There is a word in the first line of the Greek text of Homer’s Odyssey that has always sent translators to the thesaurus as well as to Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon. The Greek word is polutropos, literally “of many turns”; it is the first adjective applied to the “man” (the first word of the Odyssey) who is eventually identified for us as Odysseus, although he is not named until line 21. Translators over the centuries have come up with a wide variety of English equivalents and expressions for this word. They largely fall into two related but distinct meanings: clever or wise (sagacious, much-versed, versatile, ingenious, of many devices, resourceful, etc.) and wily (shrewd, crafty, shifty, cunning, etc.). A few translators have resorted to phrases rather than single words (never at a loss, skilled at all ways of contending, of twists and turns, of many means, etc.). Emily Wilson, in her 2017 translation, was the first to use “complicated,” though in fact Liddell and Scott include that word among their definitions, contemporary though it may sound. (“It’s complicated.”)
Daniel Mendelsohn, in his new translation of the poem, chose to use a phrase, and one not resorted to before, as far as I know:
Tell me the tale of a man, Muse, who had so many roundabout ways
To wander, driven off course, after sacking Troy’s hallowed keep.[1]
If that seems a little wordy, even inelegant, the cause lies in the meter, and in Mendelsohn’s stated determination to make his translation line-for-line, a rare if not unprecedented choice. Scan those two lines and you will hear six beats, perhaps even seven, among twelve syllables, just like the Greek. “I have developed,” writes Mendelsohn, “a much longer line, one that replicates, to a great extent, the distinctive pulse of the original, as often as possible with its customary pauses and breaks.” Most twentieth-century translators have chosen instead to use a loose five-beat line akin to blank verse, a natural enough choice perhaps, but one that changes the poetics of the ancient epic from contemporary English poetry and substitutes something different. The use of the pentameter line can also swell the length of the poem. Book I in Mendelsohn’s translation consists of 444 lines, just like the Greek. George Chapman’s translation of 1616, the one that so moved Keats and his friend Charles Clarke exactly 200 years later, extends to 682 lines, more than fifty percent longer. (Chapman, incidentally, translated polutropon quite literally as “many a way.”) Alexander Pope’s version of 1725–26 in heroic couplets contains 558 lines. Emily Wilson’s translation of Book I also keeps to 444 lines, but at the expense (as Mendelsohn points out in his introduction) of some one-third of the Homeric text.[2] (Wilson’s version was in general well reviewed and is the obvious competition for Mendelsohn’s own. He spends perhaps a little too much time in his introduction pointing out its deficiencies.)
The opening lines of the poem are as good an example as any of Mendelsohn’s strengths and faults:
Tell me the tale of a man, Muse, who had so many roundabout ways
To wander, driven off course, after sacking Troy’s hallowed keep;
Many the peoples whose cities he saw and whose ways of thinking he learned,
Many the toils he suffered at sea, anguish in his heart
As he struggled to safeguard his life and the homecoming of his companions.
But he did not save his companions even so, though he longed to,
For their heedlessness destroyed them, theirs and nobody else’s—
Fools that they were, like children, who devoured the sun-god Hyperion’s
Cattle, and so he took from them the day of their homecoming.
Goddess, start where you will; daughter of Zeus, share the tale with us too.
This style may feel more flaccid than the Homeric verse in English that we are used to, but in fact it attempts to imitate the Greek closely. Mendelsohn respects all of Homer’s enjambments (with one exception), even the rather jarring example which places the word “cattle” at the beginning of a line. Readers experience Homer’s dactylic hexameters more vividly here than in the usual pentameters of other translators. The repetition of “many,” which might be deemed a flaw in an English lyric poem, accurately reflects Homer’s Greek: he really does use “many” three times in four lines. Apart from limiting the sun-god’s name to Hyperion, Mendelsohn leaves out nothing in this passage. (Homer calls him Hyperion Helios, the sun above.) The vocabulary is kept simple, and perhaps only the word “keep,” which I believe S. O. Andrew alone used before Mendelsohn in his 1953 Everyman edition—most translators use “citadel”—stands out as unexpected, as we associate a keep with a medieval castle rather than with the battlements of Troy. Line 5 feels overlong—it has nineteen syllables compared to Homer’s fourteen—and the sentence “and so he took from them the day of their homecoming” feels slightly puzzling or at least indirect. Stephen Mitchell’s “blotted out their homecoming” may be a bit too fancy, but at least it is more understandable.
One of the most famous and touching passages in the Odyssey occurs in Book XI, when Odysseus visits the underworld. Having spoken with Agamemnon, the leader of the Greek forces during the Trojan War (“So many of us died for the sake of Helen”), he then speaks to Achilles, the greatest of the Greek warriors. Odysseus counsels Achilles not to feel grief in hell because of the power he wields as “the most mighty Achaean.” Here is Achilles’ heart-rending answer in Mendelsohn’s version:
Don’t you sweet-talk me about death, illustrious Odysseus!
