Essays on Homer’s Iliad
These essays, prepared by Ian
Johnston of Vancouver Island University (the new name for Malaspina
University-College), Nanaimo, BC, are in the public domain, and may be used by
anyone, in whole or in part, without permission and without charge, provided the
source is acknowledged, released August 2005
For the Table of
Contents of the series of
essays and an Introductory
Comment outlining the
purpose of the series, please use the following link: Essays
on Homer's Iliad.
Essay Eight
On Modern English Translations of
the Iliad
JOHNSON.
‘We must try its effect as an English poem; that is the way to judge of
the merit of a translation. Translations
are, in general, for people who cannot read the original.’ . . .
BOSWELL. ‘The Truth is, it is impossible perfectly to translate poetry.
In a different language it may be the same tune, but it has not the same
tone.’ (Boswell 921)
“It
is a very pretty poem, Mr Pope, but you must not call it Homer” (attributed to
Richard Bentley).
Some
Opening Observations
George
Chapman, the first well-known translator of the Iliad into English, had
little sympathy for his critics. “Envious
Windfuckers,” he called them (quoted Logue 1). In so doing, he helped to
launch a lively and continuing modern tradition of fierce arguments about the
merits of various translations of Homer’s great war epic. One of the most
curious features of this tradition is its intensity.
People tend to have very strong feelings when it comes to discussing
their preferences, and even cautious scholars easily fling aside the restraint
they normally display in their academic work to express their unqualified praise
or dismissive contempt for this or that English version of the Iliad (1).
It’s not just a matter of academics getting aggressively superior in
defense of the Greek text (which is hardly Homer’s original poem, but no
matter), although that can enter into it (after all, departments of classics
justifiably see themselves as the traditional guardians of the poem, hierophants
charged with protecting it from impurities) or would-be poets tossing
accusations of dry pedantry at the scholarly establishment.
To judge from conversations in internet chat rooms, students and
first-time readers and Homerophiles generally are also eager to initiate
confident and often aggressive debates about their own preferences.
Such
arguments are common these days, for we have all sorts of translations to choose
from, new and old. In fact, at no time in the history of Homer in English have
we had so many options readily available. Not
so long ago, the translations of Rieu and Lattimore ruled the English-speaking Iliad
world between them for a generation, but now the field is much more crowded,
with recent versions by Fitzgerald, Fagles, and Lombardo in print (among others)
and even more choices in the public domain on the internet (including many of
the long forgotten versions now freely available through Google Books). The
most obvious reasons for this are a growing interest in Homer among
Greekless readers (especially as a Great Book in Liberal Studies and Humanities
curriculums) and the prospect of a tidy income from the text-book market. Faced
with such a rich array of choices, a neophyte seeking the “right”
translation or a teacher in search of a class room text has good reason to worry
about an attack of consumer anxiety.
Presumably
anyone in search of a translation has to begin by rejecting Boswell’s notion
(often repeated by later students of the questions) that translation is
inherently impossible. We may not be able to get the exact equivalent of
Homer’s poem, whatever that means exactly (since the surviving official text
is clearly not exactly the same poem Homer composed and since virtually all
those dealing with the Iliad are reading it silently at home rather than
listening to a professional bard singing the text at a large group feast), but
with a judicious sense of the limits of the translator’s artistic license we
can get close enough to it to satisfy ourselves that we are dealing with Homer
or at least an acceptable form of the original (2).
And
in making a decision about the most suitable translation (especially for
classroom use), we will probably have to settle for one particular favourite.
Few teachers of the classics would deny that the best way to study the Iliad
is to read the original Greek in conjunction with as wide a variety of different
translations as possible (ancient and modern), so that one’s enjoyment of the
Greek text is played off against one’s appreciation for the different
interpretative talents which the translators bring to bear upon a vision of
experience and a language so different from their own. Such a rewarding way of
exploring the text is, alas, available only to very few readers, so we tend to
wrestle with the different possibilities, settle on one, and defend that choice
as best we can.
