by Homer
With a good deal of trial and error I began to find that Homer’s epithets could move with a certain flow into English. Thus 22.430—
tên d’apameibomenos prosephê polumêtis Odusseus—
might appear in drably literal English: “Then answering her Odysseus, a man of many strategies, said …” In this translation:
An answer came from Odysseus, full of the best plans …
A fair approximation of Homeric sound and sense, this English also struck me as idiomatic enough. A bigger and harder-looking combination was polutlas dios Odusseus. Again I tried to stay close to the Greek’s music and meaning without sacrificing current English: “long-suffering, godlike Odysseus.” Will some readers have trouble with “godlike”? Not much, I hope: the human and divine often mirrored each other in Homer’s world. Poetry readers in fact suspend as much disbelief, surely, encountering Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner. Another apparently simple adjective has caused both translators and commentators trouble. The word amumon, often rendered “flawless” or “noble,” links well with a virtuous king or a deathless goddess. But how to link it with Aigisthos, the man who seduced Klutaimnestre and killed her husband, Agamemnon? In a line referring to Zeus’s memory (1.29), I chose two other closely related meanings of amumon:
His heart recalled the high-born, handsome Aigisthos …
It was not possible—or wise—to fit all of Homer’s epithets into proper metrical notches in English. I experimented for months and settled on choices for many; for others I remain unsure to this day. J. B. Hainsworth’s 1968 book with its self-explanatory title, The Flexibility of the Homeric Formula, warmly encouraged my experiments and variations—a play with epithets and formulas that Homer himself enjoyed.
As for the syntax, I ran into less trouble and complexity with Homer than with Virgil. Clausal arrangements in the Odyssey tend to be direct, marked by that winning plainness that Arnold spoke of. One reason probably was the bardic tradition: since every line must be orally presented, not only the metrical pattern but a certain clarity must have ranked high. Indeed the temptation for many English translators has been to fiddle with things, the formulaic diction as well as the syntax, possibly supposing that a plain Homer is not hardy enough for modernist or postmodernist taste. I too have restructured some of Homer’s sentences when the flow of modern English invited it. I hope I have not strayed too far from the letter and spirit of the Greek. (Actually some of my syntax is plainer than Homer’s.) The call of variety—to sail away to some other island—and the insistence of accuracy—to stay close to the Greek home—have both preoccupied my Odyssean journey. I could not have listened to both goddess-like voices without mentors like Arrowsmith and Wilbur.
During revisions of the book I continued traveling, usually by mail, to other poets, friends, and classicists. I hoped each would be a xeinos amumon—a noble host. Consistently my excerpts were welcomed and sent off laden with gifts of attention, criticism, and encouragement. If “Nothing is worse for any man than to wander,” as Odysseus tells us (15.343), probably nothing is better than to arrive at a place excelling in hospitality like Phaiakia. My thanks go out to all my hosts at least in the form of these acknowledgments. David Konstan at Brown encouraged and discriminated among my earlier efforts closely. Deborah Boedeker at the Center for Hellenic Studies insisted that the hardest question in translating Homer is the metrical one: I value that emphasis. Joseph Tebben at Ohio State, a lover like me of Wilbur’s translations of the French, expressed hope for an English Homer both melodic and elegant. I hope my version approximates that ideal. Robert Bly, writing from Moose Lake, Minnesota, welcomed the relaxation in many lines and the tension in others. Richard Janko, writing from Marseille, praised my efforts and warned about spurious lines added to Homer by later writers. I’m grateful to Alan Boegehold at Brown for sending a brisk following wind to a raftlike piece of my translation. Norman Austin at the University of Arizona wisely warned me about false grandeur in English translations of Homer. He also noted that accuracy can result in more, rather then less, vividness. Barry Powell at the University of Wisconsin strongly backed my earliest efforts—that took foresight—and emphasized the primacy not of translation theory but of actual practice. William Hansen at Indiana praised the rhythm of my lines and urged me to work harder on the diction; I hope I’ve complied. William Sale at Washington University in St. Louis advised me to stay in close touch with the Classical tradition in English literature while translating Homer.
I deeply thank Donald Hall, writing from Danbury, New Hampshire, who was distinctly but rightly displeased with much of my early word choice. Peter Green at the University of Texas generously critiqued my versification and Greek translation theory at length. Herbert Howe, writing from retirement in Madison, Wisconsin, expressed particular concern about passages wandering off into non-English idioms. Margaret Graver at Dartmouth recommended, with a stamp of her own enthusiasm, first-rate books about Homeric craft.
