TRANSLATOR’S POSTSCRIPT

“Homer makes us Hearers,” Pope has said, “and Virgil leaves us Readers.” So the great translator of Homer, no doubt unknowingly, 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 hold 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.”

In aiming for these and other objectives in a version of the Odyssey, I have had many kinds of help. The greatest has come from my collaborator, Bernard Knox, whom I would rather call a comrade. As we worked together on Sophocles and the Iliad, so we have done on the Odyssey as well. Not only has he written the Introduction and Notes on the Translation, but he has commented on my drafts for many years. And when I leaf through the pages now, his commentary seems to ring my typescript so completely that I might be looking at a worse-for-wear, dog-eared manuscript encircled by a scholiast’s remarks. Yet Knox’s gifts are larger, for he has offered me what Yeats would call Platonic tolerance and Doric discipline, and something even more basic to the Iliad and the Odyssey. Athena, disguised as Mentor, encourages Telemachus to live up to Odysseus, “a man . . . in words and action both” (2.305). My good fortune has been to work with such a man.

Several modern scholars and critics, cited among the further readings, have helped as well, and so have several modern translators of the Odyssey. Each has introduced me to a new aspect of the poem, another potential for the present. “For if it is true,” as Maynard Mack proposes, “that what we translate from a given work is what, wearing the spectacles of our time, we see in it, it is also true that we see in it what we have the power to translate.” So the help I have derived from others is considerable, and I would like to say my thanks to them, dividing them for convenience into groups. First the ones who have translated the Odyssey into prose: from Samuel Butler, A. T. Murray, revised by George E. Dimock, and George Herbert Palmer, to W. H. D. Rouse and R. D. Dawe, and in particular to Walter Shewring and to D. C. H. Rieu who, in consultation with Peter V. Jones, has revised the earlier work of his father, E. V. Rieu. Each presents an example of accuracy as well as grace, and the stronger that example, the more instructive each has been in bringing me somewhat closer to the Greek. And next the translators who have turned the Odyssey into verse: from Albert Cook to Ennis Rees to Richmond Lattimore, Allen Mandelbaum, Oliver Taplin and Robert Fitzgerald. Each presents a kind of aspiration, and I have learned from each, probably most from Fitzgerald, since he would persuade us that Homer is, as he described him, “a living presence bringing into life his great company of imagined persons.” And finally there are the unapproachables, who either are too remote (and so to me, at least, examples not to follow), like certain Victorians, and Cowper, and Chapman —pace Keats —or are impossible to equal, like T. E. Lawrence at his best or Pope in the dozen books of the Odyssey that he produced himself.

Only a few of the recent translators have I known in person, yet we all may know each other in a way, having trekked across the same territory, perhaps having experienced the same nightmare that harried Pope throughout his Homeric efforts. “He was engaged in a long journey,” as Joseph Spence reports Pope’s dream, “puzzled which way to take, and full of fears” that it would never end. And if you reach the end, the fears may start in earnest. Your best hope, I suppose, and a distant one at that, is the one held out by Walter Benjamin in his essay “The Task of the Translator,” where he writes, “even the greatest translation is destined to become part of the growth of its own language and eventually to be absorbed by its renewal.”

Many friends have come to my side, some by reading, some by listening to me read, the work-in-progress, and responding with criticism or encouragement or a healthy blend of both. Most encouraging of all, none has asked me, “Why another Odyssey?” Each has understood, it seems, that if Homer was a performer, his translator might aim to be one as well; and no two performances of the same work —surely not of musical composition, so probably not of a work of language either —will ever be the same. The timbre and tempo of each will be distinct, let alone its deeper resonance, build and thrust. My thanks, then, to André Aciman, Clarence Brown, Andrew Ford, Rachel Hadas, Robert Hollander, David Lenson, Earl Miner, Sarah Nelson, Joyce Carol Oates, Jacqueline Savini, Ben Sonnenberg and Theodore Weiss. And I also thank the ones who invited me to try the work in public, and improve it in the bargain: Peter Bien at Dartmouth College, Ward Briggs III at the University of South Carolina, Larry Carver and Paul Woodruff at the University of Texas in Austin, and Karl Kirchwey at the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y. And philhellenic thanks should go to Edmund Keeley, the English voice of the great modern Greek poets, for he accompanied me on Homer’s nostos, reacting line by line and knowing well, with his Cavafy, that only Ithaca can give you “the marvelous journey” in the first place.

