The Iliad of Homer

by Richmond Lattimore

  Lattimore’s work of 1951 comes at the end of one long tradition, Homeric translation as it had been practiced from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, and near the start of another, the contemporary rendition of Homeric verse. Like any such work, it is also a work of interpretation. His style treats the events and characters of the poem as not quite of our day: their sentences are longer, their diction a bit higher, the very slightest patina of antiquity marks the whole. But at the same time, Lattimore achieves a clarity, vigor, and strength of poetic line such as few had reached. To conclude this brief survey, it will be worthwhile to consider three translators coming before Lattimore, and three afterward, by way of one small target passage, Achilleus’ refusal of the embassy, a rhetorical apogee (9.319–27):

  Richmond Lattimore (1951)

  We are all held in a single honour the brave with the weaklings.

  A man dies still if he has done nothing, as one who has done much.

  Nothing is won for me, now that my heart has gone through its afflictions

  in forever setting my life on the hazard of battle.

  For as to her unwinged young ones the mother bird brings back

  morsels, wherever she can find them, but as for herself it is suffering,

  such was I, as I lay through all the many nights unsleeping,

  such as I wore through the bloody days of the fighting,

  striving with warriors for the sake of these men’s women.16

  George Chapman (1611)

  With equal honour cowards die and men most valiant,

  The much performer and the man that can of nothing vant.

  No overplus I ever found when, with my mind’s most strife

  To do them good, to dangerous fight, I have exposed my life.

  But even as to unfeathered birds the carefull dam brings meate,

  Which when she hath bestow’d, her selfe hath nothing left to eat:

  So when my broken sleepes have drawn the nights t’extremest length

  And ended many bloody daies with still-employed strength.

  To guard their weakness and preserve their wives’ contents infract,

  I have been robd before their eyes . . .

  This version, the first full Iliad ever in English, probably known to Shakespeare and made famous by the poem of Keats (On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer), uses rhymes; ancient Greek poetry is never rhymed. The effect, reinforced by the ballad meter of the “fourteener,” borders on singsong. Diction strikes us as archaic (meate for “food,” dam for “mother”), or unexpected (native English overplus, instead of the more common French-derived surplus). These were not antiques at the time, however. As with Shakespeare, vigorous Anglo-Saxon words (wives’) ring up against Latinate (infract—meaning “unbroken”), and hard monosyllable endings mark off nearly every line. (Contrast Lattimore’s run of three trailing-off end-words: suffering/unsleeping/fighting.) Surprisingly, three hundred years after, a few Chapman phrases can work unvaried or nearly (e.g., bloody days; single honour/equall honour). On the other hand, Chapman goes off track frequently: “preserve the wives’ contents infract” is almost satirical, something not in Achilleus’ tone here, or in the Homeric narrator’s ever.

  Alexander Pope (1720)

  Fight or not fight, a like reward we claim,

  The wretch and hero find their prize the same.

  Alike regretted in the dust he lies

  Who yields ignobly or who bravely dies.

  Of all my dangers, all my glorious pains,

  A life of labours, lo! What fruit remains?

  As the bold bird her helpless young attends,

  From danger guards them and from want defends;

  In search of prey, she wings the spacious air,

  And with the untasted food supplies her care;

  For thankless Greece such hardships have I braved,

  Her wives, her infants by my labours saved;

  Long sleepless nights in heavy arms I stood,

  And sweat laborious days in dust and blood.

  Lattimore (and the Greek text that he follows exactly in terms of line-numeration) accomplish in nine verses what Pope does in a leisurely fourteen. His elaboration is the essence of Augustan-era “wit”—finding a clever point at each turn, making a punchy contrast where none was implied, inverting adverbs to give a pleasing chiastic shape to the line (yields ignobly/bravely dies). It is far from Homer in a different way than Chapman—farther in tone and worldview, as far as chatter of the drawing room is from laconic talk on the battlefield (a thing known better to Elizabethans, as to Greeks). The underlining above marks the padding not found in the original. Some of the most ringing lines (e.g., Who yields ignobly or who bravely dies) are the least supported by the Greek (which in this case reads simply “there dies the man who does not work and one who has worked much”).

