Examining changes in the eighteenth-century French translations of Homer's Iliad by Anne Dacier and Houdar de la Motte

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In her 1711 effort, Dacier (1651-1720) aspired to remain as close to the original as modern French and propriety would allow, and used prefatory and detailed annotation to praise Homer's genius and potency. By contrast, Motte (1672-1731) changed characters, incidents, and rhetoric in 1714 to match his conception of what a heroic poem should be to please his readers. Morton (English, McMaster U.) finds in the difference an expression of the basic hermeneutic disagreement of the Anciens and the Modernes about whether translating a poem of antiquity should carry attentive and unprejudiced readers back to the noble civilization of its origins, or should force the old text to fulfill the differing expectations of a new audience. The text is double spaced. Annotation : 2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).