Blind Reading Test Reveals Which Odyssey Translation Readers Prefer
Which Odyssey translation wins a blind reading test?
We hid translator names and asked over 1,500 readers to compare eight English versions of the Odyssey in a blind test. Robert Fagles emerged as the clear winner across multiple statistical models, while Emily Wilson, despite having the highest search attention, ranked sixth. Our analysis shows that popularity and archaic language do not necessarily predict reader preference in this self-selected social media sample.
Mild stylistic archaism is often accepted without question in translations of ancient texts and can be presented as if it were a mark of authenticity.
- branon
I got Robert Fitzgerald, wish it would tell me which passages were by which authors after I finished though
ah, it does, to an extent at least - about 2/3rds down the front page, ctrl+f for "opening"
- lordleft
Fagles was what I read when I first read the Iliad/Odysseus years ago, and I was happy to see him pop up as my revealed preference via the test. I'm also a big fan of Lombardo.
- npinsker
“How much you enjoy the prose” doesn’t really seem like the metric by which we should rank these? I’d prefer to read whatever’s most faithful to the original, which isn’t measured here.