The Odyssey by Homer, Translated by Samuel Butler
At first glance I thought this was the same translation I read from Standard Ebooks, but in fact I believe that was by William Cullen Bryant.[0] Both translations use the Roman names of the deities rather than the Greek. I found this odd and more than a bit confusing, but from reading the preface to the Bryant translation it seems that this approach was chosen because the Roman names were, at the time, much more recognisable to the English-speaking public. This seems strange to me now--while the names of the Roman deities are familiar to us because of the planets, I think most people would be more familiar with Zeus and Poseidon <i>as deities</i> than Jupiter and Neptune.<p>Bryant&#x27;s defence of the approach is interesting:<p>&gt; In the Preface to my version of the Iliad, I gave very briefly my reason for preserving the names derived from the Latin, by which the deities of the Grecian mythology have hitherto been known to English readers —that is to say, Jupiter, Juno, Neptune, Pluto, Mars, Venus, and the rest, instead of Zeus, Herè, and the other names which are properly Greek. As the propriety of doing this is questioned by some persons of exact scholarship, I will state the argument a little more at large. The names I have employed have been given to the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece from the very beginnings of our language. Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and the rest, down to Proctor and Keats —a list whose chronology extends through six hundred years —have followed this usage, and we may even trace it back for centuries before either of them wrote. Our prose writers have done the same thing; the names of Latin derivation have been adopted by the earliest and latest translators of the New Testament. To each of the deities known by these names there is annexed in the mind of the English reader —and it is for the English reader that I have made this translation —a peculiar set of attributes. Speak of Juno and Diana, and the mere English reader understands you at once; but when he reads the names of Herè and Artemis, he looks into his classical dictionary. The names of Latin origin are naturalized; the others are aliens and strangers. The conjunction and itself, which has been handed down to us unchanged from our Saxon ancestors, holds not its place in our language by a firmer and more incontestable title than the names which we have hitherto given to the deities of ancient Greece. We derive this usage from the Latin authors —from Virgil, and Horace, and Ovid, and the prose writers of ancient Rome. Art as well as poetry knows these deities by the same names. We talk of the Venus de Medicis, the Venus of Milo, the Jupiter of Phidias, and never think of calling a statue of Mars a statue of Ares.<p>&gt; For my part, I am satisfied with the English language as it has been handed down to us. If the lines of my translation had bristled with the names of Zeus and Herè, and Poseidon and Ares, and Artemis and Demeter, I should feel that I had departed from the immemorial usage of the English tongue, that I had introduced obscurity where the meaning should have been plain, and that I had given just cause of complaint to the readers for whom I wrote.<p>0: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;standardebooks.org&#x2F;ebooks&#x2F;homer&#x2F;the-odyssey&#x2F;william-cullen-bryant" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;standardebooks.org&#x2F;ebooks&#x2F;homer&#x2F;the-odyssey&#x2F;william-...</a>