To this the strategist Odysseus answered:
(Kalypso has inquired if he thinks Penelope more attractive than herself, since he is so anxious to return to her.)
The great tactician carefully replied:
(Queen Arete wants to know why he is wearing clothes that her daughter Nausikaa took that morning to the river to launder.)
His mind ranging far, Odysseus answered:
(Athena has revealed herself in Ithaka and promised to help him; carefully he sifts her promises.)
And the great master of invention answered:
(He is about to relate the fifth of his six fictitious life stories to Penelope.) A particularly fine example of Fitzgerald’s care for context occurs in Book 7, where Odysseus, safe at last in happy Phaiákia after so many harrowing adventures, is referred to as polutlas, much-enduring, one of his most constant epithets. Fitzgerald translates: “Odysseus, who had borne the barren sea.” There is no barren sea in the Greek but a lot of it in Odysseus’ mind.
One could continue to praise the variety of means whereby this resourceful poet-translator has brought over into English Homer’s poem of the resourceful Odysseus. For “that increasingly important if ill-defined person, the Greekless ‘general reader,’” in Professor Dodds’s just and careful words, this is the only translation. Those that preceded it have their interest but are not essential; those that have followed do not matter. The fortunate few who have some Greek, good Greek, any Greek, find their pleasure in the original quickened by meeting it reborn in their own language. Sometimes, even … listen to Nausikaa proudly describing her father in his great chair by the fire:
there like a god he sits and takes his wine
τ γε oνoπoτζε φμενoς θνατoς ς.
Is not the English almost as fine as the Greek, even if Fitzgerald cannot quite match Homer’s swagger?
BY ROBERT FITZGERALD
TRANSLATIONS
The Iliad
The Aeneid
Oedipus at Colonus
Chronique (St.-John Perse)
Birds (St.-John Perse)
(with Dudley Fitts)
Oedipus Rex
Antigone
Alcestis
POEMS
Poems (1935)
A Wreath for the Sea
In the Rose of Time
Spring Shade
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
POSTSCRIPT
BY ROBERT FITZGERALD
CRITICAL WRITING
ON THE ODYSSEY
AND HOMERIC POETRY
NOTES AND GLOSSARY
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
There are two sets of line numbers throughout this book. Those in the margins refer to the English text; those at the top of the page refer to the Greek text. A few lines thought spurious or out of place in antiquity, and later, have been omitted from the translation. These are:
Book I, lines 275 through 278 and 356 through 359.
Book IX, line 483.
Book XI, line 245.
Book XIII, lines 320 and 321.
Book XIV, line 154, lines 161 and 162, lines 504 through 506.
Book XVI, line 101.
Book XVII, line 402.
Book XXIII, line 320.
The translator wishes to record his gratitude for aid of various kinds. A Guggenheim Fellowship helped him to begin; a Ford grant helped him to finish. Dudley Fitts and Sally Fitzgerald read and commented invaluably on the entire work in the course of writing. About half of the poem benefited from close readings by Andrew Chiappe, Jason Epstein, and John F. Nims. Valuable corrections and suggestions were given on shorter sections by John Berryman, Colin G. Hardie, Michael Jameson, Randall Jarrell, Priscilla Jenkins, and John Crowe Ransom. One salutary blast came from Ezra Pound. For the patient publisher, Anne Freedgood gave the manuscript a discerning reading.
POSTSCRIPT
BY ROBERT FITZGERALD
SOME DETAILS OF SCENE AND ACTION
I
The ship on which I sailed from Piraeus one summer night approached Odysseus’ kingdom from the south in the early morning. Emerging on deck for the occasion, I saw a mile or so to the west the bright flank of a high island, broadside to the rising sun. This was Kephallenia, identified by tradition with Same of The Odyssey; in fact the port where we presently put in is called Same. Beyond it to the north and dead ahead rose another island mass, lying from northwest to southeast and therefore visible only on its western side, all shadow, a dark silhouette. This was Thiaki or Ithaka.
