all disgraced, even by generations down the years,
480 if we don’t punish the murderers of our brothers and our sons!
Why, life would lose its relish —for me, at least —
I’d rather die at once and go among the dead.
Attack! —before the assassins cross the sea
and leave us in their wake.”
He closed in tears
and compassion ran through every Achaean there.
Suddenly Medon and the inspired bard approached them,
fresh from Odysseus’ house, where they had just awakened.
They strode into the crowds; amazement took each man
but the herald Medon spoke in all his wisdom:
490 “Hear me, men of Ithaca. Not without the hand
of the deathless gods did Odysseus do these things!
Myself, I saw an immortal fighting at his side —
like Mentor to the life. I saw the same god,
now in front of Odysseus, spurring him on,
now stampeding the suitors through the hall,
crazed with fear, and down they went in droves!”
Terror gripped them all, their faces ashen white.
At last the old warrior Halitherses, Mastor’s son —
who alone could see the days behind and days ahead —
500 rose up and spoke, distraught for each man there:
“Hear me, men of Ithaca. Hear what I have to say.
Thanks to your own craven hearts these things were done!
You never listened to me or the good commander Mentor,
you never put a stop to your sons’ senseless folly.
What fine work they did, so blind, so reckless,
carving away the wealth, affronting the wife
of a great and famous man, telling themselves
that he’d return no more! So let things rest now.
Listen to me for once —I say don’t attack!
Else some will draw the lightning on their necks.”
510 So he urged
and some held fast to their seats, but more than half
sprang up with warcries now. They had no taste
for the prophet’s sane plan —winning Eupithes
quickly won them over. They ran for armor
and once they’d harnessed up in burnished bronze
they grouped in ranks before the terraced city.
Eupithes led them on in their foolish, mad campaign,
certain he would avenge the slaughter of his son
but the father was not destined to return —
520 he’d meet his death in battle then and there.
Athena at this point made appeals to Zeus:
“Father, son of Cronus, our high and mighty king,
now let me ask you a question . . .
tell me the secrets hidden in your mind.
Will you prolong the pain, the cruel fighting here
or hand down pacts of peace between both sides?”
“My child,” Zeus who marshals the thunderheads replied,
“why do you pry and probe me so intently? Come now,
wasn’t the plan your own? You conceived it yourself:
530 Odysseus should return and pay the traitors back.
Do as your heart desires —
but let me tell you how it should be done.
Now that royal Odysseus has taken his revenge,
let both sides seal their pacts that he shall reign for life,
and let us purge their memories of the bloody slaughter
of their brothers and their sons. Let them be friends,
devoted as in the old days. Let peace and wealth
come cresting through the land.”
So Zeus decreed
and launched Athena already poised for action —
540 down she swept from Olympus’ craggy peaks.
By then Odysseus’ men had had their fill
of hearty fare, and the seasoned captain said,
“One of you go outside —see if they’re closing in.”
A son of Dolius snapped to his command,
ran to the door and saw them all too close
and shouted back to Odysseus,
“They’re on top of us! To arms —and fast!”
Up they sprang and strapped themselves in armor,
the three men with Odysseus, Dolius’ six sons
550 and Dolius and Laertes clapped on armor too,
gray as they were, but they would fight if forced.
Once they had all harnessed up in burnished bronze
they opened the doors and strode out, Odysseus in the lead.
And now, taking the build and voice of Mentor,
Zeus’s daughter Athena marched right in.
The good soldier Odysseus thrilled to see her,
turned to his son and said in haste, “Telemachus,
you’ll learn soon enough —as you move up to fight
where champions strive to prove themselves the best —
560 not to disgrace your father’s line a moment.
In battle prowess we’ve excelled for ages
all across the world.”
Telemachus reassured him,
“Now you’ll see, if you care to watch, father,
now I’m fired up. Disgrace, you say?
I won’t disgrace your line!”
Laertes called out in deep delight,
567 “What a day for me, dear gods! What joy —
my son and my grandson vying over courage!”
“Laertes!”
Goddess Athena rushed beside him, eyes ablaze:
570 “Son of Arcesius, dearest of all my comrades,
say a prayer to the bright-eyed girl and Father Zeus,
then brandish your long spear and wing it fast!”
Athena breathed enormous strength in the old man.
He lifted a prayer to mighty Zeus’s daughter,
brandished his spear a moment, winged it fast
and hit Eupithes, pierced his bronze-sided helmet
that failed to block the bronze point tearing through —
down Eupithes crashed, his armor clanging against his chest.
Odysseus and his gallant son charged straight at the front lines,
580 slashing away with swords, with two-edged spears and now
581 they would have killed them all, cut them off from home
if Athena, daughter of storming Zeus, had not cried out
in a piercing voice that stopped all fighters cold,
“Hold back, you men of Ithaca, back from brutal war!
Break off —shed no more blood —make peace at once!”
So Athena commanded. Terror blanched their faces,
they went limp with fear, weapons slipped from their hands
and strewed the ground at the goddess’ ringing voice.