I would far rather live off the earth as the serf of another man—
Some man with a pitiful portion who barely ekes out a living—
Than rule here as the lord of all those who are dead and gone.
This translation has some excellent qualities as poetry: the internal rhyme of “earth” and “serf”; the alliteration in “a pitiful portion”; the extension of “dead” to “dead and gone” which hammers home the point that Achilles is making; as well as the seven-stress line that accurately reproduces the poetics of the Greek epic poem. Perhaps “sweet-talk” is a little too slangy for the Greek verb which means “to persuade,” “to urge,” “to console”; I feel the same about Robert Fitzgerald’s and Stephen Mitchell’s choice of “smooth-talk” in their versions. (Other translators have chosen “comfort,” “console,” and “reconcile to.”) Perhaps it is Alexander Pope who was most successful at making Achilles’ words into the most convincing poetry:
Talk not of ruling in this dolorous gloom,
Nor think vain words (he cried) can ease my doom.
Rather I’d choose laboriously to bear
A weight of woes, and breathe the vital air,
A slave to some poor hind that toils for bread,
Than reign the sceptred monarch of the dead.
Of course that is the poetry of a long-gone era, and the short line and rhyming couplets could not be less Homeric. Mendelsohn’s stated goal for his translation is “an English that is plain and natural, with occasional departures—usually but not always to suggest a slightly higher register.” He tries to avoid “multisyllabic Latinate words in favor of a simpler vocabulary derived from Anglo-Saxon roots.” He mostly achieves these goals, while occasionally having recourse to slang or to choices that can seem a little puzzling. In the former category one can count “vittle” (an old word to be sure, but non-standard today and in a non-standard spelling), “without a stitch,” “runs off at the mouth,” “divvy,” “with all the trimmings,” and others. Somewhat confusing translations include, for example, Zeus addressing Athena in Book I: “Child of mine, what a speech has slipped through the fence of your teeth!” Emily Wilson’s “You must be joking” pays too little attention to the actual words and is additionally perhaps too colloquial. Albert Cook’s “What sort of word has got past the bar of your teeth” seems clumsy. The words for “fence” and “teeth” are inescapably in Homer’s Greek. Perhaps Stephen Mitchell’s “How can you say such a thing” makes the most sense. (This is not the only use in Homer of the metaphor of the teeth. In Book IX of the Iliad, for example, Achilles speaks about death as the soul passing across “the barrier of the teeth.”)[3] One last example occurs in Book II, when the scabbard of Herakles’ sword is being described. Here Mendelsohn writes of “Skirmishes and battles, slaughters and man-killing murders.” Man-killing murders? Most other translators use some version of “slaughter” and “murder.” Man-killing murders feels like piling Pelion on Ossa, or is at least reduplicative.
In Book XXIII, Odysseus convinces Penelope that he is indeed her long-lost husband by describing their marriage bed in close detail. She breaks down in tears—there are many, many moments of weeping in the Odyssey—throws her arms around his neck and kisses him. After her speech, which ends with the line “Now you’ve persuaded my heart, even though it’s as hard as steel” (which is perhaps anachronistic, given that steel was not known in Mycenean culture), there is a line which Mendelsohn translates beautifully: “He wept as he held his wife, heart of his heart, whose thoughts were so true.” Chapman is jejune by comparison:
He wept for joy, t’ enjoy a wife so fit
For his grave mind, that knew his depth of wit . . .
Neither Albert Cook (“He wept, holding his pleasing wife, who had a sense of devotion”) nor Emily Wilson (“He held his love, / his faithful wife, and wept”) nor even Richmond Lattimore (“He wept as he held his lovely wife, whose thoughts were virtuous”) manages anything as succinct and lovely as Mendelsohn’s line. Robert Fitzgerald perhaps comes closest (“and he wept at last, / his dear wife, clear and faithful, in his arms”), though “clear” seems a surprising choice. That scene in Book XXIII, in which Odysseus and Penelope go to bed, is tender, charming, and moving. Many readers find themselves wishing that it was the final scene in the poem; it is hard to shake the feeling that it rounds off the poem in a perfect way, that it represents the end-point of Odysseus’ nostos (homecoming).