  F. W. Newman (1856)

  Like portion hath the stay-at-home as though he bravely battled

  And equal honour is assign’d to cowards and to heroes.

  Dieth alike the lazy man and he who much hath laboured

  Nor aught of vantage do I win that hardiment I suffer

  And alway jeopardize my life in perilous encounter

  But as the parent bird doth bear unto her unfledg’d nestlings

  Morsels of meat, whate’er she seize and her own welfare slighteth

  So likewise many a sleepless night and bloody day of combat

  Your consorts to regain have I in war of men accomplished.

  This is the translation that prompted the critic Matthew Arnold to issue his penetrating lectures “On Translating Homer.” Newman lacked the literary gifts of his more famous brother, John Henry Newman (writer, Catholic convert, and eventual cardinal). His influences are obvious: Anglo-Saxon verse, with its strong central caesura; “heroic” poetry of the Icelandic sagas (then finding wide circulation in England); Tennyson; and the King James Version of the Bible. The aura is exactly that of the Pre-Raphaelites, at this period busy making “medieval” art out of ancient Greek myth. The Arthurian diction (vantage, hardiment) and the inverted verbal structures (have I accomplished) are meant to feel archaic, but end up muddying Homer’s clear syntax. (To be fair, Newman did provide a glossary to his translation.) His defense was that he had tried to make an Iliad as it would have sounded to Greeks of the Classical age, centuries after Homer (something like Shakespeare, or in spots Robert Burns, would sound to the nineteenth-century Oxford ear).

  Arnold, in response, denied that one could recover such effects. Rather than making the text strange, he urged that it be made clear, especially as the audience of the present day (not to mention to come) were Greekless, unable to test a translation for accuracy on their own. Four qualities should guide the translator, wrote Arnold: Homer is rapid, plain in diction, direct in matter and ideas, and noble. His lectures of 1861–1862 remain a touch-stone for the exact criticism of poetic style.

  Finally, we can compare Lattimore’s with three outstanding versions produced after his. (In the interest of full disclosure, I must say that Fitzgerald taught me; Fagles was my long-time Princeton colleague; I know Lombardo. In each case, therefore, I recall the translator’s mien and voice, which helps.)

  Robert Fitzgerald (1974)

  The portion’s equal

  Whether a man hangs back or fights his best;

  The same respect, or lack of it, is given,

  brave man and coward. One who’s active dies

  like the do-nothing. What least thing have I

  To show for it, for harsh days undergone

  and my life gambled, all these years of war?

  A bird will give her fledglings every scrap

  she comes by, and go hungry, foraging.

  That is the case with me.

  Many a sleepless night I’ve spent afield

  And many a day in bloodshed hand to hand

  In battle for the wives of other men.

  Fitzgerald, as do the next two trans
lators, opts for a shorter line more familiar to readers of English poetry in iambic meter (especially Shakespeare). Lattimore, on the other hand, explicitly sought a free six-beat line, “a speed and rhythm analogous to the speed and rhythm I find in the original.”17 By avoiding dramatic touches (exclamations, broken sentences), Fitzgerald gives the impression of a speaker who is quiet, resigned, in control. “Do-nothing” is closer to the Greek (a-ergos, literally “without work”) than the more colorful and moralistic “lazy” (Newman). Sticking to the plainness of the original, he produces a version most like Lattimore’s, although more lyrical than epic in its shorter lines.

  Robert Fagles (1990)

  One and the same lot for the man who hangs back

  and the man who battles hard. The same honor waits

  For the coward and the brave. They both go down to Death,

  the fighter who shirks and the one who works to exhaustion.

  And what’s laid up for me, what pittance? Nothing—

  and after suffering hardships, year in, year out,

  Staking my life on the mortal risks of war.

  Like a mother bird hurrying morsels back

  To her wingless young ones—whatever she can catch—

  but it’s all starvation wages for herself.

  So for me.

  Many a sleepless night I’ve bivouacked in harness,

  day after bloody day I’ve hacked my passage through,

  Fighting other soldiers to win their wives as prizes.