All
arguments about translations, however, are inherently problematic because they
are inevitably circular. One starts by setting down (implicitly or explicitly)
certain criteria, applies those to various offerings, and then makes a decision
based upon those criteria and (more importantly) upon the relative weight one
assigns them. The outcome is thus
predetermined by one’s initial preferences, which rest upon a host of personal
biases about what long narratives in general and an ancient epic in particular
should “feel” like (and these biases are often decisively shaped by one’s
own personal experience in dealing with long traditional narratives).
It may be easy enough to secure general agreement about the initial
criteria involved, but everything depends upon the way these are ranked and
applied.
Then,
too, there is the matter of remaining faithful to the translation which first
aroused a particular reader’s imagination about Homer. In my experience, this
factor often plays a decisive role in a particular reader’s preference (I
myself have always had a strong affection for Rieu’s Iliad and Odyssey
for precisely that reason). Hence,
initiating a disinterested conversation about the merits of different texts can
be a difficult business.
The
Past and the Present
Before
going onto to explore some of the major criteria in greater detail, one should
perhaps reflect for a moment on the general challenge facing the translator of
an ancient text. In a sense, his task is to mediate between the strangeness in
the language and vision of the original (which are not a product of the modern
world) and the contemporary sensibility of his readers. Since the successful
experience of reading an ancient poem necessarily requires these two to
interact, the translator is, in effect, something of a broker, shaping something
foreign and, at times, difficult, so that it fits contemporary taste (which
includes contemporary taste in dealing with traditional poems). This task is
more delicate than it sounds (or should be), because if the translation is to
work effectively it must be accessible to the imagination of the reader—it
must, as it were, speak a language she understands—and yet it must also not
completely forfeit the strangeness, because the value of an old poem (and
especially of the Iliad) emerges in no small measure from the way it can
force the reader’s imagination to explore something different, something
uncomfortable, something that challenges the reader’s most complacent
assumptions about the world. It’s easy enough to forget this dialectical
tension at the heart of the enterprise, either by keeping the translation so
strange it makes no intimate imaginative connection with the reader or by making
it so contemporary it ceases to challenge with its strangeness.
Few
translators, for example, strive to produce an English text which “fits”
exactly the Homeric method of recitation according to ancient patterns of sound
or to produce recordings of such translated recitations. Whatever the reason one
might have for attempting such a treatment of the Iliad, the results
would almost certainly be counterproductive because the modern reader simply
cannot access the poem in this manner (dealing with art, after all, requires a
familiarity with the conventions it uses, and producing something intelligible
to readers requires some attention to the conventions familiar to them). To some
extent Lattimore’s idiosyncratic attempt faithfully to adhere to the original
lineation and rhythms of the original (by no means the first attempt to
translate Homer in this manner) makes the poem far too awkward and strange for
many modern readers (myself included). Whatever language he is using, it is not
written in a fluent and easily recognizable form of English (in fairness to
Lattimore, one should observe that the enduring popularity of his translations
would seem to indicate that for many readers he is clearly doing something
right, although I suspect that a good deal of that popularity has to do with the
text book choices made by scholars, who tend to value what they feel is the
alleged “Greekness” of the original far more than they do the imaginative
accessibility of the English text, especially one written in verse). That
comment applies also to Hammond’s translation, which is written in such an
execrable English style I can think of no other reason why it is still on the
market.
Similarly,
attempts to modernize Homer, to appeal more directly and obviously to the
language of the contemporary reader, can have deleterious effects on the central
tension I refer to. Lombardo, for example, is not above injecting contemporary
colloquialisms here and there, a habit which instantly collapses my imaginative
assent to the fiction. Yes, it’s my language, but something in me strongly
resists accepting it as Homer’s. Of course, different people have different
opinions about just how contemporary Homer’s poetic diction should sound and
different levels of tolerance for a modern colloquial style. However, most would
agree, I think, that for them there is a limit of some kind and that, for
example, a gangsta rap style would be unacceptably titling the balance in favour
of modern sensibilities. I suspect
that few people who take some sort of faithfulness into account would consider
Eickhoff’s recent rendition of the Odyssey a “translation,” given
the extreme liberties he takes with Homer’s text and the way in which he
freely inserts into Homer all sorts of details, major and minor, which are not
in the original in order to give the story the flavour of a modern television
drama series.