I gladly acknowledge a debt, moreover, to those who never saw this work but exercised influence, sometimes enormously, on my tactics. A number of key translators and critics I’ve noted above; if Pope and Arnold were alive I hope they would both smile on this book. Editors and contributors to commentaries and dictionaries, like Stanford and Autenrieth, have also proved themselves invaluable. Filling out their efforts in a monumental way was the new Oxford Commentary. These volumes, arriving in my library at the most opportune moment, solved a myriad of puzzles—or candidly pronounced them unsolvable. I read Heubeck and others at first for their informed judgment; in time, for the sheer beauty of their expertise.
As the nearest help is often the dearest, I hasten to thank my Rhode Island support team, colleagues at Providence College such as Bruce Graver and Rodney Delasanta, always a staunch ally. My principal coach in matters Homeric was often William Wyatt at Brown: his going-away horse-car I would gladly load with a dozen bronze cauldrons, tripods, and silver wine-bowls. My wife, Beatrice, always enthused and encouraging, sounded out the Greek with gusto after I did. She was a nostos in herself, a warm home to return to after hours among frail cries of the dead and the living.
I close with a special thanks to you, John Lawless, the only Classicist at our small college. A call or a knock away when I first tangled with Homer’s impossible-looking epithets and diphthongs, you were patient and informed especially when I suffered from still another attack of irregular verbs, those one-syllable, virus-looking things beginning with epsilon, clearly and maliciously cloning each other. You were my Classics helper par excellence, an Asklepios in my own back yard. Many, many thanks.
Introduction
Richard P. Martin
Plots and Performances
The Odyssey charts the end of a voyage, the return home, after twenty years, of a veteran warrior and long-suffering sailor. Odysseus’s reentry into life on the island of Ithaka comes just in time. His son Telemakhos is on the verge of full manhood while his patient wife, Penelopeia, is starting to lose hope and contemplating remarriage. It is more difficult to say when this story begins, for the fate of Odysseus is wrapped up with that of the city of Troy. And, from one point of view, Troy’s destruction at the hands of avenging Greek troops had been long afoot, reaching back to the origin of the cosmos. We can piece together the story from Greek myths that were most likely known to the audience of the Odyssey, while remembering that already in ancient times there existed variant, even contradictory, versions of these events. The sources for these tales include the Theogony of Hesiod (roughly contemporary with the rise of Homeric poetry in the eighth century B.C.) and the so-called cyclic epics of the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. (filling out the Trojan “cycle”) of which only random citations and a few plot summaries from later sources now survive.
Gaia, the Earth, was one of the first creatures. She arranged for her relentlessly oppressive husband, Ouranos (“sky”), to be overthrown by their son Kronos, who was in turn displaced by her favorite grandso
n, Zeus, in a family upheaval that had universal consequences. With the advice of his primeval grandmother, Zeus gained the kingship of the heavens by recruiting for his battles against the older generation of gods the monstrous Hundred Handers, who had been imprisoned by the earlier divine tyrants. With her advice as well, he swallowed one of his first wives, Mêtis (“cunning intelligence”), and, thus armed with cautious wisdom, came to ensure that his own reign would never be overthrown. Instead of producing a son stronger than Zeus, as had been predicted, the disempowered Mêtis, tucked safely inside her husband, bore Athene, who sprang full-grown from the chief god’s head.
Zeus, therefore, owed Gaia a debt. As time went on and she complained of the increasingly heavy burden of human life, Zeus devised a massive war to decrease world population and lighten the load on the Earth’s surface. The conditions for the Trojan War grew out of another averted divine marriage; a hero’s wedding; a rape; and an elopement.
Zeus desired the nymph Thetis, one of the fifty daughters of the sea-god Nereus. But once again, he feared that if he mated with a powerful goddess, any offspring might eventually replace him. So he found reason to marry off Thetis to an unsuspecting mortal, Peleus, as a reward for that hero’s pious behavior. It was at their splendid wedding that Strife (Eris), who had not been invited, tossed amid the guests an apple inscribed “kallistêi”—“to the fairest.” Athene, Here, and Aphrodite each claimed the prize. The father of the gods chose a Trojan, named Paris, to judge. Rejecting the promises of the other two goddesses, he chose Aphrodite and received Helen as his reward.