They spun in flight to the city, wild to save their lives,
590 but loosing a savage cry, the long-enduring great Odysseus,
gathering all his force, swooped like a soaring eagle —
just as the son of Cronus hurled a reeking bolt
that fell at her feet, the mighty Father’s daughter,
and blazing-eyed Athena wheeled on Odysseus, crying,
“Royal son of Laertes, Odysseus, master of exploits,
hold back now! Call a halt to the great leveler, War —
don’t court the rage of Zeus who rules the world!”
So she commanded. He obeyed her, glad at heart.
And Athena handed down her pacts of peace
600 between both sides for all the years to come —
the daughter of Zeus whose shield is storm and thunder,
yes, but the goddess still kept Mentor’s build and voice.
NOTES
TRANSLATOR’S POSTSCRIPT
“Homer makes us Hearers,” Pope has said, “and Virgil leaves us Readers.” So the great translator of Homer, no doubt unkno
wingly, set at odds the claims of an oral tradition and those of a literary one, as we would call the two traditions now. Homer’s work is a performance, even in part a musical event. Perhaps that is the source of his speed, directness and simplicity, that Matthew Arnold praised —and his nobility too, elusive yet undeniable, that Arnold pursued but never really caught. Surely it is a major source of Homer’s energy, the loft and carry of his imagination that sweeps along the listener together with the performer. For there is a power in Homer’s song, and whether it is “that unequal’d Fire and Rapture” that Pope found in the Iliad or the glow of the setting sun that Longinus found in the Odyssey, it brings to light the Homeric Question facing all translators: how to convey the force of his performance in the quieter medium of writing? “Homer makes us Hearers, and Virgil leaves us Readers.”
Yet the contrast may be too extreme. Virgil the writer was certainly no stranger to recitation. Homer the performer, as Bernard Knox conjectures in his Introduction, may have known a rudimentary form of writing. And writing may have lent his work some qualities we associate with written works in general —idiosyncrasies at times, and pungency and wit —and with the Iliad and the Odyssey in particular, their architectonics, their magnificent scale, and the figures of Achilles and Hector, Odysseus and Penelope. But even if Homer never used an alphabet himself, he now seems less the creature of an oral tradition whom Milman Parry discovered, and more and more its master, as envisioned by Adam, Parry’s son, and as others have agreed. A brilliant improviser, Homer deployed the stock, inherited features of this tradition with all the individual talent he could muster. Never more so, in fact, than in his use of the fixed and formulaic, frequently repeated phrase. Not only is Homer often less formulaic than might appear, but the formulas themselves are often more resonant, more apt and telling in their contexts, than the “hard Parryites” argued for at first. So the original form of Homer’s work, though a far cry from a work of literature as we know it now, is not exactly a song, pure and simple, either. It may be more the record of a song, building, perhaps, over the poet’s entire lifetime —not spontaneity outright but what Marianne Moore would call “a simulacrum of spontaneity.”
Writing at a far remove from Homer, my approach in this translation has been the one I took in a version of the Iliad. With the Odyssey, however, I have tried to vary my voice in even more ways, modulating it to fit the postwar world, the more domestic, more intimate world of the later poem; yet raising it when an occasion calls —when Homer returns to heroic action or a fabulous encounter or an emotional crescendo —as a reminder that a related voice runs through both poems. That, taken as a sequel to the Iliad, the Odyssey would celebrate, in Wallace Stevens’ phrase, “war’s miracle begetting that of peace.” And both of my translations share a related impulse, too. Again I have tried to find a middle ground (and not a no-man’s-land, if I can help it) between the features of Homer’s performance and the expectations of a contemporary reader. Not a line-by-line translation, my version of the Odyssey is, I hope, neither so literal in rendering Homer’s language as to cramp and distort my own —though I want to convey as much of what he says as possible —nor so literary as to brake his energy, his forward drive, though I want my work to be literate and clear. For the more literal approach would seem to be too little English, and the more literary seems too little Greek. What I have tried to find is a cross between the two, a modern English Homer.
Of course, it is a risky business, stating what one had tried to do or, worse, the principles one has used (petards that will probably hoist the writer later). But a few words of explanation seem in order, and the first of them refer to the more fixed and formulaic parts of Homer. Again I have treated them in a flexible, discretionary way, not incompatible with Homer’s way, I like to think —especially when his formulas are functional as well as fixed —yet also answering to the ways we read today. It is a matter of “riding easy in the harness,” as Robert Frost once said of democracy, and my practice ranges from the pliant to the fairly strict.