I
mention these points here not in an attempt to discuss thoroughly some complex
issues (more about them later) but simply to make the general point that a
translation of Homer (and any evaluation of a particular translation) needs to
take into account the present world of the reader and the past world of the poem
and that the success of a translation depends more than anything else upon the
translator’s ability successfully to answer the sometimes competing claims of
past and present.
Poetry
and Prose
Homer’s
original audience had no sense of a written form for work to which they were
listening—and that’s true whether we believe it was an oral composition or
not—any more than we have any idea about the written appearance of the lyrics
of a new popular song we are listening to. Given that the words were organized
into regularly repeating rhythmic units or lines, when a written form did
appear, it was organized as poetry (since that sense of a repetitive rhythmic
pattern has been, up until modern times, the single most important
characteristic separating what we call prose from what we call poetry). Hence,
the major tradition in translating the Iliad in English has, for the most
part, been committed to the production of verse translations, although there
have been those, like Thomas Carlyle, who would reject a poetical style as
irrelevant: “We want what the ancients thought and said, and none of your
silly poetry” (Carlyle, qu. in Preface to W. C. Green’s translation of the Iliad).
That,
in itself, would be no sufficient reason for declaring that a modern English
version of the Iliad must be offered to us as poetry rather than as
prose. After all, a modern audience
is much more familiar with long narrative epics in prose than in any other
style, and many prose translations have an enduring popularity (Butler or Rieu,
for instance). Still, one has to
wonder about which form is more appropriate for modern times, given that the
overwhelming majority of Homer’s “audience” now consists of silent readers
rather than rapt listeners.
Why
should this matter? Well, it does if we remember that the experience of reading
poetry is (or can be) significantly different from reading prose. For one thing,
the reader’s eyes move differently, and (in my case at least) reading patterns
vary (with poetry I tend to linger more or review particular passages more
frequently, with my sensitivity to certain tropes heightened). Then, too, the
poetic text presents a different visual appearance (a ragged right hand margin
with a significant amount of white space), especially if the translator chooses
to add breaks here and there (for example, between narrative descriptions and
speeches), and that can significantly affect the way a reader experiences the
poem (in marked contrast to page after page of right-justified, proportionally
spaced prose, often in relatively small print with few breaks). In addition, of
course, to offer a long narrative in the form of a poem in a traditional rhythm
is to remind the reader that she is not dealing with an entirely contemporary
work; it is, if you like, a way of putting her into a frame of mind more
receptive to an encounter with a past sensibility (especially if she already has
some experience of reading traditional poetry). A prose narrative in itself
tends to smooth out this difference (that may, in part, account for some of the
accusations leveled at Rieu for allegedly turning the Iliad into a
Victorian novel). What this amounts
to one can sum up as follows: To translate the Iliad into prose is to
invite the reader to read it as a novel or a historical romance; to translate
the Iliad into poetry is to invite the reader to read it as one would a
traditional English epic, and these two ways of reading are not necessarily the
same. None of this means that a poetic text is always preferable to a prose
version, but it does mean that the decision a translator or reader makes is not
without consequences.
[To
digress from Homer for a moment, one should note that there are a few works in
which the form itself (poetry or prose) is part of the content, a
feature which should make the decision I have been discussing somewhat
more complex. The best example which comes to mind is Lucretius, De Rerum
Natura, which is something very rare in the experience of English
readers—a long poem on a philosophical and scientific subject. There has long
been, it would seem, a decided preference among English translators to render
Lucretius in prose, perhaps in response to what readers are used to in treatises
of this kind. That is understandable enough. However, Lucretius himself
repeatedly calls attention to the fact that we are dealing with a poem and
indicates that a very important part of his purpose is to fuse “obscure” and
“difficult” ideas with the charms of poetry (he uses the metaphor of rubbing
honey around the rim of a cup containing bitter medicine). Hence, the decision
to render his work in (often very wooden) prose would seem to me a major
violation of the content.]