Jeffrey M. Duban’s new version of Homer’s Iliad has the single Latin word “faciebat” on the title page in lieu of “Translated by” or “In a version by.” He takes this word from the Naturalis Historia of Pliny the Elder, who, Duban tells us in his introductory comments, claimed that most Greek painters used it (presumably in Greek) to sign their work, rather than the Greek equivalent of the word that would become standard much later, “fecit” (he made it). Both verbs acknowledge the artist, but the first, being in the imperfect tense, suggests “if you will, that the work remained imperfect, i.e., unperfected, incapable of perfection, or necessarily incomplete, regardless the extent worked on.”[4] This view of his work by a translator surely amounts to special pleading, as though he is asking readers not to blame him for inaccuracies or infelicities. They are, he contends, inherent in a work of art, which is “necessarily imperfect.” In a sense that is certainly true. The history of art, from Leonardo da Vinci to Willem de Kooning, is strewn with variations on the notion that a work of art is not finished, only abandoned. But Duban has eccentric ideas about translation, and especially the translation of Homer. Right off the bat he asks readers whether “one wants a translation of Homer that reads like poetry, in a suitable register exhibiting the incidents of poetry, or like an appliance-installation manual.” I’ll take the first one, please. In the latter category Duban gleefully places every translation of the Iliad since and including Richmond Lattimore’s of 1951, and he is not especially an admirer of earlier versions either. George Chapman embodies “lack of restraint.” Alexander Pope alone gets a compliment. The word “classical” on the book’s title page means that Duban will use a strictly metered line, diction that is “neither common nor colloquial,” polysyllabic words in abundance, archaic verb forms (thinkest, thinkst, and thinketh, for example), and what he calls “purposeful stylization.” The distaste for literary modernism that was fully on show in his earlier book, The Lesbian Lyre (2016), is reasserted here. He points to his “own ‘antique’ manner” as providing a foil for “the ongoing artistic debasement early encouraged by twentieth-century modernism.” He finds “a deadening mono- and disyllabism” in recent translations of Homer. Whether such translations are deadening is a matter of opinion, and most opinions tell against him; but his observation is not off the mark. Had Daniel Mendelsohn’s translation been published when Duban wrote his introductory remarks, he might have pointed to Mendelsohn’s aspiration, quoted above, to avoid polysyllabic Latinate words in favor of “a simpler vocabulary derived from Anglo-Saxon roots.” Emily Wilson, for her part, uses two polysyllabic words in the first three lines of her translation of the Iliad (“cataclysmic” and “immeasurable”) and is not in the least determined to avoid words such as “egregious,” “craftsmanship,” “concoction,” “silver-swirling” and many others.
The proof of Durban’s contentions, of course, is in the Homeric pudding. An earlier translator like Barry Powell held some unorthodox opinions about Homer too, mainly about the age of the poems and the historical process by which they came to be put into writing. Yet his translation, like most recent versions, kept to a relatively simple style with a five-beat line. “I am not concerned with sounding ‘poetic,’ or beautiful, or clever,” he wrote, “because that would be to falsify the plain style of the original Greek.”[5] Powell therefore translates the question stated in line 8 of Book I in a straightforward way: “Which god was it who set them [Achilles and Agamemnon] to quarrel?” Emily Wilson’s iambics are equally down to earth: “Which god set / the pair apart and prompted them to fight?” Robert Fagles pretty much follows suit: “What god drove them to fight with such a fury?,” although the word “fury” increases the temperature somewhat. Duban’s line by contrast sounds démodé:
Which, then, of the gods, conjoined the two discordant?
This diction lies closer to a nineteenth-century translator like the 14th Earl of Derby, whose Iliad was published in 1864—prior to his third term as Prime Minister—than it does to most recent English versions:
Say then, what God the fatal strife provok’d?
William Morris, whose Odyssey (1887) was generally derided as overly archaic, did not complete a translation of the Iliad; but he did translate parts of Book I, and his attempt at Line 8, in an old-fashioned fourteener, yielded something not far off from Duban’s, if not quite as outworn in diction:
But which of the Gods then yoked them to battle & debate?
Chapman, for his part, makes every other translation, even Duban’s, sound modern:
What god gave Eris their command, and op’d that fighting vein?
In Duban’s version, neither “conjoined” nor “discordant” is an archaic word; yet the two conjoined produce what is inescapably an archaic expression, and the placement of the adjective after the noun adds to the overall antiquarianism.
Book 24 of the Iliad centers around one of the poem’s most famous and touching scenes: Priam’s nighttime visit to Achilles’ tent. With help from Hermes, who is carrying out Zeus’s orders, Priam slips undetected through the Greek encampment in order to try to convince the great Greek warrior to release his son, Hector’s, body, which has been mistreated but has not yet begun to decompose, another indication of the gods’ favor. Priam enters Achilles’ tent and throws his arms around his enemy’s knees. They weep together—another Homeric moment of tears—Priam for his son, Achilles in recollection of his great friend Patroclus, killed in the war by Hector himself, but also for his own father. They eat and drink together and retire to bed, though Priam is awakened in the night by Hermes, who wants him to flee lest he be discovered among the Greeks by Agamemnon or others. Duban’s translation of this book is full of archaic or disused words and is characterized by older-fashioned syntax and phrase structure. The sea is “the embattled brine,” a pair of horses becomes “horses twain,” and “aside” is used several times instead of “beside” (“He sequesters Hector aside the ships”). Direct speech sometimes sounds as though it was written by Lawrence Kasdan for Yoda to speak:
A herald from Zeus I come who, though distant far,
Exceedingly regards and pities and you [sic]. Commands
He you ransom Hector anon, your goodly son,
Bearing gifts to Achilles to gladden his heart;
Sole your journey, entirely unaccompanied.
