I’m debating buying it to translate and also kinda motivate myself to keep progressing in learning greek. Is it a good translation?
Yes, it’s extraordinarily good (unlike the Hobbit, which is to be avoided).
It’s a lot of fun to read, though I don’t know about translating it. The early chapters are done with real genius and creativity, especially in the creation and explanation of terminology for everyday things, but in later chapters the fun leaked out a bit for me, leaving only the impressive workmanship. Still, that transition may reflect something in the source material. The writing is exceptionally clear and understandable, never awkward.
I believe that Michael may be thinking about the Latin Hobbit. I’ve never heard of a Greek one.
There is a Greek Winne-the-Pooh. It all seems correct enough, as far as I can tell anyway, but not exactly magical. It doesn’t quite flow. The poetry rhymes (!!).
Hi, you can also check out the review here on the Greek:
https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2005/2005.08.07/
Key parts of the review for you:
It is, of course, Andrew Wilson’s translation, into Ancient Greek, of J.K. Rowling’s first Harry Potter book. It is also, in this reader’s opinion, a complete success. On nearly every page there is some felicity of composition to be admired, some construction that shows off the Greek language’s power and versatility, some turn of phrase that arouses admiration for the translator. In its entirety, it is an extraordinary work — a prose comp. exercise on an unprecedented scale. But unlike most prose comp exercises, it is also a wonderfully good read.
…
His Greek is generally clear, not highly flavored, and not excessively periodic. He has said that he adopted Lucian as his model for Greek prose, but what this seems to mean in practice is an intelligent and high-minded fourth-century syntactical armature, combined with a libertine and unfussy embrace of vocabulary from every era and idiom. The lexical promiscuity was largely forced on him by the vast number of things he needs to talk about — parking meters, golf, trains, and Golden Snitches among others. He sometimes uses circumlocutions, but more often uses post-Classical Greek, or transliterates, or simply invents (e.g. “not even dressed in Muggle clothes” becomes ” ἀλλὰ καὶ φοροῦντες ἱμάτια πάνυ ἀμύγαλα“).
A quick little interview here too worth listening to:
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1676134
Good luck with it!
Cheers, Chad
That’s a very nice review. In addition to the typos he mentions, there are some bad or missing accents in places, and πρωτοπείρομς (ους) on page 95. Probably others. I’m not usually too alert to that sort of thing. The typo that he mentions on pg. 229 must have been corrected in my edition. I was more interested in reading it for its own sake, and did not compare it to the English at any point, and can only say that it was comprehensible, fun, and that the Greek flowed. He really should have mentioned the songs, which are wonderful, as well as the the ghost who speaks in hexameter.
I’d be grateful for identification of lexical and grammatical aids needed to read the Ancient Greek Harry Potter. Is there a vocabulary? Can paradigms of invented words be inferred from what is given?
When a sentence is too hard, will the English Harry Potter usually help?
Hi Hugh,
It looks like the translator has posted a Greek–English vocabulary and notes to the translation on his website.
You don’t need any. I read the first chapter a few times over the years, it didn’t seem the time to go on, and then this year I read it all for the first time without opening the dictionary or any other resource. (I once read the English version when it came out in the 1990s. And I listened to the first few chapters in German a couple of years ago.)
If you aren’t quite there yet, you can pick up Morwood’s dictionary and grammar.