Back
to Homer. Nowadays, since Lattimore’s translation (1951), the trend seems to
have swung away from prose translations, and we now have a wealth of Iliads
in English verse (the publication of Hammond’s prose version in 1987 came as
something of a surprise to me, especially considering the result is so inferior
to Rieu’s earlier prose version, also published by Penguin).
I must say I applaud the trend, although I would be hard put to offer a
comprehensive justification for my preference if someone were to produce a
startlingly good prose version (in these matters it is always wise to be
pragmatic and judge the adequacy of one’s principles by exploring particular
examples, rather than by writing such principles in stone and applying them
rigorously).
Then,
of course, there’s the matter of the appropriate poetic form, particularly the
rhythmic pattern of the lines. Here
one basic choice is between hexameters and pentameters.
The former is Homer’s pattern, but it is relatively uncommon in English
verse and thus makes certain extra demands on the reader. There is a long
tradition of arguments among English poets, translators, and scholars about the
suitability of the hexameter, some people dismissing it completely on the ground
that it never will be an English meter (Lord Derby remarked on the “pestilent
heresy of the English hexameter”) and others urging readers to consider how
suitable it is for certain features of Greek metre.
The argument is, in my view, largely pointless (although sometimes
interesting), because setting up a priori judgments about what will or
will not work as a metre in English verse is irrelevant: what matters is the
pragmatic test of whether or not anyone has demonstrated that the hexameter
works as an English verse form suitable for translating Homer (and even if many
of the attempts to render Homer in English hexameters are wretched enough,
surely one can point to some modern translations which have succeeded very
well).
The
pentameter is, of course, the work horse of traditional English poetry and is
thus immediately accessible to any reader familiar with the blank verse of
Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, or any number of others. Much depends here on
how one wants the translation to register with the reader. Everything else being
equal, the hexameter tends to be a heavier line, taking more time to read and
working against a English reader’s familiarity with traditional verse, and
thus it can lend a certain weight or gravitas to the poem. Chapman, the
first translator of the Iliad into English used an even longer (and
heavier) line of fourteen syllables:
Achilles’
bane full wrath resound, O Goddesse, that imposd
Infinite sorrowes on the Greekes, and many brave soules losd
From breasts Heroique sent from farre, to that invisible cave
That no light comforts; and their lims to dogs and vultures gave.
To all which Jove’s will gave effect; from whom first strife
begunne
Betwixt Atrides, king of men, and Thetis’ godlike Sonne.
The
pentameter obviously makes it possible for the reader to move through the poem
more quickly (an important element in a work which contains so many impassioned
speeches). So to some extent the decision involves making a decision between the
relative importance of weight and speed or between strangeness and familiarity.
A comparison of Fagles’ hexameters with Fitzgerald’s pentameters makes this
point clearly enough. Prima facie, the most successful and popular
pentameter translations are those of the Odyssey, a poem which does not
demand quite the gravitas of the Iliad, at least in the eyes of
many readers.
Parenthetically,
I must confess in the case of my own efforts at translating Homer this decision
was difficult to make (particularly since I admire both Fagles’ and
Fitzgerald’s translations), so I ended up using both: hexameters (or a roughly
12-syllable line) for the narrative and a pentameter (or a roughly 10-syllable
line) for the speeches (where the shorter line is, in my view, much more
appropriate, especially given the influence of Shakespeare on the English
reader’s imaginative response to dramatic utterances). There is, I later found
out, a minor precedent for such changes in the basic verse form:
It
remains only to add, that the student of Homer's Odyssey will find much
to assist him in the very amusing and suggestive translations which the late Dr.