  This represents a compromise between the long line of Lattimore and the shorter Fitzgerald, but at the risk of sounding unmetered and weak. In terms of diction, however, Fagles has chosen to have Achilleus sound as he imagines a modern veteran might. “Bivouacked” is soldier-talk; “all starvation wages” is far beyond the Greek’s plain “there is no surplus for me,” but it personalizes the speaker, just as the un-Homeric sequence “what pittance? Nothing” tries to capture a mode of speech familiar from natural talk. “Day after bloody day” makes the original (êmata haimatoenta—literally “bloodied days”) into a British-inflected soldier’s swear, and “hacked my passage” notches up the original’s “made way through” (dieprêsson). In sum, Fagles raises the verbal temperature by consistent overdramatizing. He thus sharply distinguishes the narrator’s verses from character-speech. Yet in the original, speakers sound much more like the Homeric poet: there is stylistic consistency.

  Stanley Lombardo (1997)

  It doesn’t matter if you stay in camp or fight—

  In the end, everybody comes out the same,

  Coward and hero get the same reward:

  You die whether you slack off or work.

  And what do I have for all my suffering,

  Constantly putting my life on the line?

  Like a bird who feeds her chicks

  Whatever she finds, and goes without herself,

  That’s what I’ve been like, lying awake

  Through sleepless nights in battle for days

  Soaked in blood, fighting men for their wives.

  The logical conclusion of the search for natural speech makes the lines highly speakable (and Lombardo’s translation, like Fagles’, is marketed in an audio version). At times, it thereby hews closer to the Greek (note “goes without herself,” which resembles the original’s literal “and she has ills” much more than do other attempts above). This can, however, mean foregoing strong verbs and nouns, while watering down the English until it risks cliché (“everybody comes out the same” for the original “with equal honor”; “putting my life on the line”). Lombardo’s observation that his version “reflects the oral performance nature of the original poems” might blur the lines separating natural talk, unscripted improvised poems, and highly artificial, formulaic oral-traditional poetry made in a complex meter. But the resulting gain in vigor can often be worth the overstepping.

  Of course only through a longer acquaintance with the entire poem, and by rereading it in variety of versions, will the reader be able to judge. Ultimately the choice among translations is a matter of taste. For many, Lattimore’s will remain the most lucid and yet elevated—“noble”—of recent attempts.18

  NOTES

  1 From Mary Wortley Montagu, The Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, edited by J. A. Stuart-Wortley-Mackenzie Wharncliffe, vol. 2 (N.p., 1837).

  2 Robert Wood, An Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer, rev. ed. (London, 1775), 4–5.

  3 Potential parallels are accumulated by Martin West in two volumes: Martin West, The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth (Oxford, 1997); and Indo-European Poetry and Myth (Oxford, 2007). More analytical treatments of the poetic heritage on which Homeric poetry draws can be found in Calvert Watkins, How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics (New York, 1995); and Bruce Lincoln, Myth, Cosmos and Society: Indo-European Themes of Creation and Destruction (Cambridge, MA, 1986). On the highly debated questions of Greek cultural inheritance from Egypt and the Near East, see the three volumes by Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (New Brunswick, NJ, 1987–2006). On the enduring ideologies that underlie studies of ancient myth, see Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship (Chicago, 1999).

  4 From a letter of Nakao Takanori, in Kamikaze Diaries: Reflections of Japanese Student Soldiers, ed. Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney (Chicago, 2006), 208.

  5 Motif-Index of Folk Literature: A Classification of Narrative Elements in Folktales, Ballads, Myths, Fables, Mediaeval Romances, Exempla, Fabliaux, Jest-Books and Local Legends, rev. & enl. ed., 6 vols. (Bloomington, IN, 1955–58).

  6 Page images of the entire manuscript, from the original held in Venice, are viewable online courtesy of the Center for Hellenic Studies and Biblioteca Marciana: http://chs75.chs.harvard.edu/manuscripts/.

  7 J. V. Cunningham, The Exclusions of a Rhyme: Poems and Epigrams (Denver, 1960).

  8 V. Bérard, Introduction à l’Odyssée, vol. 1 (Paris, 1924). He thus allied himself with such earlier French defenders of Homer as Boileau and Dacier.

