Michael Silk's review appeared in the TLS of December 19, 1997
We belong to a generation for which Homer is poetry again. For many years,
interpreters of Homer belonged to rival factions asserting their several
claims. There were proponents of an "oral poetics" and there were
"analysts"; there were historians, preoccupied with sorting the epics into
archaic-age, Dark Age, Bronze Age elements; and then there were
poetry-lovers, concerned to save Homer from the barbarians, but generally
lacking the literary-critical agility to challenge them. "Barbarians" is
wrong, of course. Oralists, analysts and historians were all civilized - are
all civilized, because they still exist - but restricted, and sometimes
damagingly so. And the damage has been most apparent when restricted
perspective has become the basis for prescriptive literary interpretation.
The historian M. I. Finley could write this in the 1950s:
"the Iliad . . . is saturated in blood, a fact which cannot be hidden or
argued away, twist the evidence as one may in a vain attempt to fit archaic
values to a more gentle code of ethics. The poet and his audience lingered
lovingly over every act of slaughter."
Yes, the Iliad is saturated in blood, but only in blood? what of, say,
Achilles and Priam? and what, anyway, are we to make of the "saturation"?
Finley's rhetoric seeks to bully us into a reading that depends partly on
his own historical, and historicist, prejudices.
Among analysts, Finley's contemporary Denys Page provides a comparable
cautionary tale. Heir to a distinguished tradition of close scholarship,
Page sees his task as one of sorting out "Homeric" and "non-Homeric" parts
of the poems, where "non-Homeric" is taken to mean "post-Homeric". This
assumption, though largely unargued and possibly meaningless, is not in
itself especially damaging. What does do damage is the corollary: non equals
worse. Page's 1955 book, The Homeric Odyssey, in fact oscillates between
searching out inferior bits of the poem (assumed, in general, to be
non-Homeric) and searching out - on, usually, linguistic grounds -
non-Homeric bits of the poem (assumed, in general, to be inferior). Thus,
having pronounced the end of the Odyssey ("the continuation") inferior to
the rest "in technique, style and quality", Page swiftly declares: "we know
that the continuation is a later appendix: we should like to know when and
why it was appended." Here the value judgment, if and once justified, is
illuminating, whereas the preoccupation with authorship is broadly a
distraction from any fruitful engagement with the text. Elsewhere, to his
credit, Page identifies the "visit to the underworld" in Odyssey Book Eleven
as a later "insertion" and yet an "improvement". In that case, why worry
about who, when, or why at all? Our Iliad and Odyssey are, for us as for
most of later antiquity, "Homer". We are not sure what the identification
means; do we need to be?
Oralism raises questions of its own. It was the achievement of Milman Parry in
the 1920s and 30s to establish that the Homeric poems presuppose a tradition
of oral composition, and in particular that their numerous "formulaic"
features - most obviously the ritually repeated lines and stock epithets -
are, in compositional terms, explicable as aids to metrical improvisation.
Parry, however, went further. He diagnosed all Homeric poetry as equally
formulaic, and ascribed to the formula a determinative significance not only
for (Homer's) composition, but also for (our) interpretation. For any
Parryan, it became an article of faith that
"in the Homeric poems, whatever the context and whoever the person may
be, the same act, thought or emotion is likely to be described in the same
words; not because those words are particularly suitable to that person or
context, but because those are the words which tradition supplies ready-made
to the poet for the description of that act, thought or emotion."
This is both illuminating and misleading. Take the episode in the Iliad when
Achilles stands in the assembly arguing with Agamemnon: "Then with a scowl
spoke to him swift-footed Achilles." Yes, Achilles is not being swift here,
and yes, "then with a scowl spoke to him" is how other angry Homeric
characters are described. On the other hand, Achilles is distinctively
swift-footed, and his climactic pursuit of Hector will depend on it. The
phrase is immensely "suitable", but on a generic basis; and on that same
generic basis, "then with a scowl spoke to him" is perfectly suitable for
Achilles here (albeit not restricted to him). Furthermore, both phrases, and
with them the whole "ritual" system to which they belong, possess a larger
aesthetic function: their ritually repetitive quality conveys an elevated
view of existence itself as ritualistic, orderly and thus worthy of
celebration even in its painful moments. In this sense, the elevated Homeric
world is populated largely by "typical" characters with "typical" values,
actions, confrontations, and these are correlative to the stylized phrasing
that predominates in the poems.
