Looking at the shades that Hermes is conducting, Agamemnon recognizes one of them and asks what brought him to this sorry pass. The man relates, at considerable length, how he and his fellows tried to win the hand of Penelope, who kept them on tenterhooks for years by her clever trick with the web, eventually announcing that she would marry the man who could shoot an arrow—and so forth. Why go over all this again?
Now for Odysseus’ visit to Laërtês, miserably reduced and hardly more than a farmhand on his own property. Before identifying himself, Odysseus decides that he should test him, “draw him out with sharp words, trouble him.” This seems unnecessary and rather cruel, but Odysseus knows what he is doing. He is afraid that revealing himself at once, as he did with Telemakhos, might be too much for the old man, so he moves slowly, as he did with Penelope, letting Laërtês gradually perceive that the man standing before him is his long-lost son. His intention, as Alfred Heubeck sees, is to release him from “the paralysis of emotion, lethargy and apathy” into which he has fallen.23 So he relates one more fictitious story, describing how he once met a man called Odysseus and became fond of him. Much affected, Laërtês asks the visitor his name. “‘My name is Quarrelman,’” Odysseus answers, “‘King Allwoes’ only son.’” Since his real name may in Greek signify Son of Pain,24 this serves to put Laërtês on the right track and, unable to keep the old man in suspense any longer, Odysseus throws his arms round him and cries, “‘Oh, Father, I am he!’” Like father like son: Laërtês asks for a sign to confirm this, and is shown the famous scar.
Meanwhile the townsfolk are arming to take their revenge on the murderer. His blood lust not yet quenched, Odysseus is about to set to and slaughter the lot of them, but at this point Zeus, prompted by Athena, intervenes:
“Odysseus’ honor being satisfied,
let him be king by a sworn pact forever,
and we, for our part, will blot out the memory
of sons and brothers slain. As in the old time
let men of Ithaka henceforth be friends;
prosperity enough, and peace attend them.”
This would have made a fine ending—for a different poem (the Oresteia for instance), one in which Odysseus’ relations with the citizenry had been a central theme and our attention had been directed to his Ithakan kingdom rather than his own house. As it is, the effect of Zeus’ words, judicious though they are, cannot be very great.
Scholarship has cast doubts on the authenticity of Book 24. However this may be, the general reader can hardly help wishing that the poem came to a more satisfying close. One could surely have been devised. Twice we have heard, first from Teiresias in Book 11, then from Odysseus himself speaking to Penelope, about a mysterious final journey that he must undertake. He is to go overland on foot carrying an oar to a people knowing nothing of ships or seafaring, plant the oar there, then make sacrifices to his enemy the great god Poseidon (is not this an issue that should be settled?) and further sacrifices to the gods when he returns home. Could not this story, which is never developed, have been introduced here? The poem might then end like this:
a seaborne death
soft as this hand of mist will come upon you
when you are wearied out with rich old age,
your country folk in blessed peace around you.
This picture of the old soldier, seaman, traveler, in calm of mind all passion spent, could have provided The Odyssey with a noble ending. But the poem ends as it does, and Fitzgerald, who read his way into it as no scholar can, finds that “in substance Book XXIV is fully ‘Homeric’ and that whoever composed it knew what he was doing.” Let the final word rest with le grant translateur.
THE TRANSLATION
The translator of Homer must first decide on the line that he is going to use. For the age of Dryden and Pope the rhyming couplet was the only candidate, but the couplet fell from favor and the blank verse of Paradise Lost came to be recognized as the English heroic measure. Matthew Arnold opted for the hexameter, with the English stress accent replacing classical syllabic length, but the specimen translations he offered did not help to commend his choice. Pound’s first Canto, a translation of the opening of Book 11 of The Odyssey in a disguised form of the Old English alliterative line, is masterly, but it is hard to imagine it prolonged for many thousands of lines. The same reservation applies to the interesting treatment of a scene from Iliad 17 in wiry sprung verse by the classical scholar E. R. Dodds, unfortunately very little known.25 Christopher Logue, with great metrical variety and enough shock tactics to keep us on the edge of our seats, in his earlier versions from The Iliad brought over a number of passages with a fire unequaled since Pope’s great translation.
The prevailing meter in modern times has been the six-beat line which seems to have been first used by the English poet C. Day Lewis in his 1940 translation of Virgil’s Georgics. He described it as “a rhythm based on the hexameter, containing six beats in each line, but allowing much variation of pace and interspersed with occasional short lines of three stresses.” This is not a recognized line of English verse, but it suits an age when poetry has been taught not to put on airs, and in Day Lewis’s hands it has its modest virtues:
I remember once beneath the battlements of Oebalia,
Where dark Galesus waters the golden fields of corn,
I saw an old man, a Corycian, who owned a few poor acres
Of land once derelict, useless for arable,
No good for grazing, unfit for the cultivation of vines.