Now, one of the innumerable questions never quite settled by students of Homer is the intended meaning of these two lines, concerning Ithaka and neighboring islands, in Book IX of The Odyssey (lines 25 and 26):
Uncertainties ramify handsomely in the first line, but let me confine myself here to the second, which literally means, or appears to mean, that Ithaka lies “toward the gloom, while the other islands lie apart toward the Dawn and the Sun.” Long before my Ithakan landfall I knew that this line has been thought simply inaccurate. But when I saw the islands with my own eyes in the morning light I felt at once that I had discovered the image behind Homer’s words. He, too, I felt sure, had looked ahead over a ship’s bow at that hour and had seen those land masses, one sunny and one in gloom, just as I saw them. An overnight sail from Pylos would have brought him there at the right time.
This notion was, of course, highly exhilarating. I am sorry that further consideration has more or less deflated it. One trouble with it was that Homer (or Odysseus, the speaker in this passage) did not describe Ithaka as being itself shadowy or gloomy but as lying in a certain direction, “toward” the “gloom.” If the contrast between Ithaka and Same at sunrise had been in his mind, he could have put it more distinctly. Not that Homer is always lucid grammatically, but “toward the gloom” for “in gloom” is not his kind of vagueness. Then, too, the word ζóφoς in Homer does not mean simply gloom; it means the gloom of one end of the world, one quarter of the compass, generally held by the ancients to be the west. δη γρ φoς oχεθ’ πò ζóφoν says Athena in Book III, 335, “The sun has gone down already under the gloom [of the west],” and Odysseus asks Elpênor in Book XI, 57, πς λθες υπó ζóφoν ηερóεντα, “How did you come down under the cloudy gloom [of the world’s end]?”
It would be excellent if these clear instances were also conclusive, and πρòς ζóφoν were to be translated “toward the west” or “toward the western gloom.” But here precisely is the difficulty. Ithaka does not in fact lie “west” of the other islands in the group. Neither does Leukas, the more northerly island that some students have believed to be Homer’s Ithaka. So far as Ithaka itself is concerned, the fact is that the northern horn of Kephallenia, across a channel a mile or so wide, reaches up along the length of the island to the west. How now?
Well, it must be recalled that Homer knew no other west than the direction of sunset, and in midsummer, in that latitude, the sun goes down at a spot on the horizon far north of true west. Whether the poet was an Ionian or an Athenian, he is unlikely to have visited the islands except in the sailing season. Homer’s sunset quarter could have been roughly northwest by west. This very nearly solves the difficulty, but perhaps not quite. If we are still a few points off, so to speak, I am glad to say that recourse may be had to the later Greek geographer, Strabo.
According to Lord Rennell of Rodd, in the Annual of the British School in Athens, No. xxxiii, Session 1932—33, Strabo “entertained no doubt” that in the line I have quoted, ζóφoς “indicated the north, as the Sun does the south.” That is to say, Strabo and Lord Rennell pass lightly over the antithesis between ζóφoς and Dawn in that line of Homer in order to embrace the antithesis between ζóφoς and the Sun, whose usual path in north latitudes passes south of the zenith. Most of Kephallenia does indeed lie to the south of Ithaka, and so does the island now called Zante, very likely the Zakýnthos of The Odyssey. As for Doulikhion, Rennell and others rather desperately identify it wi
th one of the small Ekhinades to the east.
Pondering this argument, I asked myself why each of the antitheses noted in the phrase should not be given equal value, or half of full value. Granted that Ithaka is “west” with respect to Doulikhion and “north” with respect to Zakýothos and Samê-Kephallenia, then πρòς ζóφoν could be briefly rendered “to the northwest,” and the other islands πρòς τ’λóν τε could be said to “lie east and south.” Here I left this question.