But then again, in Homer, the celebratory and the fixed consort with the
exploratory and the free. In his anger, Achilles calls Agamemnon
"lucre-lover" (philokteanotate), which Agamemnon uniquely is, and the word
never occurs again in Greek literature. It makes no sense to call this
"formulaic", or "typical", or "generic". The same goes, on a much larger
scale, for Achilles' unique confrontation with Priam in Iliad, Book
Twenty-Four, including the startlingly unique simile with which the scene
begins, here in Pope's translation:
As when a wretch (who, conscious of his crime,
Pursued for murder, flies his native clime)
Just gains some frontier, breathless, pale,
amazed,
All gaze, all wonder: thus Achilles gazed:
Thus stood the attendants stupid with surprise:
All mute, yet seem'd to question with their eyes:
Each look'd on other, none the silence broke,
Till thus at last the kingly suppliant spoke . . . .
The specificity of such a passage produces a powerful here-and-now immediacy.
Remarkably, that effect is conveyed also from within the stylization of the
poems: from the generic epithets; from the "obvious" descriptions of people,
places, actions and emotions. There is a pervasive sense of presence; the
Homeric "ritual" is physical and intense.
The Homeric epics, clearly, are strange as well as familiar. They are rich,
open-ended texts, and a full generation of scholars have explored that
richness, less restrictedly, from perspectives as different as the moral
criticism of Jasper Griffin, the Bakhtinian dialogism of John Peradotto and
the narratology of Irene de Jong. We may not be clear who "Homer" is, but
meanwhile such varied interpretations have helped to confirm what Homer is:
poetry again.
And now this poetry comes to us in another two decent, readable verse
translations: Stanley Lombardo's Iliad, Robert Fagles's Odyssey. We possess
quite a few others already; just glance at George Steiner's 1993 anthology
Homer in English. How are we to respond to these two?
Any translation of poetry that aspires to be more than a practical aid should
seek to convey our sense of the distinctive richness of the original or (if
this is unavailable to the translator) to embody some equivalent richness of
its own. It is true, no doubt, that any text with a strong narrative
structure (like the Iliad or the Odyssey) will retain something of its force
in almost any version; and this is, no doubt, especially true of texts
structured around such archetypally powerful and humanly affecting moments
as the confrontation of Achilles and Priam in the Iliad. But any poetry will
embody strengths which cannot readily be conveyed except by some
equivalence. This is not to accept Robert Frost's dictum that "poetry is
what is lost in translation"; it is rather to demand that a translation of
poetry should be poetry in its own right.
It is on such grounds that one admires Pope's Iliad. "A pretty poem, Mr Pope,
but you must not call it Homer", said the scholar Richard Bentley,
preoccupied with detailed discrepancies and oblivious to larger issues. In
Pope's "As when a wretch . . .", no, the rhyming couplets and the courtly
checks and balances (along with much attendant detail) are not Homer. But
compare the (by comparison) "close" translation in Lombardo:
Passion sometimes blinds a man so completely
That he kills one of his own countrymen.
In exile, he comes into a wealthy house,
And everyone stares at him with wonder.
So Achilles stared in wonder at Priam.
Was he a god?
And the others there stared
And wondered and looked at each other.
But Priam spoke, a prayer of entreaty.
In Pope's version, the shapeliness, the Augustan tension and order, do succeed
in creating a surprising, if partial, equivalence to the stylized qualities
of Homer's Greek. The stylization is hardly hinted at by Lombardo. One might
infer it (though not its effect) from, say, the archaism and formality of
the old Loeb translation by A. T. Murray: "And as when some blindness of
heart cometh upon a man . . .".