From England the six-beat line (minus the lines of three stresses) passed to America, into the hands of Richmond Lattimore, whose 1951 translation of The Iliad quickly assumed classic status and was used in classrooms all over the country. A Greek scholar himself, Lattimore was loudly praised by members of his profession for his ruthless fidelity to the original. “Professor Lattimore adheres to the literal at times,” Guy Davenport unkindly observed, “with the obstinacy of a mule eating briars.“26 Certain defects this celebrated translation has. Lattimore’s six-beat line lacks the rapidity that Arnold saw as the first of the qualities characterizing the Homeric hexameter, and does not provide what Goethe found in Homer,”a language which does your thinking and poetizing for you.” On the contrary, the translator must work at his six-beater all the time to prevent it from turning into wooden prose arbitrarily chopped into verse lengths.
Robert Fitzgerald, unaffected by the fashion, saw that our classic English measure, the more or less iambic decasyllabic line, was the only choice, even though it was not in favor when he wrote and has often been very dull, as even Wordsworth can be when he is not inspired. Milton showed that it does not have to be dull and is capable of the widest metrical variety: “Into a Gulf shot under ground, till part”—a 4/4/2 rhythm, two choriambs, call them, plus an iamb, followed by a swift caesura-less line: “Rose up a Fountain by the Tree of Life.”
Fitzgerald made himself entirely at home with the iambic line, using it with a variety and flexibility it has always been capable of. He avoided the danger of monotony by counterpointing speech rhythm against the formal iambic rhythm (“too much iambic will kill any subject matter,” Pound told him), and succeeded in writing an English so easy and unforced that we look through the words, conscious of them only for their expressive felicity, to what is being done or said. He can be as casual and relaxed as this:
“I hear the old man comes to town no longer,
stays up country, ailing, with only one
old woman to prepare his meat and drink.”
Almost prose? but turn to Rieu’s version and see how much is lost when Homer is really turned into what Greek called logoi pezoi, pedestrian’s talk: “For I gather that he no longer comes to town, but lives a hard and lonely life on his farm with an old servant-woman, who puts his food and drink before him.”
Fitzgerald’s lines are verse all right, narrative verse as fluent and natural as any in our language, and can effortlessly modulate into poetry as they do a
little earlier on in this passage:
“A man whose bones are rotting somewhere now,
white in the rain on dark earth where they lie,
or tumbling in the groundswell of the sea.”
He is helped by his exceptionally fine ear for dramatic utterance and tones of voice, all-important in Homer, in whose poetry there is so much speech. The range is very great, from the homely pathos of Penelope’s
“Oh, Nan, they are a bad lot”
to the Olympian maestoso of Zeus’
“Hermês, you have much practice on our missions,
go make it known to the softly-braided nymph
that we, whose will is not subject to error,
order Odysseus home.”
Listen now to the softly-braided Kalypso asking Hermes why he has come to see her: “Tell me please, Hermes of the golden wand, why have you come, an honored, dear friend? You have not visited me much in the past. Say what you have in mind, for I am eager to do it if I can and if it is something that can be done.” But this will never do. The lady must be allowed to speak her own beautiful language:
Tíπτε ‘Eρμεíα Xρυσρραπ, εíλλoυθας
αδoς τε φλoς τε; πρoς γε μν o τ θαμζες.
αδα τ φρoνες τελσα δ με θυμς νωγεν,
ε δναμα τελσα γε κα ε τετελεσμνoν στν.
Fitzgerald hears what she would say were she speaking English:
“O Hermes, ever with your golden wand,
what brings you to my island?
Your awesome visits in the past were few.
Now tell me what request you have in mind;
for I desire to do it, if I can,
and if it is a proper thing to do.”
Homer gives the god his ceremonial epithet, khrusorrapis, “with wand of gold.” These epithets are a problem for the translator, since English poetry is so much less free with them than Greek. Robert Fagles in his recent version takes the bull by the horns and writes: “‘God of the golden wand, why have you come?’” Not very polite, nor is this a convincing form of address; neither in real life nor in a novel can someone say, “Man in the black mask, what are you doing in my house?” Fitzgerald solves the problem by making a point of it. He hears a coquettish half-mocking note in Kalypso’s voice as though she were saying, “I see you have brought your golden wand with you. You never leave home without it, do you?” Fagles has her call him “a beloved, honored friend.” Fitzgerald continues the note of mockery and keeps closer to the Greek aidoios with “your awesome visits.” His “for I desire to do it, if I can” follows the original closely; “and if it is a proper thing to do” (can the god be asking her to do something improper?) does not, but a great translator can occasionally lend his greater original author a helping hand, as Laurence Binyon does when he writes “thwart winds” for Dante’s “contrari venti.”27
Long narrative poems are hardly in vogue nowadays and readers are easily put off by rank after rank of solid verse. Whether or not consciously avoiding this danger, Fitzgerald often breaks up lines into their constitutive elements, directing our attention now to this character, now to that, and introducing bits of speech so that we sometimes seem to be reading a scene from a play. Take a passage like this from Book 17:
Telémakhos,
after the blow his father bore, sat still
without a tear, though his heart felt the blow.
