How Do Translations Depict Diomedes In The Iliad Differently?

2025-08-22 17:32:13 240

4 Answers

Declan
Declan
2025-08-23 13:56:48
I’ve bounced between translations for years and one thing always grabs me: diction. When a translator uses archaic words and steady line breaks, Diomedes often comes across as reserved and classical — someone carrying lineage and duty. When the language is modern and muscular, he’s more immediate, angry, impulsive, alive on the page.

Take the scene where he actually strikes at the gods (that wild moment when Athena empowers him to wound Aphrodite and Ares). Some versions make it startling, almost comic — a god recoiling — while literal translators keep the awkwardness and the taboo front-and-center, emphasizing how weird and dangerous it is for a mortal to lay hands on the divine. Then there’s the Glaucus episode: translators who stress hospitality and the exchange of armor make Diomedes look generous and tradition-bound; others who focus on irony bring out the futility of wartime loyalties. That shift in tone affects whether I root for him as a paragon or watch him with suspicion.
Grady
Grady
2025-08-24 20:52:02
Short and messy confession: I judge Diomedes by the translation’s music. If a translator keeps the jagged, repetitive lines of the "Iliad," he reads as ritual and duty incarnate; if the translator smooths things to modern prose, he becomes a hot-tempered, sympathetic guy you could see in a gritty movie. Small things — whether the translator renders his epithet as "godlike" or leans into "son of Tydeus," whether the Aphrodite scene is rendered as violent or oddly comic — tilt him toward hero or human. I now always read at least two versions; it’s like meeting two old friends who swore they knew the same man but tell wildly different stories about his worst night.
Owen
Owen
2025-08-25 10:09:31
I love how translators act like different tour guides on the same battlefield — each one makes Diomedes feel like a slightly different person. In my copy of "Iliad" translated by Lattimore, he’s blunt and liturgical: the lines are spare, the epithets sit heavy, and Diomedes reads as a disciplined, almost stoic warrior. Lattimore’s literalness keeps the harshness of the aristeia (that glorious slaughter in Book 5) very visible; you feel the mechanical clarity of combat and the ritual weight of honor.

By contrast, when I read Robert Fagles’ version I remember being swept along by the rhythm and the heat. Fagles makes Diomedes roar and sparkle — more human, more cinematic. The same scenes feel energetic and present, which pulls you toward admiration and excitement. Some translations, like Lombardo’s, tilt even more toward colloquial bluntness; Diomedes becomes grittier, almost contemporary in his outbursts.

Small choices — whether a translator preserves the repetitive epithets, softens the divine-wounding of Aphrodite, or renders the dialogue between Diomedes and Glaucus as formal versus friendly — change how sympathetic or fearsome he feels. I keep several translations on my shelf and flip between them; it’s the easiest way to see how translators are really co-authors, framing Diomedes either as a tragic, heroic ideal or as a sharply human, sometimes brutal man.
Elijah
Elijah
2025-08-26 08:27:19
I’ll say this: reading multiple translations of the "Iliad" changed how I view Diomedes more than any scholarly article did. One translation presented him almost as a cold strategist — precise verbs, minimal flourish, which made his killing feel ritualized. Another portrayed him with lyrical lines that made his courage seem tragic and beautifully doomed. The difference often comes down to three translation levers:

- Word choice and register: literal vs. idiomatic. Literal translations preserve repetitive epithets and formal speech, creating a heroic distance. Idiomatic renderings make Diomedes accessible and emotionally immediate.

- Handling of divine episodes: some translators downplay supernatural grotesqueness (softening Aphrodite’s wounding), others keep it raw, showing the sacrilegious shock of a mortal hurting a god. That decision reshapes his moral silhouette.

- Treatment of similes and speeches: expansions, cuts, or poetic reconstructions can make Diomedes seem either full-bodied or a rhetorical construct.

I personally switch between versions when I want analysis (literal) and when I want to feel the battlefield (poetic). It’s like toggling between an annotated map and a high-adrenaline documentary, and it’s astonishing how the same man can be a principled hero in one text and an almost tragic brute in another.
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