Her mother Lede had once been taken forcibly by Zeus disguised as a swan. Helen’s unusual birth from an egg presaged a remarkable career. By the time she was of marriageable age, she had suitors from every corner of Greece. Menelaos, the son of Atreus, was picked to be her husband, and to avoid further strife, all the suitors bound themselves by an oath that they would rally to retrieve Helen, if ever she might be in need. Odysseus of Ithaka, who had suggested this idea, was in return aided by Helen’s mortal father Tundareos, who persuaded his own niece, Helen’s first cousin, to marry the young man. Her name was Penelopeia.
Finally the elopement—or abduction, as some preferred—and its aftermath. On a visit to Menelaos at the couple’s home in Sparte, Paris found his promised reward for the beauty contest and, with the help of Aphrodite’s seductive wiles, persuaded Helen to leave with him for Troy, thus setting in motion the mobilization of Greek forces to punish the eastern transgressor. At the time, Odysseus and Penelopeia had just been blessed with a son—their first child—and the proud father, reluctant to leave Ithaka to retrieve Helen, tried to outfox the recruiting party, led by Agamemnon, brother of the aggrieved husband. Donning a furry cap (although it was summer), he started to plow his field with the ridiculous combination of an ox and a horse. But one of the visitors, Palamedes, refused to believe Odysseus was crazy. Snatching Telemakhos, the infant son of Odysseus, from his nurse’s arms, he placed the baby in front of the plow. When Odysseus veered to avoid hurting his child, the charade was exposed. Off he went to war.
The siege of Troy lasted ten years. After the death of Akhilleus and Hektor, the foremost fighters on either side, the Greeks took the advice of Odysseus to insinuate themselves into the city by hiding within the Trojan Horse. In the chaos and slaughter that followed this sneak attack, Troy fell, but Athene’s temple within the citadel was desecrated by the invaders. Consequently, her wrath was to hound the Greeks—including Odysseus—on their journey home. The returns of the heroes were narrated in an ancient epic, now lost, called the Nostoi. Something like this poem must be the burden of the song of Phemios, the local bard on Ithaka, who sings to the suitors about the homeward journeys of the war-weary Greeks (1.325ff.). Further on within the Odyssey itself, we hear about the successful homecoming of Nestor (3.130ff.), how Aias (Ajax) lost his life, the sadly delayed trip of Menelaos, and the fatal return of his brother Agamemnon (all in 4.351ff.). Each of these stories forms a contrast to the overall narrative of Odysseus’s voyage. In particular, the cautionary tale of Agamemnon—slain by his wife and her lover soon after his triumphant return—is made into an explicit warning for Odysseus by none other than the victim himself in the underworld (11.441ff.). It is there, too, that Odysseus encounters the great Akhilleus, who chose a short life with glory instead of a long life back in his native place. In another striking contrast with the fate of his former warcomrades, Odysseus manages to have both fame and safe return, to obtain glory precisely through homecoming. In this, he finally goes one better than his old heroic rival. His return to Ithaka involves one more battle, this time against 108 young men, Penelopeia’s arrogant suitors, some of them his fellow islanders. Restored to his rightful place, flanked by his son and father, Odysseus stands as a model of intelligence, care, and perseverance. He is the ultimate survivor.
Even in ancient times, it was recognized that Homeric poetry presented these stories from the Trojan War in a unique manner. In the fourth century B.C., Aristotle in his sketch of literary history and theory, the Poetics (1459b), noted that Homer “takes only one portion of the story and makes use of many episodes, such as the Catalogue of Ships and others by means of which he diversifies his poetry. But the others make their poems about one person, one time, one action having many parts, in the way that the composer of the Kupria and the Little Iliad did.” In short, Homeric epic had unity, while cyclic epics were just collections.
Thus, the Iliad focuses on just a few days in the last year of the war, on the quarrel between Agamemnon and his best warrior, Akhilleus, with its devastating results. By the end of the poem, Akhilleus is still alive, the Horse and the fall of Troy are in the future: the poet has declined to recount the whole saga. Nevertheless, thanks to artful allusions and juxtapositions within the tale, the emotional force of the coming events informs every part of the poem. Through the death of Hektor at the hands of Akhilleus, and Priam’s mission to the Greek camp to retrieve his son’s body, we feel, at the most personal level, the pathos of a doomed city.
