The Odyssey: The Fitzgerald Translation

by Homer;Robert Fitzgerald

  “Witness this,

  god of the zenith, noblest of the gods,

  and Lord Odysseus’ hearthfire, now before me:

  I swear these things shall turn out as I say.

  Between this present dark and one day’s ebb,

  after the wane, before the crescent moon,

  Odysseus will come.”

  It is late, so she tells the maids to prepare a couch for her guest and a bath. But the old soldier will not have some sly flibbertigibbet girl touch him—let someone of his own years give him a footbath. Penelope calls on her housekeeper:

  “Come here, stand by me, faithful Eurýkleia,

  and bathe, bathe your master, I almost said

  for they are of an age, and now Odysseus’

  feet and hands would be enseamed like his.”

  We should not take this to mean that she now accepts the stranger as her husband. Rather, she half, half thinks that this might be him and her thought inadvertently slips out into words. Odysseus sits down to have his feet washed, then suddenly realizes the risk he is running. There is a scar on his thigh that Eurykleia is sure to recognize; he must not let her see it or his identity will be known before he is ready to reveal it. To relax the tension, the poet now opens up a long, brilliantly narrated flashback to a day in the carefree time of youth when he was out in the hills on a boar hunt. In the lead, he was about to cast his spear as the beast was already charging and it gashed his thigh badly. Inevitably, Eurykleia does in due course recognize the scar and exclaims, “‘You are Odysseus!’” (Did she in fact recognize him all along, so that the scar merely affirms what she already suspected?) Penelope is nearby, but Athena bemuses her and she hears nothing. Late though it is, she cannot let him go, afraid of one more lonely night when “‘bitter thoughts and fears crowd on my grief.’” Like Desdemona singing her willow song, she finds relief by turning her sorrow into lyrical form, a lovely aria about the nightingale, once a mortal woman who in her madness killed her son:

  “Think how Pandáreos’ daughter, pale forever,

  sings as the nightingale in the new leaves

  through those long quiet hours of night,

  on some thick-flowering orchard bough in spring;

  how she rills out and tilts her note, high now, now low,

  mourning for Itylos whom she killed in madness—

  her child, and her lord Zêthos’ only child.

  My forlorn thought flows variable as her song …”

  We should not press this too closely and say that she fears that by holding out on the suitors she risks bringing about her son’s death at their hands, for she knows that they have been planning to kill him. What fills her mind is the pure sense of loss, loss of her husband and the happiness she once knew with him. Her thought, as she says, flows variable, and in the effort to reach some solid ground she describes a dream she had, or—again we reach for the meaning that may lie just behind the words—has she just invented it?

  “Listen:

  interpret me this dream: From a water’s edge

  twenty fat geese have come to feed on grain

  beside my house. And I delight to see them.

  But now a mountain eagle with great wings

  and crooked beak storms in to break their necks

  and strew their bodies here. Away he soars

  into the bright sky; and I cry aloud—

  all this in dream—I wail and round me gather

  softly braided Akhaian women mourning

  because the eagle killed my geese.”

  The Greek is brilliantly ambiguous here. The primary sense of her words is probably as Fitzgerald has it. Or perhaps she means that the eagle has killed the geese for her. Or has her tongue got ahead of her conscious thought, as it does a little later, and made her say “my eagle,” my eagle husband, Odysseus? It would not be possible to bring this over into English and Fitzgerald does not try. At all events she is revealing more than she means to do. If the geese feeding at her house are the suitors, who have been doing that for years, why does she delight to see them and why mourn their death? Because, as Russo suggests in his note on this passage, “the lonely queen obviously derived some cheer from the attentions of the suitors, and would, on an unconscious level, regret their sudden slaughter.” No doubt some of them were presentable enough young men. The meaning of the dream is clear, her guest says: Odysseus is coming back to deal with your suitors. But no, she still won’t have it. The dream was false, one of the delusive night visions that come through the ivory gates, not the horn gates through which true dreams come.21 News of Odysseus’ return would be too good to be true. She resists, we may understand, because accepting the news that her husband is returning would mean giving up the defensive structure she has built around herself; feeling relatively comfortable there, she is loath to step outside into the cruel reality of her life. The Greek nowhere directly says this. Homer’s language was superbly equipped to present actions and the great primary emotions, but was scarcely required to depict the fugitive mouvements de l’âme. All the more wonder then that using the resources at his command he can let us see so far into the recesses of the mind. He is doing something here, we may believe, that had never been done before, moving into regions that the psychologizing novelists of the nineteenth century were to make their own, fantastic though it may seem to make such a claim for a poet composing nearly three millennia ago. Yet as we saw with the words describing the danger that Skylla represented, a great poet may on occasion stretch beyond the range of his time and culture.

  Penelope now pulls herself together sufficiently to realize that the issue of her marriage must be decided at once. Why the sudden urgency? Her parents have been pressing her to remarry, and although Telemakhos is not going to force her hand she knows that he would be glad to see her take a husband, if only to prevent the suitors from devouring any more of his estate. What has precipitated the matter is the arrival of this fascinating visitor who might be Odysseus. The next day, she says, she will hold a contest:

  “We have twelve axe heads. In his time, my lord

  could line them up, all twelve, at intervals

  like a ship’s ribbing; then he’d back away

  a long way off and whip an arrow through.

