy Connections
- 2 Pope’s Trojan Geography
- 3 Sophoclean Journeys
- 4 Cicero: Gentleman and Orator
- 5 Eating Eumolpus
- 6 After Freud
- 7 The Price of the Modern
- 8 Composite Cultures, Chaos Wor(l)ds
- 9 Time, Free Verse, and the Gods of Modernism
- 10 Lost in Nostalgia
- 11 No Consolation
- 12 The Abject Eidos
- 13 What’s Hecuba to him…that he should weep for her?
- 14 Modernism’s Nostalgics, Nostalgia’s Modernity
- 15 Mediating Trauma
- 16 History as Traumatic Memory
- 17 Reading the Invisible with Cees Nooteboom, Walter Benjamin, and Alberto Giacometti
- Conclusion
- Epilogue
- Index