  9 Skafte Jensen, The Homeric Question and the Oral-Formulaic Theory (Copenhagen, 1980), 112.

  10 The main proponents of the early archaic, single-recording origin theory are Barry Powell, in Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet (Cambridge, 1991); and Richard Janko, in “The Homeric Poems as Oral Dictated Texts,” Classical Quarterly 48 (1998): 1–13.

  11 Miscellaneous Works of Edward Gibbon, Esquire: With Memoirs of His Life and Writings, Composed by Himself: Illustrated from His Letters with Occasional Notes and Narrative, by John Lord Sheffield in Three Volumes (Dublin, 1796), 2:300.

  12 “Gallipoli,” in The Cause: Poems of the War (Boston, 1917), 68.

  13 Quoted in Patrick Shaw-Stewart, by Ronald Knox (London, 1920), 160.

  14 “The Shield of Achilles,” in The Shield of Achilles (New York, 1955), 35.

  15 Aeschylus, Myrmidons, fragments 135–37 in Aeschylus: Fragments, edited by A. Sommerstein (Cambridge, MA, 2008), 145–47.

  16 In this edition of Lattimore’s translation, spelling and punctuation have been altered to follow American usage rather than the British conventions employed in the 1951 edition. Thus, in the main body of the poem, honour will be spelled honor, etc. Otherwise, Lattimore’s text of the poem appears here virtually unaltered, with the exception of half a dozen or so slight adjustments for the sake of grammar or clarity.

  17 The Iliad of Homer, trans. and ed. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago, 1951), 55.

  18 For many further examples, with a fine introduction, see Homer in English, edited by G. Steiner (Harmondsworth, 1996).

  Translator’s Note

  RICHMOND LATTIMORE, 1951

  In making this translation I have used the Oxford text of D. B. Monro and T. W. Allen (3rd edition, 1919), and have not knowingly failed to follow its readings except in a very few cases, viz.: In 8.328 I would either read νερον instead of νευ
ρν, or, better perhaps, take νευρ here to mean nerve, sinew, or tendon, not bowstring. Where the Oxford editors have numbered, but excluded from their text, 8.548 and 8.550–552, I have included these lines. I have translated, but bracketed, 16.614–615.

  Further, I have, in the interests of clarity and English usage, occasionally given personal names instead of personal pronouns. As regards formula and repeat, I have, with the help of Schmidt’s Parallel-Homer and Cunliffe’s admirable Lexicon of the Homeric Dialect, tried to preserve something of the formulaic character, but have not systematically attempted to render all identical passages in Greek by identical passages in English.

  My aim has been to give a rendering of the Iliad which will convey the meaning of the Greek in a speed and rhythm analogous to the speed and rhythm I find in the original. The best meter for my purpose is a free six-beat line. My line can hardly be called English hexameter. It is less regular than that of Longfellow, or the recent Smith-Miller translation of the Iliad. It is not based on a quantitative theory (or any other theory) as is Robert Bridges’ rendering of part of the Aeneid. I have allowed trochees, anapests for dactyls, and even iambs for spondees. The line is to be read with its natural stress, not forced into any system.

  Matthew Arnold has stated that the translator of Homer must bear in mind four qualities of his author: that he is rapid, plain and direct in thought and expression, plain and direct in substance, and noble.1 Even one who does not agree in all details with Arnold’s very interesting essay must concede that Homer has these qualities. I have tried as hard as I could to reproduce the first three. I do not think nobility is a quality to directly strive for; you must write as well as you can, and then see, or let others see, whether or not the result is noble. I have used the plainest language I could find which might be adequate, and mostly this is the language of contemporary prose. This usage is not “Homeric.” Arnold points out that Homer used a poetic dialect, but I do not draw from this the conclusion, which Arnold draws, that we should translate him into a poetical dialect of English. In 1951, we do not have a poetic dialect, and if I used the language of Spenser or the King James Version of the Bible, I should feel as if I were working in Apollonius of Rhodes, or at best Arktinos, rather than Homer. I must try to avoid mistranslation, which would be caused by rating the word of my own choice ahead of the word which translates the Greek. Subject to such qualification, I must render Homer into the best English verse I can write; and this will be in my own “poetical language,” which is mostly the plain English of today.