  Now I’ll impose this trial on the suitors.

  The one who easily handles and strings the bow

  and shoots through all twelve axes I shall marry …”

  Bracketing off the much discussed question of how one can shoot an arrow through an ax, let alone twelve axes (through the metal ring at the end of the helve allowing an ax to be hung on a wall, Professor Bernard Knox suggests in a note to Fagles’s translation), one wonders what she has in mind. Since she has seen Odysseus perform this feat, it might be a means of declaring him the winning man. But this cannot be right, for she does not yet know or cannot bring herself to admit that she knows him to be her husband. As the more perceptive critics have seen, this is a form of divination. As we might toss a coin to let it decide a difficult issue for us, she is letting the contest do it for her. It is to be held the next day, and with this their long parley is at an end.

  Lying awake and wondering in his troubled mind how one man can take on a whole crowd, Odysseus does what Penelope has just done and turns to divination, asking Zeus for an omen, a double omen consisting of what Greeks called a phm or kldn, some utterance that may carry a message, and a teras, a sign or portent from the outer world of nature. Zeus responds by thundering from a clear sky, and Odysseus hears the voice of a woman grinding barley. Old and tired, she has had to work late into the night to complete the stint imposed on her. She prays to Zeus:

  “let this day be the last the suitors feed

  so dainty in Odysseus’ hall!

  They’ve made me work my heart out till I drop,

  grinding barley. May they feast no more!”

  Since we do not practice divination today, the reader probably lets this pass as one of the odd things that
ancient Greeks did. If he is industrious he may seek help from a commentary, but what he finds there is likely to be so much academic lumber that lies inertly in the mind. With a poem that can speak so directly to our human sympathies we would hope for more, something that helps us to understand what Odysseus finds in these two chance happenings, as we would call them. Are there traces of this ancient thinking in our minds today? Surely there are. Suppose that a person contemplating some expensive purchase hears someone say in answer to an improbable suggestion, “No, I won’t buy that for a moment!”—might not this make him wonder if he really wanted to make the purchase? The world of nature too we still find meaningful, so much so that in the form of weather it can be used as a structural device in novels. It plays a powerful part in an early modern classic like The Turn of the Screw. It is high summer when the governess arrives at Bly; “the rooks circled and cawed in the golden sky” and she enjoys “all the music of summer and all the mystery of nature.” As James begins to introduce intimations of trouble (Quint appears at the top of the tower), it rains so violently that she cannot walk the children to church on Sunday morning. A darker intimation follows: Miss Jessel, a figure of “unmistakeable horror and evil,” whereupon nature speaks again more decisively in a brilliantly written sentence: “The summer had turned, the summer had gone; the autumn had dropped upon Bly and had blown out half our lights.” A Greek would have known what the extinction of those lights heralded. The literature of even the distant past need not always seem so remote from us and, curiously enough, relatively recent work can be stranger than anything from antiquity. Greek poetry offers nothing so bizarre as the ironclad virtue of the heroines of Victorian fiction.

  Reassured, Odysseus has to put up with more indignities in his own house, thanks to Athena, who is still at her grim work and “had no desire now to let the suitors/restrain themselves from wounding words and acts.” A bully called Ktesippos remarks that Telemakhos’ guest should have his share of the good things going. “‘Let me throw in my own small contribution,’” he says wittily, and throws a cow’s foot at Odysseus’ head. He does not have long to live. Book 20 ends with the vision of the suitors driven to madness by Athena.

  The day of the contest dawns and Penelope goes to fetch the bow from the storeroom. Standing among the suitors, she announces:

  “My lords, hear me:

  suitors indeed, you commandeered this house

  to feast and drink in, day and night, my husband

  being long gone, long out of mind. You found

  no justification for yourselves—none

  except your lust to marry me. Stand up, then:

  we now declare a contest for that prize.”

  She will marry the man who can string the bow and send an arrow through the twelve axes that have been lined up ready for the contest. Telemakhos pretends to try the bow himself, but stops playing at a nod from his father. One Leodes, a decent enough fellow and something of a prophet (this avails him nothing; he will die at Odysseus’ hands), steps forward and has a go but gives it up at once as hopeless. Because you can’t string it, Antinoos says angrily, you make out that no one can. There are men here who can do the job. All the same he proposes to have the bow greased to make it more pliable. Why not let me try my hand? Odysseus breaks in, whereupon Antinoos turns on him—a mere tramp daring to compete with the best men in the island! Let him have the bow, Penelope orders. Odysseus picks it up, examines it closely, and then, the moment we have been waiting for:

  … the man skilled in all ways of contending,

  satisfied by the great bow’s look and heft,

  like a musician, like a harper, when

  with quiet hand upon his instrument

  he draws between his thumb and forefinger

  a sweet new string upon a peg: so effortlessly

  Odysseus in one motion strung the bow.

  Then slid his right hand down the cord and plucked it,

  so the taut gut vibrating hummed and sang

  a swallow’s note.