II
If you will do an hour or two of hard climbing on Ithaka you can reach the spinal ridge of the island and there, while you cool off, you can look across the blue channel to the west at the steep side of Same a mile away. Close in to the other shore you will see a tiny islet known as Daskalion. This, with no great satisfaction, the commentators identify with Asteris, the small island behind which the suitors in their long boat lay in wait for Telémakhos at the end of Book IV. This identification in turn depends on another, that of a small round cove on the west side of Ithaka, somewhat north of the islet, as the harbor from which Telémakhos put out on his evening voyage. The longer I looked at this setting the more quarrelsome I felt with received opinion. It is true that at first glance all the requisites are there: the channel, the islet, the harbor. I am afraid, of course, that received opinion may be right. But on this point I have remained cranky and fond of my private reasons for dissent.
It appears that Polis Bay, as the round cove is tendentiously named, was once larger, and that it was a port of call in the classical period for Greek ships passing up the channel, outward bound for Italy. This fact of itself seems to me irrelevant if we are concerned to find the port of Ithaka at the time of the Trojan War, long before colonization or commerce with Italy, or even in Homer’s time, late in the eighth century, when voyages to the western Mediterranean had just begun. The harbor described in The Odyssey serves, above all, ships that ply to and from Elis, the mainland of the Peloponnesus to the southeast, and Thesprotia, or Acarnania, to the east. It was from the southeast that my ship, the S. S. Miaoulis, arrived, and the Miaoulis put me ashore at Vathy on the deep harbor of the same name (it means “deep”). This is the longest and best sheltered of three bays opening southward off the wide Gulf of Molos, which runs inward from east to west and almost cuts Ithaka in two. Along the quay of Vathy in the evening I saw open caiques from the mainland unloading cattle in slings. From pasture land to the stony island, pastureless, the caiques had brought these cows to be slaughtered for Ithakan markets. Here was a ferry service exactly like the one alluded to in Book XX, 187, of The Odyssey. As the Gulf of Molos is the roadstead of Ithaka, Vathy is its natural harbor—or at least so it seems to the ferrymen, to the Greek steamship company, and to me.
But how could Vathy have been the port from which Telémakhos sailed, if on leaving it he would have had to issue eastward by the Gulf of Molos into the open sea, passing through no channel between Ithaka and Same? This objection would be insuperable if Homer had been an Ithakan. Since he surely was not, but was a visitor like myself, I think it worth reporting that on the day after my arrival I had another visual revelation. From high ground on the north part of Ithaka I saw a small island, perfectly satisfying Homer’s description of Asteris, that seemed to lie between Ithaka and Same to the south. I said to my guide, “What island is that?” “Oh, that is Attako,” he said. I looked at my map, which showed Attako lying in the sea to the east of Ithaka. “Are you sure?” said I. “Of course, I’m sure, I’ve been fishing there many times.” No one would have guessed from the map that from the northeast height of Ithaka, looking south, you see this islet against the background of what appears to be another island mass but is in fact the southern part of Ithaka. What looks like a “channel” is the mouth of the Gulf of Molos.
My surmise is that Homer on his peregrination over Odysseus’ island made mistakes like mine, that he confused the Gulf of Molos with the channel between Ithaka and Same, and that his islet “Asteris” is the island Attako, not the tiny rock called Daskalion. Do not suppose that my theory lacks textual support. Attako has high ground from which the suitors could have kept their watch (XVI, 365); Daskalion has not. Moreover, to bear out my identification of Vathy with Telémakhos’ harbor, I can refer to at least one detail of his embarkation. Athena is said to have moored his ship “at the harbor’s edge,” in Book II, 391 π’ σχατ λµνoς, and once he had shoved off she sent him a following wind that took him out to sea. From what quarter blew this wind? From the west, for it is expressly called Zφυρoς, the west wind, in II, 420—21. This is just the wind you would need astern if you wanted to put out from the mouth of Vathy Bay, but if you were putting out from Polis Bay it would blow you right back in.
