/lit/ - Literature

No. Start with the chinese.

>>18306852
Cringe

>>18306852
Nothing in the Chinese canon compares to the Iliad.

Remember to only listen to it on Audiobook to help preserve the oral tradition of Homer.

>>18306966
Recommendations?

>>18306710
i did

>>18306852
>just be a bootlicker slave to the state t. ching chong #3454353634
no thanks

>>18307000
>Recommendations?
If you like the Pope translation Librivox's audio version is good. And free. They also have other translations but I have not listened to those yet.
https://librivox.org/the-iliad-pope-translation-by-homer/

Just finished the part in the Odyssey where Odeysues blinded the Cyclops. I didn't realize this and the Illiad are so vividly violent. I remember reading the Odyssey in highschool but I think it was like an abridged version in a textbook and we all were assigned characters to read aloud.
Did anyone else read some kind of abriged textbook version in school? feels like an embarassing signifier of a shitty public school education.

Best translation?

>>18306710
I don’t read.

>>18307060
>Odyssey in highschool
What?
I'm Swedish and we were told to read books like Lord of the Flies and 1984 and from what I've gathered from /lit/ that's on the high end of what people worldwide were told to read in high school.
Being told to read the Odyssey sounds crazy. Do you mean you were given excerpts to read?

I'm a millennial btw.

>>18307064
Lattimore if you want accuracy to Homer's poetic meter.
Fagles or Mitchell if you want it more readable and prosaic.
Pope if you want a more grandiose "classical" feel.

One should read it several times in one's life in different translations.

start with the Egyptians, the sole inspiration for everything greek.

>>18306959
Three Kingdoms is better

I won't start with what a 4channer says
my heart is enough
that being said I started with the hindus

>>18307178
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAAHAHHAAHAHAHHAAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAAHAHAH

>>18307136
I went to a top high school and we were assigned oedipus rex

>>18307136
that's what I am saying, we DIDNT read the actual Odyssey. It was something in a textbook and we acted it out like a table read. I barely remember anything besides the plot points like the cyclops and sirens and the sad part with the dog.
I just feel gypped by my education is all. They basically made us read the Odyssey plot wiki page, it feels so lazy when they could be teaching us about history and literature and a foundational piece of culture.

>>18307200
You know it's true. The Illiad is actually not that good, Achilles is a winny faggot and so is Agammenon. No character is as great as Caocao. Homer has good presentation, but the story is weak. Three Kingdoms surpasses Homer in plot and matches in epicness, losing in presentation. Dream of the Red Chamber surpasses in plot and matches in presentation, losing in epicness. The disadvantage of the chinese is that they don't have a founding classic.

I started reading the Illiad and it's so gay. It is like I am reading about overemotional twinks in the Greek Dark Age.

>>18307060
I read a fucking abridged, prose, ILLUSTRATED version of the Iliad and the Odyssey as as child. The illustrations were great but obviously it was heavily sanitized. For example, in the kiddy version, Hera simply lulls Zeus to sleep so Poseidon can go help the Achaeans, as opposed to riding his dick like she does in the actual poem.

>tfw I'll never be best bros with someone like Achilles and Patroclus

>>18307346
I actual got a chub reading that part

>>18307271
lmao no

>>18307060
No, we just watched the movie.

>>18306710
>reading fiction

>>18306710
>skipping the Mesopotamians and the Egyptians
Why not try to surpass everybody else? What will you achieve by only doing what everyone else has done?

>>18307136
I read The Odyssey in high school and I went to an urban public school here in the US. This was in the mid 1990s though.

does the Iliad make sense on its own or do you have to read mythology.

>>18307271
>t. Chang

>>18307136
I went to a shitty high school in North Carolina and we read the Odyssey in 9th grade. I still have my copy - Oxford classic edition. Looks just like this

>>18307228
Public education is pure evil.

>>18306710
Good timing or this thread. Just finished the last book I was reading, and am now going to re-read the Iliad and the Odyssey as well as Aeschylus' plays.

>>18307136
Im from the baltics and we had to read the Greeks/ancient classics (Oedipus, Homer's works, Dante) in the 10th grade. Almost nobody understood shit and it was mostly excerpts.

>>18306852
mediterraneans
now

>>18306852
>uggh dude what if everything was subjective

>>18306852
>Zhuangzi
you are too good for this website, anon

Why are we still pretending the Iliad isn't just proto-shonen.

>>18307060
I got to read the iliad, Odyssey and the Aenid as part of classical studies in secondary

>>18307352
they fucked each other in the ass

>>18307494
You can just jump right in.

The Iliad is literally the very start of "Western literature" as we know it, since almost all subsequent literature and philosophy responds to it in some way. For example, one of the reasons Plato writes his dialogues is to challenge ideas in Athenian society that have their origins in Homer.

>>18308029
this meme is litererally 100% of indian + chinese + japanese philosophy

>>18308184
It's a meme. Fucking awful book.

>>18308184
It's almost as if action, drama, and violence are endemic to the human condition, and a story that features them gets our attention in a fundamental way, and can therefore go on to also comment on certain other features of human existence, like the duty one has to one's family, and the fleeting nature of fame and glory.

>>18307000
This was a try.
https://youtu.be/qI0mkt6Z3I0

>>18306710
I wish I liked it but I just don't, it's just "x killed y via z" for most of the chapters.

>>18309381
We're living in the most peaceful time in history in the first world, violence is absolutely not endemic to our condition.