Maginn gave to the public many years ago; first in the pages of Fraser's
Magazine, and afterwards in a collective volume. They are in every possible
variety of metre; but the several metres chosen are admirably suited to their
respective subjects, and those who once read them will not fail to remember
them. In fact, we do not know a book better calculated than that of Dr. Maginn
to inspire a clever youth with a love of the Homeric poems; and for our own part
we are not sure that the most perfect plan of translating Homer would not be to
employ blank verse for the narrative, and to vary the monotony of its flow by
the use of various metres, like Dr. Maginn, according to the subject, in the
speeches and other episodes. (The Gentleman’s Magazine,
January-June 1866—the article, a very interesting discussion of a number of
translations is available here;
the Magin translation, which is incomplete, is available at the following link: Magin
A
number of translators of Homer have felt obliged to base their translation on
some other traditional English verse forms (e.g., Spenserian stanzas) or on
their own vision of what something like a traditional verse form might look like
when adapted for Homer. These efforts, which, so far as I can tell, are rarely
successful, can produce results which readers find extremely odd, none more so
than the astonishing efforts of F. W. Newman, younger brother of the famous
Cardinal Newman (although the continuing efforts of a modern American poet to
translate the entire Iliad as one long sequence of sonnets comes close).
Presumably the hope there is that the unusual verse form will put the reader’s
imagination in a frame of mind better suited to dealing with a long, traditional
poem. In my case, the effect is almost always the reverse—the strangeness in
the basic verse form makes the poem too remote, too odd, too idiosyncratic (any
reader who would like a rich sampling of the different attempts to translate
Homer into English should consult the following link:
Published English Translations of Homer).
Trudittori
Traditori
In
dealing with the matter of evaluating translations, Matthew Arnold introduced
the useful metaphor of a financial exchange (112). From a translation we want
some close attention paid to an exact reckoning, and, even if there are no
posted rules, there’s a limit to what we will accept by way of tampering with
the exchange rate. Christopher Logue’s War Music, for example, is a
marvelously poetic modern “rendition” of Books 16 to 19 of the Iliad,
and no teacher of the epic would fail to recommend the work to his students.
But the book hardly qualifies as a fair exchange for the Homeric text,
and few readers, if any, except perhaps Logue himself, would consider it a
translation.
Sometimes
I like to think of the text as a trampoline and the translator as someone who is
trying to move along it. His task is
to remain graceful and agile, while keeping his feet in frequent contact with
the mesh. He is permitted the
occasional leap or somersault, a captivating flourish, but should not let his
desire to perform take him too far from the mesh for too long.
Decisions about the liberty he has to perform such maneuvers are best
left to the consensus of readers (who will, of course, differ among themselves).
This
metaphor is useful because it reminds me that those who try to remain doggedly
faithful to the text, who try, that is, to walk firmly along the mesh step by
step, often (perhaps generally) tend to move in a very ungainly fashion. The
best example that comes to mind is Hammond’s prose, which never departs from a
dogged contact with the text and turns the experience of reading the Iliad
into an ungainly plod, useful perhaps to someone seeking a convenient crib for
the Greek text, but hardly a stirring rendition of a magnificent poem.
There’s the constant flavour of an Anglice reddenda exercise in
which the fluency of the English is consistently sacrificed for scrupulous
fidelity to the Greek: “. . . his was the blood more than any that his heart
pressed him to feed full to Ares . . .” and so on. The effect is bad enough in
the descriptions but disastrous in the speeches, which, as a result, lack any
colloquial rhythm that might convey the sense that particular (and strong)
feelings are engaged: “. . . even if I should resent it and try to refuse you
their sack, I can achieve nothing by resentment, as you are far the stronger” (3)
And similar objections have been made about Lattimore’s desire to remain
faithful to Homer: “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” (Lattimore 55) (4).
Modern
traditions in translation tend to emphasize fidelity to original texts (in
marked contrast to translation styles in some earlier centuries when the
emphasis was much more on the translator’s performance, on his ability to
display his own poetical skills over and above any close adherence to the
original, a prominent feature of Chapman’s Iliad.
The Arrowsmith translations of Aristophanes are some of the best examples
of this old tendency in modern translations of classic works.
