The Odyssey of Homer读后感精选

《The Odyssey of Homer》是一本由Homer著作，Harper Perennial Modern Classics出版的平装图书，本书定价：USD 14.99，页数：400，特精心收集的读后感，希望对大家能有帮助。

《The Odyssey of Homer》读后感(一)：Love

人类才有短短一段生命，才可以说，我将我的全部的时间都给了你。 神不可以的。 人类才可以说，我永远和你在一起。 人是有永远的。 我将我全部的时间给你。 我们永远在一起。 我原先信afterlife的，还有life after life。 现在我不信了。 我将我的余生给一个人。 心甘情愿，毫不吝惜。

在你身边，我连爱上别人也是快乐的。

《The Odyssey of Homer》读后感(二)：一个好故事

去年暑假读Iliad，作为史诗阅读的开端，今年终于把荷马史诗的第二本读完了。这是至今读过的第三本希腊神话的“二手书”。相比伊利亚特，我更喜欢奥德赛，感觉荷马在这部书里把讲故事技能发挥得淋漓尽致。就叙事视角来说，故事虽然是全知叙述，但是有两条平行线：一是从奥德修斯的视角讲述他的遭遇-这是主线；另一条则是以奥德修斯国内亲人视角展开故事-以奥德修斯儿子为主。就叙事顺序来说，故事不像伊利亚特那样按时间顺序展开，主要采用插叙，因为书的开端奥德修斯就已经经历了各种奇幻冒险，被某女神救下并扣押在小岛上了，故事讲述的是这个时间点以后发生的事情，而之前的冒险是通过奥德修斯自己讲述我们才得知的。也就是说，荷马采用的是框架叙事。比较有意思的是，后来奥德修斯回到国内，和儿子相遇后，两条叙事线就交织在一起了。和单纯的奇幻冒险相比，我反而更喜欢奥德修斯回国以后的部分。各种人物刻画得惟妙惟肖：有奥德修斯的隐忍与谋略、儿子telemachos的成长与成熟、妻子Penelope的忠贞、养猪人eumaios的善意正直、各种追求者的恬不知耻各种甩锅、还有各色人物当面一套 背后一套等等。每个人都是既善言辞又感情丰富：男主女主一想到过去就大哭，英雄们对失去队友沉痛的哀悼。很喜欢人情浓浓人性满满的情节。比如奥德修斯在冥界遇见各种已经过世的人，每个人讲述自己的故事表达情绪-尤其是奥德修斯和已故母亲相遇的情节；又如奥德修斯的老狗都老得走不动但是依然能辨认出昔日的主人并向他摇尾。诗人善用陌生化手法讲故事，比如不说she stopped crying，而是说she sated with tears；不说they were full，而说they put away their desire for eating and drinking。此外，诗人还很喜欢用重复、类比等修辞手法。关于类比，其实就是用大家更熟悉的场景来让诗人描述的情境或感觉更生动更接地气。读奥德赛，我也学到了不同的事物是有不同颜色的，如green fear, black death， wine blue sea water。这是一个不错的故事，有情节、有技巧。啊，感觉要在读史诗的道路上越走越远了。

《The Odyssey of Homer》读后感(三)：On translation

In the last 6 months I've been reading poems almost exclusively, although in itself it is probably not saying much. The slight fatigue is understandable after near 2,000 pages of In Search of Lost Time and 800+ pages of Underworld. Nevertheless I was going to read Ulysses next but it occurred to me maybe I should actually read Odyssey first. After some due diligence online I decided to read Lattimore's translation side by side with Fagles', that somehow rekindled my interests in poetry and translation.

The apparent preference to Lattimore by the academia can be adequately summarized by what I found in a web post:

"But, in my opinion, to whatever extent (Fagles) makes The Odyssey comfortable, he perforce conceals its true alienness. The Lattimore rendering, to my ear, is primitive, pagan, grand, hypnotic, and wild—as it should be."

But a friend of mine pointed out that the “primitiveness” that purported by Lattimore was maybe itself an illusion, it gives you a false sense of satisfaction that you are reading the epic in Greek as Homer intended but it really is more of a mimic in English, which is deliberately twisted, awkward and worse, maybe totally unwarranted. He pointed me to an article on Carne-Ross that discusses at length a translator’s proper role, using Homer as an example. The article sees the modern preference to scholarly accurate translations as a sign of declination of poetry and attributes it to the practical demands of high school classrooms. Lattimore then becomes the natural point of attack:

“Carne-Ross thought Lattimore's dedication to literal, word-for-word accuracy—the very quality for which the translation is ordinarily praised—had produced a perverse and unreadable distortion of Homer. He was right. Lattimore's Iliad is tone-deaf and often unclear…”

Now as a (unfortunately, linguistically-challenged) common reader I'm not sure I agree with the sentiment. I don't know if Lattimore's Odysseus is “unreadable”, I read it and enjoyed it. It's like someone (don't remember whom now) dismissed Carlos Kleiber as a “crowd-pleaser”. My reaction was well, I'm a face in the crowd and I'm pleased.