If the translator's task is to convey the actual strengths of an original,
Homer, with his extraordinary combination of stylization and immediacy, is
peculiarly hard to translate into modern English, at least. If Pope has
something of the stylization, he has less of the immediacy. We get a bit
more of that from Chapman. Odyssey, Book Eight:
the Muse inflam'd
The sacred singer. Of men highliest fam'd
He sung the glories, and a poem penn'd
That in applause did ample heav'n ascend -
Whose subject was the stern contention
Between Ulysses and great Thetis' son,
As, at a banquet sacred to the gods,
In dreadful language they express'd their odds,
When Agamemnon sat rejoic'd in soul
To hear the Greek peers jar in terms so foul . . . .
Note in particular the "rejoic'd/peers/jar" sequence. There is no counterpart
to this jarring play of sound in Homer. In Fagles, the sequence is:
the Muse inspired the bard
to sing the famous deeds of fighting heroes -
the song whose fame had reached the skies those
days:
The Strife Between Odysseus and Achilles,
Peleus'
Son . . .
how once at the gods' flowing feast the captains
clashed
in a savage war of words, while Agamemnon,
lord of
armies,
rejoiced at heart that Achaea's bravest men
were
battling so.
A hint of stylized dignity with immediacy is given by "famous/fighting",
associated with a slight lift to formal iambic rhythm in the fourth line.
Conversely, the mechanical assonantal collocations, "skies those days",
"flowing feast", "captains clashed", "war of words", cut no ice (lest anyone
should suppose that sound effects are sensuously immediate per se).
The Homeric poems embody a comprehensive vision that is largely alien to our
expectations and our experience. In our literature, we can (sometimes) touch
and (occasionally) elevate, but we associate touch with intimacy and
elevation with remoteness. Homer combines the immediate and the stylized in
a way that makes the heroes alive and life heroic. And the awkward truth is
that, whereas Elizabethan-Jacobean English is readily immediate, and
Augustan English readily stylized, contemporary English idiom is readily
neither. What it is really good for is abstraction and ironic perspectives.
Eliot (say) exploited it for both:
A commission is appointed
To confer with a Volscian commission
About perpetual peace: the fletchers and
javelin-makers and smiths
Have appointed a joint committee to protest
against the reduction of orders.
It is not for nothing that Eliot's own peculiar sensuousness often conveys a
distracting impression of the immediate just out of reach:
Meanwhile the guards shake dice on the
marches
And the frogs (O Mantuan) croak in the
marshes.
In current English idiom, even concrete compression or ellipse tends to
produce not a sense of immediacy so much as a quasi-conceptual sharpness.
Look at successful tabloid headlines ("Swedes Two, Turnips One" - the Sun's
famous dig at England football under Graham Taylor) or successful adspeak
("Who says a woman can't get pleasure from something soft?"). Even in poetry
in assertive concrete mode, some kind of distancing humour, ironic or other,
is never far away. One has the impression that, particularly in British
English, the contemporary language can no longer take sensuousness quite
seriously in what was once the principal mode of all poetry.
Stylization, meanwhile, is not so much alien to creative modern English as
unhelpfully restricted in effect. Two centuries after being problematized by
the Romantics as an unacceptable substitute for "the language really spoken
by men", it seems to have ended up indeed as the idiom of the unreal or else
the disquieting. A sense of ironic threat is there in Eliot's dissonant
para-rhyme, "guards shake dice on the marches / frogs . . . croak in the
marshes", as it was in Wilfred Owen's. The effect of parallelism and
restricted idiom may be witty and ironic, as often in Stoppard, or else
sinister, as in the incantatory schemata of Pinter and, behind him, Beckett.
It is no accident that among the most felicitous translations from classical
poetry (or "poetic" prose), over the past fifty years or so, have been
versions of ironic Latin, like Guy Lee's versions of love elegy, or ironic
and disturbing Latin, such as William Arrowsmith's Petronius.
With such unpromising materials, where is the modern translator of Homer to
turn? One possibility is to create a space in which true equivalence to the
qualities of the original can be meditated and explored, the precondition
being a "free" version, as free as Pope's or - given our generally greater
distance from Homeric perception and idiom - still freer. This is how
Christopher Logue has achieved such remarkable success with his "accounts"
of the Iliad. Take Iliad, Book One, where Agamemnon agrees to give back his
concubine, first in Lombardo:
"But I want another prize ready for me right away.