However, such frequent and sometimes sustained vaulting above the text is
uncommon in recent translations of Homer. That
said, many scholars have excoriated Fitzgerald for the liberties he takes with
the Homer’s text (as far as I can tell, criticism of this sort is directed at
his work more than at the efforts of any other modern translator of Homer), but
there may well be a connection between such “betrayals” of Homer and the
most outstanding quality of Fitzgerald’s translation, its nuanced lyric
quality, which in many places is far superior as English poetry to any other
translation available. And, of course, for most modern readers of an English
text of the Iliad scrupulous fidelity is not a particularly important
issue, since they bring no knowledge of Homeric Greek to the experience.
This
notion of “fidelity” to Homer leads some translators to the extremely odd
habit of making their translation a line-by-line affair, often with the attempt
to keep the same words on the same lines (a tradition which started, so far as I
can tell, with the translation by T. S. Brandeth in 1846), and, in extreme
cases, offering what the translators claim is an English approximation of the
Greek metre (a homometrical translation) and sometimes even a Greek “sound.”
Now, I understand why a translator might like to see if he can pull feats
like these off simply as a challenge, but I’ve never understood what these
demands are supposed to add to the English translation. Brandeth himself
confessed that this requirement of the style had “no great merit” but
claimed that it had prevented him from adding anything superfluous to the
translation. There’s no great
disadvantage in such a notion of fidelity, I suppose, provided it does not lead
to unnecessary awkwardness in the English style. Given that it almost always
does, it baffles me why anyone would seek to impose on English verse the
requirements of Greek metre or sound. Since
the principles of Greek metre in classical poetry are so very different from the
principles of traditional metres of English poetry, such a practice simply
imposes on the English a rule which virtually guarantees some very odd
unidiomatic language. And this point is all the more relevant if the translator
claims that this practice makes the poem much easier to recite in the
appropriate manner so that we are, in effect, as one gushing reviewer put about
Merrill’s Odyssey, listening to the voice of Homer.
Scholars
often greet with rapture some English translation which, they claim, matches the
sound or the rhythm of the Greek or both (e.g., the translations of Lattimore,
Merrill, and McCrorie, for example). But if I want the sound and rhythm of the
Greek, then I’ll read the Greek. Why
put up with the often deleterious effects of an attempt to “translate” those
qualities into another language? And if I don’t know the Greek, why should I
have to wade through an English style which sounds unnatural (often rhythmically
and syntactically awkward and stuffed with unnecessary words in an odd order)?
What possible merit is there is such strange attempts?
Those who might wish to point to the great popularity of Lattimore’s
translations as evidence that such isometric translations can succeed need to
explore carefully what else Lattimore is doing in his English poetry to render
Homer so vividly to so many readers, and a close inspection of Lattimore’s
verse reveals quickly enough that his notion of “isometric” does not require
him to follow Greek metre or sound very scrupulously.
I
don’t mean to belabour this point, but given the emphasis in some recent
translations on the importance of matching or attempting to match the
“sound” of the Greek, a few more remarks may be in order. What do we mean by
the phrase “sounding like the Greek”? Does
this mean that the English should sound something like the Greek text as we
teach students to recite it? Or does
it mean that the English should sound something like an original recitation
(complete with music), as best we can tell, would have sounded? There is no
agreement about the first of these answers (since teaching methods vary), and we
have no reason to suppose that, however we teach the recitation of Homer in
class, the results bear any similarity to an original recitation. As to that
original recitation, here again we have no sure idea what that sounded like, but
we can be certain that it would have been something very much stranger than
anything we are used to in English. To appreciate this point, try listening to a
recent attempt to recreate a “rhapsodic” recitation of Homer in Greek,
complete with musical accompaniment, and ask yourself what connection this could
possible have to anything written or recited in English (if you would like to
try that now, you might wish to use the following link: Homer
recital).
Or
does “sounding like the Greek” really mean “sounding the way we would like
Homer to sound”? Many readers
bring such expectations to a long traditional poem (clearly Matthew Arnold did),
and there is no agreement whatsoever among them. Many scholars like something
that reminds them of the Greek; other readers prefer an Arthurian, Miltonic, or
Biblical flavouring (something old, in any case). Some want “rhetorical”
effects to beef up the English (like the alliteration in Fagles) or syntactical
awkwardness (as in Lattimore) to bring out the fact that this is an old poem
written in a foreign language; others prefer a modern colloquial prose, even
with injections of contemporary slang (as in Lombardo). So in addition to the
demonstrated problems which come from “sounding like the Greek” we have to
deal with the fact that we don’t really agree what that means.