It can be urged against me that the stern wind supplied by Athena lasted all night and took Telémakhos’ ship all the way to Pylos. A steady wind from the west would have taken him not south to Pylos, but east, let us say, to Missolonghi. Perhaps, as I have myself argued that Homer’s west lay in a more northerly quarter, his Zephyr also blew from that quarter and would serve a ship sailing from Polis Bay down the channel between Ithaka and Same. I do not, of course, see why it could not have been the west wind at the start and have changed direction during the night, but in the end I compromised in deference to the established view. It is a northwest wind in my text. I may add that on my second evening at Vathy the wind freshened from that direction and, blowing over open water, made a fluttering and percussive effect in my eardrums—not entirely agreeable—like the noise of Homer’s line for it:
III
These notes may suggest some of the pleasures and complexities of going to see for yourself. I would be a fool to plume myself on my dip into those studies on ancient sites that have occupied good men and women for years. But I am forever grateful for my days on Ithaka as I am for other days, few but moving, in Athens and elsewhere in Greece. A rendering for the opening of Book III,
came into my head in the Saronic Gulf, and a week later at sunrise in Heraklion I found words for the next phrase, oρανòν ς πoλχαλκoν. By these and other keepsakes I am reminded that if I had never listened to the cicadas and drunk the resined wine I would have done the job differently, if I had done it at all. But most of it was what all writing is, a sedentary labor, or joy, sustained at a worktable. At one elbow, in this case, there were always those lines and parts of lines that have been pored over by so many for centuries. Of the puzzling ones I will give a few more examples, two at least of them notorious, with some account of the elucidation I think they demand. Multiply these cases by a thousand, and you will see what the preliminary or incidental work was like. As befits a dramatic poem, the first case is a tiny detail of action.
In Book XI Odysseus hears the shade of Agamemnon tell how Aigisthos and Klytaimnéstra murdered him on his return from Troy, and with him his companions. They were all butchered, he says bitterly, like swine. I take it that he means what he says. The way you butcher a pig is by piercing or cutting his throat, and it does not seem unreasonable to imagine here, and to bear in mind elsewhere, that this is what happened to Agamemnon. He describes the banquet scene, the laden tables, and the floor fuming with blood where the victims lay.
Then, in line 421, he says he heard a most piteous cry from his royal slave and mistress, Kassandra,
and great difficulty has been found in grasping precisely what action this passage was meant to convey. Klytaimnéstra was in the act of killing Kassandra, so much is clear, and Kassandra was close beside the fallen Agamemnon. But what does he say he himself was doing? Consider it word for word in the order in which it appears: “but I upon (or against) the ground lifting my hands / was throwing [them] while dying around the swordblade.” Half the problem is to divide or punctuate this.
On one prevailing interpretation we should divide or punctuate after βλλoν and must therefore take πoθνσκων περ φασγν to mean “dying around the swordblade,” that is, with a blade left in his body. Thi
s is contrary to slaughtering procedure, but Professor W. B. Stanford in his annotated edition of The Odyssey tells us that there are many precedents for taking it so. He refers to four passages in The Iliad and to one in Sophocles’ Ajax. With all respect I must say that none of these makes a good precedent for Stanford’s reading, because in none of them does anyone die “around a swordblade” left in him by anyone else. Ajax has, of course, impaled himself on his own sword. Of the cases cited in The Iliad, one is concerned with an arrow and two with spears, weapons often left sticking in tenacious parts of the foe. It is otherwise with a sword; a sword in these poems was something a killer held onto if he could. The fourth case in The Iliad might be a better precedent, not for Stanford’s notion of Agamémnon’s wound but for mine (since it is an allusion to slaughtering), if the preposition used were not µφ instead of περ. In short, the evidence is inconclusive.
Moreover, if you adopt this awkward reading, you are left with a clause that represents Agamemnon as lifting his hands and throwing them. With what purpose? Or perhaps I should ask, with what aim? Victor Bérard imagined that he meant to shield Kassandra. A. T. Murray, the Loeb translator, thought he tried to hit Klytaimnéstra. Butcher and Lang, W. H. D. Rouse, and T. E. Lawrence accepted “let fall” as a translation of βλλoν: he lifted his hands and helplessly let them fall. Others, including Stanford, take πoτ γα as “against the ground” with βλλoν and suggest that he beat his hands against the ground to invoke vengeance from infernal powers.
The Odyssey: The Fitzgerald Translation Page 50