If the Iliad is a long saga, brilliantly condensed and intensely focused, the Odyssey is rather a simple story told through a complex narrative. The tale of the Trojan War hero starts nearly at the end of his return, uses flashbacks to fill in the previous years, synchronizes several subplots, and presents the major events mostly through the recollections and perspectives of others. In other words, already at the beginning of Western literature, almost all the devices of the modern film and novel are masterfully put on display.
The poem’s first four “books” (traditional chapter-size divisions) are a fine example of the Odyssey’s indirect tale-telling. We do not meet the hero at all. Even his name is delayed for a number of lines, as the poem begins with a generic noun: “The man, my Muse, resourceful, driven a long way …” Instead of simply bringing Odysseus onto the scene from the start, the poet artfully lets us hear other people talking about the hero—the gods, his wife and son, those who miss him, and those who want to replace him. His impact is made vivid precisely through his absence.
Odysseus’s absence, naturally, has the greatest effect on his son, now twenty years old. Telemakhos has never known his father except by hearsay. But now he is thrust into action, to go and learn of Odysseus’s fate, by a combination of factors—the gods’ plans, the growing impatience of his mother’s suitors, and his own coming of age. The story of his own miniature “odyssey” to visit those heroes who made it back—Nestor and Menelaos—and the suitors’ plot to murder him, occupy the first four books. These have been called the “Telemakhy,” or story of Telemakhos. A number of nineteenth-century critics argued that they were part of an extraneous composition, tacked on inelegantly to the poem. But the few inconsistencies that prompted that criticism are far outnumbered by the rich and meaningful resonances that emerge when we experience the Odyssey in this way, as the story of a father being gradually learned of by his own son. Telemakhos, within the poem, is like us ou
tside it, an audience for the heroic past.
Not only is this poetic strategy compelling and persuasive in terms of narrative. It is culturally apt as well, since archaic Greek notions of heroic performance and family history always tied the fame of father and son closely together. In the best cases, sons continued the fame of their fathers, or bettered it; fathers promoted the achievements of their sons, and spread their fame. Odysseus, in the Iliad, actually swears oaths with the phrase “as much as I am the father of Telemakhos”—an assertion that what he says or does is as true as his paternity. The very name “Telemakhos,” which means “fighting afar,” is an adjective applicable to Odysseus, both as an archer and as one who battled in distant Troy, rather than an epithet befitting his son. It’s as if the son’s identity depends on the father’s actions. Ironically, the Odyssey opens with Telemakhos doubting whether Odysseus ever was his father (1.215–16). A main purpose of the first four books is to show that the young man deserves to be recognized as Odysseus’s son by others and has the innate qualities that guarantee this paternal bond.
In the next four books of the poem, the center of attention is Odysseus, now on the last leg of his voyage. Even as Telemakhos starts traveling to learn of his lost father, the hero begins moving closer to Ithaka. The fortuitous absence of Poseidon from the gods’ company enables Athene, with Zeus’s consent, to liberate her favorite from the island of Kalupso, where he has been stranded, increasingly restless although in the company of the beautiful nymph, for seven years. Another shipwreck brings him to the land of the Phaiakians, where Odysseus, revealing his identity, charms the royal family into giving him safe passage home. As the poem makes clear, Odysseus holds his audience enthralled with a performance very much like that of the real poet of the composition: Odysseus takes over as narrator for the next four books, weaving a tale of his previous adventures that includes giant cannibals, seductive witches, sea-monsters, seers, magic, ghosts—the age-old ingredients of folktales, worldwide, worked into an autobiographical narrative. At the same time as it gives us this sailor’s tale, the Odyssey takes pains to provide a carefully nuanced framework for the story that Odysseus relates. We see him enchant his audience; we hear of their reactions (including the decision to load the teller with more gifts); we can imagine the local bard Demodokos listening to this newly arrived tale-teller with admiration and envy—all of which is surely meant to suggest how we, as an audience, might best receive and appreciate the entire Homeric Odyssey. More dazzling, still, by posing the “odyssey” of the hero’s adventures in this way, the poem teases us with the idea that the whole “autobiography” may itself be largely convenient fiction.