With one of the most frequently repeated phrases, for example —the line that introduces many individual speeches —I have been the freest, trying to hint at the speaker’s nuance of the moment while retaining, at least, the habit of an introductory line for every speech. When Homer begins a speech of “winged words,” however, I rarely omit the well-known phrase, yet I like the flight of the words to vary, with a sudden burst at times and a longer drift at others, depending on the words a character has to say. And so with the epithets that cling to the leading figures as closely as their names. According to what perifrôn Penelope is doing at the time, the sense of the epithet may go from the heroine’s guardedness, her circumspection, to her self-possession, to her gift for great good wisdom, and her willingness to give that wisdom voice. With pepnumenos Telemachus, many qualities, from his wariness, to his growing poise, to his level-headed sense in action as well as speech, may be involved. And with polumêtis Odysseus, the epithet may extend from the hero’s craft and cunning (murderous cunning when required), to his skill of hand or expertise at quick disguise and spinning yarns, to his zest for exploit and adventure. Odysseus, the virtuoso of sometimes doubtful virtue, is short on “character” in the sense of habitual goodness but long on “character” as John Crowe Ransom has described “the Shakespearean, modern, passionately cherished, almost religious sense of the total individuality of a person who is rich in vivid yet contingent traits, even physical traits, that are not ethical at all.” And as Ransom concludes, “this kind of character engages an auditor’s love, and that is more than his ethical approval.” Fullness of personality would seem to be essential, particularly for the “polytropic” hero, “the man of twists and turns” —the beggar-king who moves at will from self-effacement to self-assertion, from mê tis to mêtis, from Nobody to Odysseus, the wily raider of cities. (See notes 9.410 and 19.463–64.) In sum, as each Homeric epithet recurs, within its family of meanings I try to find a kindred English word that suits the character and the context.
Yet with longer repetitions in the Odyssey I like to repeat my English version closely, especially if the context shifts the function of the passage, and the opportunities for irony may be ample. For instance, the rituals prior to dining —rinsing the hands, serving the appetizers and the bread, and drawing a table toward a guest —recur, hospitably, in Ithaca and Sparta and Phaeacia, but in Circe’s house they are part of her seductions, all of which Odysseus resists until the witch, who turned his shipmates into pigs, turns them back again to men. With one of the longest recurrent passages in the poem, Penelope’s deception of her suitors, the translation, like Homer’s original, repeats almost verbatim the weaving and unweaving of her web. First Antinous describes it in Book 2.101–22, indicting Penelope before the Ithacan assembly while, as the Introduction observes, paying “reluctant tribute to the subtlety of her delaying tactics.” Then when she describes her weaving in Book 19.153–75 — adding her own words of indignation in 173–74 —she defends herself, her fidelity and her finesse before the nameless stranger, though some suggest she is also secretly appealing to the man she senses is Odysseus. And finally in Book 24.139–61, a leading suitor, Amphimedon —killed by Odysseus and new to the world of the dead —cries out against Penelope’s duplicity to the ghost of Agamemnon, who had been murdered by Clytemnestra, his duplicitous wife. The suitor may trust that the warlord will be outraged when he hears of another wife’s deceptions, but of course the wife of Odysseus, deliberately or not, sped the work of her avenging husband. That’s what impresses Agamemnon, and so he calls for “a glorious song in praise of self-possessed Penelope” (24.218, see note 1.34–55) —the song that Homer has provided in the Odyssey. All in all, then, I have tried for repetition with a difference when variation seems of use, yet for virtual repetition in the longer passages, particularly when the weave of right and wrong, the Homeric moral fabric, is at issue.
Turning briefly to Homer’s metrics, I would also like to hol
d a middle ground, here between his spacious hexameter line —his “ear, ear for the sea-surge,” as Pound once heard it —and a tighter line more native to English verse. If, as Knox suggests, the strongest weapon in Homer’s poetic arsenal is variety within a metrical norm, the translation opts for a freer give-and-take between the two, and one that offers more variety than uniformity in the end. Working from a five- or six-beat line while leaning more to six, I expand at times to seven beats —to convey the reach of a simile or the vehemence of a storm at sea or a long-drawn-out conclusion to a story —or I contract at times to three, to give a point in speech or action sharper stress. Free as it is, such interplay between variety and norm results, I suppose, from a kind of tug-of-war peculiar to translation: in this case, trying to capture the meaning of the Greek on the one hand, trying to find a cadence for one’s English on the other, yet joining hands, if possible, to make a line of verse. I hope, at any rate, not only to give my own language a slight stretching now and then, but also to lend Homer the sort of range in rhythm, pace and tone that may make an Odyssey engaging to the reader.
And I would like to suggest, again at a far remove, another tension in Homer’s metrics, his blend of mass and movement both —his lines have so much body or ongkos yet so much grace and speed. And so I have tried to make my own lines as momentarily end-stopped, and yet as steadily ongoing too, as English syntax and the breathing marks of punctuation will allow. My hope has been that each turn in the verse might mark a fresh beginning, moving toward a fresh conclusion, turning and returning, like a version in minuscule of a familiar Odyssean rhythm. In other words, I have tried to keep the master’s voice in mind and to offer, if nothing more, a partial, distant echo of it in the reader’s ear. But Homer’s line is the line beyond compare, and I would only remind the reader of the Introduction’s fine description: “The long line, which no matter how it varies in the opening and middle always ends in the same way, builds up its hypnotic effect in book after book, imposing on things and men and gods the same pattern, presenting in a rhythmic microcosm the wandering course to a fixed end which is the pattern of the rage of Achilles and the travels of Odysseus, of all natural phenomena and all human destinies.”
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