Archaic and largely archaic words are everywhere: goodly, coagulate (as an adjective), beauteous, instancy, nowise, therefor, aforetime, wain, comely, archeress, betide, darkful, etc. Short forms also abound: o’er, ne’er, e’er, neath. Sons who are “tall” (Robert Fitzgerald) or “strong” (Emily Wilson) in other versions here are “luxuriant.” Fitzgerald’s “trouble and pain” is ratcheted up to “relentless trauma,” in an unusual example of Duban sounding more contemporary than any other translator. (Emily Wilson has Achilles say, “Poor man! Your heart has suffered / so much.”) One especially strange passage—“But you delinquent scrounge about—fraudulent tongues, / Twinkling twirlers pirouetting the dancing floor, / Brigands of cattle among your own folk” sent me befuddled to other translations. Twinkling twirlers pirouetting? Has an MGM musical or All That Jazz been evoked? Emily Wilson is most accessible. She chose “tricksters” over “fraudulent tongues,” and settled on “dancers, / superb at tapping rhythms with your feet” over Duban’s odd and alliterative twinkling twirlers. Robert Fitzgerald calls those young people “hollow men, dancers, heroes of the dance,” while Robert Fagles muddies the waters a little with his “heroes only at beating the dancing-rings,” which feels less convincing and is a little puzzling. (Dancing-rings?)[6]
In the first part of his Introduction, somewhat oddly called “A Personally Taken Iliad,” as though the poem were a pill to swallow, Jeffrey Duban foresees a mixed reception for his translation. After claiming that his work has “the finesse, elevation, and authority of the original,” he admits that it “bespeaks a vision and temperament nowadays begging to incur disfavor.” Alas he is right. Even the authorities he quotes—the poet Jones Very and the painter Washington Allston—seem contrived to convince us that Duban is mired in a conservative vision of Homer whose time has long passed. No amount of Elizabethan syntax and vocabulary plucked from a nineteenth-century edition of Roget can rescue Homer for the contemporary reader from some misconstrued and cranky revisionist take on Modernism and the translations it eventually engendered. There being no context of other texts for Homer’s poems, no Greek scholar really knows whether the poet’s language is “fittingly neither common nor colloquial.” No more than Duban would I applaud a translation that divagates too far down the path of slang. (“Yo, Achilles” constitutes Duban’s nightmare.) Duban has striven to create an Iliad “new by virtue of its datedness,” but that was an unrealizable goal. The Homeric translations made by Andrew Lang in collaboration with Walter Leaf, S. H. Butcher and Ernest Myers adopted a similar aesthetic and are no longer read except by specialists. Charles Montagu Doughty’s The Dawn in Britain, a Homeric poem in scope, aspired to a similar linguistic antiquarianism and is equally disregarded today. Duban claims quite correctly that a translation can be “at once faithful and beautiful.” But beauty is always new, never old. Cycladic sculpture is beautiful because it looks absolutely modern, not 4,000 years old. The merely archaic in literature lies dead on the page.
[1] THE ODYSSEY, by Homer, trans. by Daniel Mendelsohn. University of Chicago Press. $39.00.
[2] Mendelsohn refers us to a review of Wilson’s translation by John Byron Kuhner, “A Coat of Varnish,”: “The Odyssey consists of 12,110 lines of dactylic hexameter, with lines between thirteen and seventeen syllables and averaging about fifteen. Wilson also has 12,110 lines, but her line averages ten syllables. And this is the reason why her work reads so much more quickly than any other version: her poem is shorter than the original by a third.”
[3] Homer, The Iliad, trans. by Barry B. Powell (New York, 2014), p. 225.
[4] HOMER’S ILIAD IN A CLASSICAL TRANSLATION, trans. by Jeffrey M. Duban. Clairview Books. $37.50. I would not normally comment on the typography of a book, but the choice of the Papyrus font for a text of over 500 pages was a cruel and unusual one. Perhaps the designer thought that it looked vaguely antique. It is nothing of the sort and is extremely wearying to read.
[5] Powell, op. cit., p. 39.
[6] E. V. Rieu, who did not have to worry about poetics, has the clearest version, even if he leaves the reader wondering about Mycenean ballrooms: “rascals all of you, heroes of the dance, who win your laurels on the ballroom floor when you are not engaged in robbing your own people of their sheep and kids.” Homer, The Iliad, trans. by E. V. Rieu (London, 1950), p. 444.
