Hey guys, happy Friday and welcome to an entirely new segment on Young Heritage. And now for something completely different.

Fridays, as most of you guys know, are when I usually stray a little bit from the

typical format of the show. On Tuesdays I will always be delivering the usual hour-long

episode. It will be about some topic or work from the Western Canon, in particular all of this year we're talking about the relationship

between morality and art and the relationship between science and faith and I think that's been really fun and fascinating so far. I hope you think so too.

But on Fridays I like to do something a little different.

Often we'll have an interview and I'm going to keep doing interviews as well with people out there in the world.

I recently dropped a short excerpt from Paradise Lost in the audiobook that I'm building over at

Rejoiseevermore.substack.com, but I wanted to introduce something now

that I hope we'll be able to come back to and do throughout the year just whenever

we have an extra moment together on Fridays and I'm

going to call this segment words words which is a reference to Shakespeare's

hamlet because this is going to be about translation and

the specifically the act of translation the art of translation from a literary text that's in some other language than English and how it is that you take,

let's say a Greek text or a book in French or a poem in Italian or whatever and

deliver it to an English speaking audience and the reason that I wanted to do this is because it's one of the questions that I get most frequently

and it's also one of the most rich and complicated topics that we deal with on the show

but we usually in the regular course of a normal episode we don't have that much time to really dig into the issue of

translation and still nevertheless I get a lot of people all the time asking

me okay so you're reading this book let's say it's the Iliad by Homer, and what's your recommended

translation? Which one should I use if I don't read Greek? And then second after that, how can I tell if I don't read Greek and then second after that how can I tell if I don't read Greek how can I

compare different translations and what sorts of things should I be looking out for?

...