Slowly he shook his head from side to side,
containing murderous thoughts.
Penélopê
on the higher level of her room had heard
the blow, and knew who gave it. Now she murmured:
“Would god you could be hit yourself, Antínoös—hit by Apollo’s bowshot!”
And Eurýnomê
her housekeeper, put in:
“He and no other?
If all we pray for came to pass, not one
would live till dawn!”
Her gentle mistress said:
“Oh, Nan, they are a bad lot …”
Fitzgerald’s Odyssey was immediately recognized as a masterpiece, but it has not always pleased professional classicists, who complain that it pays no attention to the most influential contribution made to Homeric scholarship in this century, the demonstration by the American scholar Milman Parry that Homer’s poems are oral compositions. The units of his poetry—to quote the formulation of Parry’s theory by an enthusiastic adherent, Denys Page—“are not words, selected by the poet, combined by him into phrases, and adjusted by him to his metre: its units are formulas, phrases ready-made, extending in length from a word or two to several complete lines, already adapted to the metre, and either already adapted or instantly adaptable to the limited range of ideas [sic] which the subject-matter of the Greek epic may require him to express. The oral poet composes while he recites; he must therefore be able to rely on his memory. He makes his lines out of formulas which he knows by heart, and which he has learned to use in this way as one learns to use an ordinary language.”28
The facts, the elements of Homeric diction, are as Parry recorded them, and are not open to question. The inferences from those facts are very much open to question and have been questioned by scholars bold enough to go against the prevailing doctrine.29 This, however, is not the place to go into the matter, since the oral-formulaic style cannot be adequately reproduced in translation. Even if the translator uses words semantically equivalent to the Greek, they will not have the same effect, or give the same pleasure, as they do in the original where we see or hear the recurrent phrases, polutlas dos Odusseus (long-enduring, noble Odysseus), polumtis Odusseus (the great planner Odysseus) and the like, fit into their appointed place in the Greek hexameter. Nothing of the sort can happen in English verse with its far freer metrical structure, and the recurrent phrases seem merely repetitious.
Fitzgerald at all events does not try to pretend that he is himself composing orally and allows himself the liberties that fine verse translators have always taken from the time of Dryden and Pope, on to Edward Fitzgerald in the nineteenth century and to Pound, the greatest libertarian of them all, in our own. These liberties are not licenses; they are necessary freedoms. When in Iliad 19 Akhilleus returns to the fighting, Pope translates:
All bright in heav’nly Arms, above his Squire
Achilles mounts, and sets the Field on Fire.
These lines do not correspond to anything in the Greek words. What Pope, using his own words, has done is to make us feel the sudden surge of energy, greater than anything we have felt before, that sets the field on fire when Achilles goes into action.
The situation today is different. Translation of classical poetry is for the most part directed not to the lover of poetry or even the general reader but to the classroom, where it is taught by people who probably do not know Greek or Latin and want to be sure that the version they are using closely follows the original. They are going to be seriously embarrassed if, having praised Homer’s wit for describing Athena disguised as a young girl as “the awesome one in pigtails,” they discover from a classical colleague that it is Fitzgerald’s wit they should be praising, not Homer’s; he speaks of Athena as “the dread goddess with beautiful hair.” Good old Lattimore never lets us down like this, they mutter resentfully.30
Merriment of this sort Fitzgerald allows himself only now and then. This is a responsible translation, and we should hardly hold it against him that it makes very enjoyable reading. There are those who enjoy reading The Odyssey in Greek. He does, however, have his own angle on the poem, interpreting it rather than simply word-for-wording it into English. Consider a line like this:
Aîas, it was—the great shade burning still
(Odysseus has just met his old enemy among the dead.) There is no burning shade in Homer’s Greek but there is in Virgil’s Latin, in the scene in Aeneid 6 modeled on Homer when Aeneas meets the shade of Dido, whom he has deserted, ardentem et torva tuentem (�
��burning and glaring savagely”). Fitzgerald lets the Latin speak through the Greek because his vision is synoptic; he knows that The Odyssey is part of a larger whole in which the poems of Virgil and Milton and the other great poets of our tradition have a simultaneous existence (to borrow words from a famous passage of Eliot). He does what Pope does when, translating The Iliad, he lets Milton’s “High on a throne of Royal State … Satan exalted sat” speak through his English Homer: “High in the midst the great Achilles stands,” “High o’er the Host, all terrible he stands.” Fitzgerald’s translation is interpretative rather than literal because he understands that a phrase or line may in different contexts mean something different. Twenty-three times in the poem there is a line that introduces a speech by Odysseus. Lattimore follows Homer by using the same words each time: “Then resourceful Odysseus spoke in turn and answered him/ her.” Fitzgerald renders it in this and more than this variety of ways: .
The Odyssey: The Fitzgerald Translation Page 49