>>18306710
Mud hut shit. Start with the Hyperborean sagas.

When I first read the Illiad, I had such high expectations. But once I began, I couldn't wait to finish. I guess it should be read for its historical significance, but don't expect anything amazing.

>>18309643
Wrong. So insanely wrong.
Go back.

>>18309706
Lol war is over deal with it

Wtf Homer had an ankle fetish

>>18310434
Patrician.

>>18307060
>>18307346
I also read what felt like an abridged version of the Odyssey in our equivalent of a high school here in Brazil but it wasn't illustrated, felt really long and I remember it being violent. Felt more like they abridged it for length than anything. But my memory fails me, that was in the early 2000s.

>Start with Homer.

>>18307017
How am I supposed to listen to this without constantly having an erection

>>18307271
>Homer has good presentation, but the story is weak.
>story
>s
>t
>o
>r
>y

>>18311678
care to explain?

>>18307136
>>18307228
After I found out you can't just google and read the first book you find if it was originally not written in English, I realized the same thing.
I had no idea about how translations were approached until recently. Like how to change the language. Do you make it as literal as possible or do you make the speech like we would talk today? Do you make it flowery? etc.
I sincerely doubt the thing I read was Romeo & Juliet. And shit like that made me hate reading.
I'm 30 now and just realized I love reading and I'm so damn far behind that I'm asking for recommendations for short stories in threads so I can consume lots of neat ideas and well tuned slices of worlds because I know I can't read very fast and probably couldn't finish very many novels in a year.

>>18307060
WHew.
I'm going to need a source.

>>18306710
You should read it because it had a profound influence on western literature and it's hard to read subsequent works without being aware of it. It's also a great poem by itself.
You probably want people to read it because you're some kind of trad larper though.

>>18306852
The only thing from china worth reading is thd dao te ching and thats after having extensive study on buddhism, zen and western philosophy.

>>18307271
>The disadvantage of the chinese is that they don't have a founding classic.
Aren't these guys:
>Romance of the Three Kingdoms
>Water Margin
>Journey to the West
>Dream of the Red Chamber
The Chinese version of our Iliad/Odyssey, in terms of cultural gravitas?

Reading in pseudo-chronological order is like /ic/ telling art newfags to start by grinding boxes and anatomy. Start by reading something easy, fun and relatively modern.

>>18312503
But you can see that while Homer is as old as what is called western civilization(being literally the founding text of it), the four classics are as old as Cervantes and Shakespeare on average. And that's with the chinese world being even older than the western.

>>18312521
In all honesty I have not read any Chinese Classical works, so I don't know how good they are.

>>18306710
That being said, I have read Homer, and the Odyssey is far better than the Iliad is.

>>18306710
if you don't read it in it's original ancient Greek, don't even bother, you will forever remain a pleb.

>>18306710
If you don't start with the Epic of Gilgamesh in the original Akkadian, don't even bother, you will forever remain a pleb.

>>18307060
>>18312445
same

>>18309756
>Anon said while Palestinian children are bombed.

>>18306710
Why the fuck do people read Homer?
Maybe the poetry is good if you're a native speaker of ancient Greek, but nobody alive today is a native speaker of ancient Greek.
Maybe the story is good, but there have been much better stories written since then.
Maybe the characters are good, but there have been much better character-driven stories since then.
There isn't anything in Homer that stands out as great, and I can't stand the pseuds (including professors) who read Homer over and over again insisting that they get something out of it every time. Read new books. Read new poetry. Read something novel (pun intended).

Imagine still getting filtered by Homer after three millennia.

>Years ago a musician said to me: 'But isn't there a place where you can get it all [meaning all of poetry] as in Bach?' There isn't. I believe if a man will really learn Greek he can get nearly 'all of it ' in Homer. I have never read half a page of Homer without finding melodic invention, I mean melodic invention that I didn't already know. I have, on the other hand, found also in Homer the imaginary spectator, which in 1918 I still thought was Henry James' particular property. Homer says, 'an experienced soldier would have noticed'. The sheer literary qualities in Homer are such that a physician has written a book to prove that Homer must have been an army doctor. (When he describes certain blows and their effect, the wounds are said to be accurate, and the description fit for coroner's inquest.) Another French scholar has more or less shown that the geography of the Odyssey is correct geography; not as you would find it if you had a geography book and a map, but as it would be in a 'periplum ', that is, as a coasting sailor would find it. The news in the Odyssey is still news. Odysseus is still 'very human', by no means a stuffed shirt, or a pretty figure taken down from a tapestry. It is very hard to describe some of the homeric conversation, the irony, etc., without neologisms, which my publishers have suggested I eschew.
- Ezra Pound, Abc of Reading.

>>18313629
>The sheer literary qualities in Homer are such that a physician has written a book to prove that Homer must have been an army doctor. (When he describes certain blows and their effect, the wounds are said to be accurate, and the description fit for coroner's inquest.)
He should be good at it, considering 90% of the book is composed of that.

>>18312342
"story" is just a vessel for the themes, the plot is of no importance, if you complain about the story in the Iliad, that's just plain evidence of a supremely retarded, surface-level reading

>>18309643
Great, and it only took us tens of thousands of years to get this far. Meanwhile these first world countries have been embroiled in foreign wars for the last several decades. War isn't gone, it's just less lethal than it used to be when you smashed two masses of soldiers against each other until one beat the other.

>>18312517
pyw, if it's shit I won't follow your advice.