Several classicists have offered information and advice: Marilyn Arthur Katz, John Keaney, Richard Martin, Georgia Nugent, John Peradotto, Pietro Pucci and Froma Zeitlin. Together with the lexicons, Homeric and ancient Greek in general, the commentaries of other scholars have been my vade mecums: those on other English translations of the Odyssey —Ralph Hexter’s on Robert Fitzgerald’s and Peter Jones’s on Richmond Lattimore’s —and those on Homer’s text itself: A. F. Garvie’s on Books 6 through 8 and R. B. Rutherford’s on 19 and 20; the complete three-volume Oxford commentary compiled by M. Fernández-Galiano, J. B. Hainsworth, A. Heubeck, A. Hoekstra, J. Russo and S. West; and W. B. Stanford’s edition of the Odyssey with his commentary on the poem. The first incentive for translating Homer came from the late Stanford, who, one afternoon in County Wicklow many years ago, sketched out a route for returning to the source. And in pursuit of it, I have often consulted the familiar spirits of Anne and Adam Parry.

The roofs of some great houses have extended welcome shelter to the translator and his work. Mary and Theodore Cross have turned Nantucket into Ithaca West with their Homeric hospitality. Princeton University gave me generous leaves of absence in the spring of 1992 and, adding a McCosh Faculty Fellowship for good measure, throughout the spring and fall semesters three years later. More important, the University has enabled me to study Homer with students who have been an education to me. The Program in Hellenic Studies appointed me to a Stanley J. Seeger Fellowship, which took me to the Ionian islands in the summer of 1994 (and persuaded me that unless Cephallenia —lying “low and away, the farthest out to sea” [9.27] —was actually Ithaca, Odysseus may never have got home at all). The Rockefeller Foundation provided Bernard Knox with a resident fellowship at the Villa Serbelloni in April 1991, when he began to write the Introduction. And the staff of Comparative Literature at Princeton, Carol Szymanski and Cass Garner, have been invaluable to us both as we prepared the work for publication.

To produce the book at hand, my editor, Kathryn Court, assisted by Laurie Walsh, has treated the writing and the writer, too, with insight, affection and address. As my manuscript editor, Beena Kamlani’s efforts to tame and train a fairly unruly piece of work have been heroic. The good people at Viking Penguin —Barbara Grossman, Cathy Hemming, Paul Slovak, Leigh Butler —all have been loyal allies in New York, where Peter Mayer —like Peter Carson and Paul Keegan in London —has been a gracious host to the latest Homer in the house. Ann Gold with all her artistry, in coordination with Junie Lee, has designed a volume to companion the Iliad that came before it, and Maggie Payette and Neil Stuart have created its handsome jacket. Roni Axelrod and Cynthia Achar oversaw the production of the book, and Marjorie Horvitz’s sharp eye was helpful to the text. Dan Lundy, Mary Sunden and Maria Barbieri have labored long and hard with Joe Marcey and Peter Smith to find this version of the Odyssey some readers. Mark Stafford, Susan Mosakowski and Mary Kohl have done the same to find some listeners, too, producing the Penguin Audiobook, read by Ian McKellen, who performs the translation as if he were personifying Homer. My former editor Alan Williams, who saw me through the straits of Aeschylus and Sophocles, gave my plans a timely push toward Troy, then home again to Greece with the old dog Argos as our guide. And through it all, without the unfailing stay and strategies of my friend and agent Georges Borchardt, assisted by Cindy Klein for several years, this translation might not have seen the light.

The Odyssey, the perennial poem of adventure, stops but never really ends. Seen in one way, Odysseus is forever outward bound, off to another country to appease Poseidon in the future, and changing through the centuries as he goes, “the man of twists and turns,” of many incarnations, with as many destinations. Among them are Virgil’s Aeneas, who makes his way toward Rome, and Dante’s Ulysses moving toward “the world where no one lives,” and Milton’s Adam toward “a paradise within thee, happier far,” and Tennyson’s restless mariner toward “the baths / of all the western stars,” and Joyce’s Bloom toward the New Bloomusalem, until he settles for dear dirty Dublin and the moly that is Molly. For as Joyce makes clear, an equal adventure lies within the bounds of Homer’s poem itself. There, after twenty years of warfaring and wayfaring, Odysseus circles back toward Penelope, and the two together reach their resting place and share a kingdom with their offspring, as if to say, with great good spirit, that life continues here and now at home. If the translation offers any sense of this, the translator thanks his daughters, Katya and Nina, and first and last the Muse he calls on in the dedication, Lynne.

R. F.

Princeton, N.J.June 17, 1996

A NOTE ON THIS PRINTING:

This printing contains minor revisions of the text.

R.F.

May 17, 1997