The article observes that the poet-translator's inventions are not “licenses, they are necessary freedom” and goes on to proclaim that a standard to be used to judge a translator should be

“…not the schoolman’s literal linguistic equivalence, but a no less daunting standard: they must be ‘dictated by insight into the original.’ ”

Now this “insight”, according to this article, is pretty much the poet-translator’s personal interpretation on the subject. The model poet-translators are Pope and Fitzgerald whose translations of Homers both, the article acknowledges, “deviate felicitously from the Greek.” Case in point: in Book XI when Odysseus visited the underworld, Fitzgerald wrote “Ajax, it was – the great shade burning still”, where Homer simply wrote “the spirit of Ajax.” This treatment is regarded as masterful as I quote in full below:

Carne-Ross hears behind those words not Homer but Virgil who, centuries after Homer, had sent his own hero Aeneas to the underworld, where he encountered, uncomfortably, the spirit of his estranged lover Dido. Virgil describes her as ardentem et torva tuentem, “burning and glaring savagely.” A narrowly scholastic view of translation would castigate Fitzgerald’s Virgilian interpolation, but Carne-Ross’s justification is masterly:

"Fitzgerald lets the Latin speak through the Greek because his vision is synoptic; he knows that the Odyssey is part of a larger whole in which the poems of Virgil and Milton and the other great poets of our tradition have a simultaneous existence (to borrow words from Eliot's “Tradition and the Individual Talent”). He does what Pope does when, translating the Iliad, he lets Milton’s “High on the throne of Royal State . . . Satan exalted sat” speak through his English Homer: “High in the midst the great Achilles stands,” “High o'er the Host, all terrible he stands.”

Anachronism aside, I do applaud Carne-Ross' caliber of hearing Virgil in Homer that Fitzgerald so cleverly planted there. And I'm sure this hide-and-seek between two poet-translators were all jolly good fun too, but I also think it's safe to assume Homer probably didn't see this coming. Carne-Ross apparent thinks that if Homer were to be informed of this he would approve too. I agree that Odyssey is now “part of a larger whole”, but I suspect injecting Virgil into Homer is doing it backwards. It's probably true that when Virgil wrote “ardentem et torva tuentem” he was thinking of Homer, that vivid image of Ajax coming to Odysseus in his apparitional rage that must be burning like a pale fire (see it's actually not that difficult to do) inspired him. And it’s admirable that Fitzgerald identified this, made that connection, which warrants a footnote, but not in the text itself.

Pound would probably, as I understand it, laugh off this idea of translator's insight. According to him there are but three types of poetry, Melopoeia, Phanopoeia and Logopoeia. Melopoeia “is practically impossible to transfer or translate”; Phanopoeia can “be translated almost, or wholly, intact”; and Logopoeia “does not translate”. Nevertheless I do agree a translator's insight is critical to the integrity of the translation, but it should be clearly indicated as such, when appropriate, to the extent possible. Instead, by directly inject his vision in the translation, especially by invoking images or metaphors not in the original text, the translator is making a definitive call as to what was in the author's mind. It's imprudent to say the least, and what's worse, it eliminates other legitimate interpretations, and as a result, deprived the readers their own chances of inspiration.

Book XI to me is the most powerful part of the whole epic. Right off the bat, is the startling scene of an endless stream of dead coming out of the boundless darkness and flocking in to Odysseus' pyre, brides, unwedded youth, old men, sorrow-stricken girls, slaughtered soldiers. When I first read this, I instantly thought of the lines from “Wasteland”:

Unreal City,

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.

These lines themselves, as Eliot properly indicated in a footnote, were drawn from Dante. I can see now that the resemblance between the Homer lines and the Eliot lines is probably superficial, but making that initial connection is itself a wonderful thing. I’m sure western literature is full of depiction of a silent march of an army of dead, maybe they all originated, in one form or another, from these Homer lines, or maybe these Homer lines were inspired by some even more ancient work. By translating the Homer lines accurately and truthfully, a translator leaves the, for lack of a better phrase, reference structure in the literature universe unaltered, and a reader can draw his own associations and inspirations. By injecting one’s own interpretation into the text, you gave the readers one version, a real gem maybe, but you rob them the world.

And there is of course, Borges, who famously argued in "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" that a word-for-word rewrite, the exact copy in Spanish that is, NOT a translation, of Don Quixote in 19th century would be a completely different book than Cervantes' original, because each of the same word was in 19th century then imbued with all the meanings in the past centuries after Cervantes' time. A fascinating proposition, which carries enormous implication especially for translation of ancient works. Fagles turned me off a bit on page 1, where he made Athena say of Odysseus, "The exile must return", where Lattimore simply wrote: "He must come back." Now, the return of the exile carries too onerous a religious connotation it just out of place here.

I'm not calling Carne-Ross' critics on Lattimore elitism, but the reason he considers Fitzgerald’s translation superior does sound like an insider wink-wink more than anything else. This could be a whole new topic, but I think all those 校簽 and 注疏 by Chinese poet-commentators contain endless variety of such scholarly battering – on any particular character of a poem, one commentator can make a dozen citations of similar uses or direct references from all over the place, just to make another commentator come in and say “that is just a 通假字 to another character, I can’t believe you didn’t pick that up you idiot.” It is surely fun to do and to read, but it’s not the systematic, institutionalized western literature criticism as we commonly know it.