I'm not going to be the only Greek without a
prize,
It wouldn't be right. And you all see where mine
is going."
And Achilles, strong, swift, and godlike:
"And where do you think, son of Atreus,
You greedy glory-hound, the magnanimous
Greeks
Are going to get another prize for you?
Do you think we have some kind of stockpile in
reserve?
Every town in the area has been sacked and the
stuff all divided.
You want the men to count it all back and
redistribute it?"
This is no-nonsense, late twentieth-century colloquial speech (and might be
better written out as the lively prose it essentially is). Logue - as much
inspired by, as deferential to, the chapter and verse of the original -
writes as follows (this from the revised edition of Kings):
". . . as the loss of an allotted she
Diminishes my honour and my state,
Before the army leaves the common sand
Its captain lords will find, among their own,
Another such for me."
Low ceiling. Sticky air.
Our stillness like the stillness
In Atlantis as the big wave came,
The brim-full basins of abandoned docks,
Or Christmas morning by the sea.
Until Achilles said:
"Dear Sir, Where shall we get this she?
There is no pool.
We land. We fight. We kill. We load. And then -
After your firstlings - we allot.
That is the end of it.
We do not ask things back. And even you
Would not permit your helmet to go round."
Trading, partly, on a sense of how translations of Homer normally sound and
then violating expectations, Logue's version achieves Homeric effects even
at its most blatantly un-Homeric. "Low ceiling. Sticky air", so unexpected,
and indeed the whole surprising sequence up to "Christmas morning",
anachronisms and all, yields an unmissable immediacy, intensified by the
very fact that surprise is largely non-Homeric in itself. And if the terse
parallelism "We land . . . we load" works in the same way, then the
arbitrary oddity of "an allotted she", "this she", repeated here (and
elsewhere) without comment, weirdly recalls old untranslated moments of
formulary elevation. And then again, plausibly enough, Logue has ditched the
direct abuse reproduced faithfully (but on a take-it-or-leave-it basis) in
Lombardo's version of Achilles' speech, in favour of that understated irony
that comes so naturally to us: "Dear Sir", and the "helmet" joke. In the
midst of these stylistic manoeuvres, meanwhile, the formality of Agamemnon's
diction and rhythms (albeit in un-Homeric contrast to those of Achilles)
serves to give the impression of stylization, even if of a stylization that
comes and goes.
Anyone doing what Logue is doing is likely to be relying on other, earlier
translators who are not doing what Logue is doing. And certainly most of
Logue's readers will be familiar with ordinary "faithful" versions. This,
though, is hardly an objection to Logue, nor does it make any "faithful"
translation any more effective than it actually is. The more a translation
inclines towards the pole of high fidelity, the narrower its margins for
success and the more it must rely on finding, and then accumulating,
momentary felicities against the odds. Robert Fagles's Odyssey begins:
Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists
and turns
driven time and again off course, once he had
plundered
the hallowed heights of Troy.
Many cities of men he saw and learned their
minds,
many pains he suffered, heartsick on the open
sea,
fighting to save his life and bring his comrades
home . . . .
Launch out on his story, Muse, daughter of
Zeus,
start from where you will - sing for our time too.
There are individual felicities here: perhaps "twists and turns", certainly
"hallowed heights". "Launch out", on the other hand, is an attempted
felicity (compare "off course") which seems alien in spirit to Homer.
Overall, this English, like Lombardo's more colloquial idiom, is decent and
readable. Variously inappropriate claims for both translations are made by
academics and others on the dust-jackets. Both translations have good
introductions (Lombardo's by Sheila Murnaghan, Fagles's by Bernard Knox).
But how do you "sing for our time too"? The polite English idiom deployed by
Fagles, like Lombardo's more demotic language, hardly begins to suggest the
pervasive qualities that the Homeric original embodies. Could any available
idiom or idioms, short of a radical programme such as Logue's, suggest more?
Could they, even against the odds? I would be happy to be persuaded - by
some other new attempt - that they could. Meanwhile, from a critic's safe
retreat, I note that there remains something heroic about such attempts,
even if there is nothing very heroic about the end products.