  Zeus thunders his approval, Odysseus picks up an arrow, sends it clean through the socket rings of the twelve axes, and now, all perplexities cast aside, the poem stands in the clear light of battle. Fitzgerald signals the new note by turning to a new meter, a longer heroic line:

  Now shrugging off his rags the wiliest fighter of the

  islands

  leapt and stood on the broad door sill, his own bow in

  his hand.

  He poured out at his feet a rain of arrows from the quiver and spoke to the crowd:

  “So much for that. Your clean-cut game is over.” The meter remains the same in the Greek, but we feel the poet flexing his Iliadic muscles.

  Antinoos is the first to die, his throat pierced by an arrow as he raises a cup of wine to his lips. Eurymakhos tries to come to terms with Odysseus but soon gives it up and charges, only to fall in his turn. One by one the suitors meet their fate. Athena lends a hand when help is needed, deflecting arrows showered at Odysseus and at one point driving the suitors mad with terror by revealing that fearful aegis (a kind of shield dreadfully emblazoned?). For heaven approves of the slaughter. This book, the twenty-second, is governed by the lex talionis, the law of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, in all its archaic severity. No one is spared: the goatherd Melanthios who played dogsbody to the suitors in their dirty game is savagely hacked to pieces; the servant girls who bedded with the suitors are taken out and hanged. The celebrated Hellenist of an earlier day, Gilbert Murray, who found a good deal in the Greek record to trouble his gentle spirit, noted with relief the end of the line describing their death: “their feet danced for a little, but not long [italics added].”22 He could have found more to comfort him in the high Hellenic note that sounds in Odysseus’ words to Eurykleia as she shrieks in triumph:

  “Rejoice

  inwardly. No crowing aloud, old woman.

  To glory over slain men is no piety.

  Destiny and the gods’ will vanquished these,

  and their own hardness.”

  Regrettably, a number of Homeric scholars have wished to delete these beautiful lines.

  Penelope has been kept upstairs away from the carnage and will not believe Eurykleia when she tells her that Odysseus has killed all the suitors. It cannot be, she says, it must have been some god who punished them for their sins. She goes down uncertain how to behave. Keep her distance and question him? Or take his hands and kiss him? Odysseus stands still, saying nothing; the moment of reunion is coming but it must not be hurried. Very gently he lets her take her time and silences Telemakhos, who reproaches her for being so aloof: “‘Peace: let your mother test me at her leisure.’” She does so, cleverly testing the great tester. If he really is my husband, she says, we will recognize each other. “‘There are/secret signs we know, we two.’” She orders Eurykleia to make up his bed for him: “‘Place it outside the bedchamber my lord/built with his own hands.’” At this Odysseus flares up in anger, asking who dared, who could, move the bed that he had built, and goes on to describe it:

  “An old trunk of olive

  grew like a pillar on the building plot,

  and I laid out our bedroom round that tree,

  lined up the stone walls, built the walls and roof,

  gave it a doorway and smooth-fitting doors.

  Then I lopped off the silvery leaves and branches,

  hewed and shaped that stump from the roots up

  into a bedpost, drilled it, let it serve

  as model for the rest. I planed them all,

  inlaid them all with silver, gold and ivory,

  and stretched a bed between—a pliant web

  of oxhide thongs dyed crimson.

  There’s our sign!”

  The loving detail is earned, for this bed, with all that it suggests of gentleness and peace, the bed where they first lay in love and where he begot his only son, is the still point to which the whole poem has been moving through the strange adve
ntures in foreign parts of the first half on to the violence of the previous book. Penelope can resist no longer:

  So they came

  into that bed so steadfast, loved of old,

  opening glad arms to one another.

  Two eminent Alexandrian scholars said or seemed to say that the poem ended here, or perhaps they meant that it came to its consummation rather than its actual conclusion, as Stanford suggests in his note on these lines. It has, at all events, reached its main goal: Odysseus has righted the great wrong by punishing the suitors for their crimes and setting his house in order. Above all, the loving unity of husband and wife has been restored. The reunion with Laërtês is, however, still to come; the bond between father and son was far too strong in Greek culture for it to be left hanging. We may also wonder how the Ithakans are going to take the deaths of so many of their prominent men; they can hardly let Odysseus get away with it. Something more has to be done, but it is hard to believe that the final book as a whole is the best that could be done.

  It begins with the shades of the suitors being led by Hermes to the world of the dead. Since Theoklymenos foretold that this was their destination, we might well have been left to suppose that the prophet knew what he was talking about. On their way they pass by some of the famous dead who fought at Troy: Akhilleus, Aias, Agamemnon. We met them in Book 11—do we need to meet them again here? Agamemnon describes the great funeral held for Akhilleus, impressive but hardly relevant unless we suppose that the poet wished to link his poem with The Iliad. Agamemnon goes on to speak of his own wretched ending, done to death by his wife and her vile paramour on returning home. This is relevant, since the contrast between his return and that of Odysseus was introduced in Book 1 and has been mentioned again intermittently, and the parallel between the false Klytaimnestra and the faithful Penelope is one of the poem’s many doublings.