In
recent years translators have been emphasizing how their version is suitable for
public recitation (and there’s a growing market for Homer on CD’s or
available as sound recordings over the Internet). This is an important
criterion, especially given the fact that so much of Homer’s epics are
speeches (often intensely passionate utterances), and one might well set down as
an important initial test of any translation the question, “Does this
rendition of Homer produce verse and especially dramatic speeches which sound as
if they are something someone might actually say?” If it does not, if, that
is, the English sounds awkward or padded or flat, then no appeals to this or
that sound quality of the original Greek is much help. If the translation does
not work in English, then there’s something seriously wrong with it.
Sometimes
I get the sense that there is a decidedly odd group of scholarly readers out
there who, when they read the English translation, wish for some reason or other
to be reminded of the sound of the Greek, no matter how the efforts to please
them in this matter may vitiate the imaginative vitality and often the clarity
of the English verse (that this group exists seems clear enough from the
following remark by Lovelace Bigge-Wither’s preface to his translation of the Odyssey
in 1869: “The aim of this translation is to be literal. In many passages it is
almost line for line, and even word for word with the original; so that to
persons well acquainted with the Greek this version will readily suggest the
very words of the divine old bard himself”).
The best response to such folk is probably the following passage from
Chapman:
Custome
hath made even th’ablest Agents erre
In these translations: all so much apply
Their paines and cunnings word for word to render
Their patient Authors, when they may as well
Make fish with fowle, Camels with Whales engender,
Or their tongues’ speech in other mouths compell.
Diction
The
single most important decision any translator (or any reader selecting a
translation) must make concerns the complex question of diction, that is, the
English idiom basic to the style of the translation. People’s likes and
dislikes are more clearly shaped by this aspect of a translation than by any
other factor, and, not surprisingly, the issues arising from English diction
generate the fiercest arguments. The best one can do, I suppose, is declare
one’s preferences and wait for a response
Given
that the purpose of a modern translation of the Iliad is to reach and to
engage the contemporary imaginations of its readers, I have a distinct
preference for a fluent modern idiom in the language of the translation. Hence,
I have great difficulty in reading the efforts of those who want to offer Homer
up to me in an olde worlde vocabulary: “Ah
me, my child, why reared I thee, cursed in my motherhood? Would thou hadst been
left tearless and griefless amid the ships, seeing thy lot is very brief and
endureth no long while; but now art thou made short-lived alike and lamentable
beyond all men; in an evil hour I bore thee in our halls” (Lang, Leaf, and
Myers). Does this Babylonian dialect sound like anything anyone would actually
say? How is a modern reader supposed to react to this fustian? Well, one common
response might be that this language encourages readers to think of the Iliad
as some sort of romantic historical fantasy, a run-of-de-Mille reworking of the
eternally popular Medieval adventure, exciting but quaint and harmless (a number
of translators have clearly worked to create this effect by using Gothic script
for the heading of the first book, something that puts the reader into an
Arthurian or Biblical frame of mind).
Now,
it is true that an artificially aged diction seems to strike a chord with many
contemporary readers (no doubt the enduring popularity of Arthurian romance has
contributed a lot to that). But one has to wonder just how much a language like
this is, as it were, protecting the readers from recognizing the immediate
connections between the Iliad and their own lives (a defense which, to
judge from the history of treatments of the Trojan War, has always been
popular). This issue is not simply a matter of style. The basic idiom of the
poem also shapes its content, in this case turning it into something essentially
irrelevant to the modern world. To use the language of old stories about ancient
Christian chivalry (in Malory, for example), or, more commonly, to attempt
(often rather lamely, as in the above example) to re-create a facsimile of such
a language, is to invite the reader to see the Iliad as belonging to that
tradition. It strikes me that if the use of such an artificial idiom is an
attempt to remind us of the strangeness of an ancient poem, the effect is
exactly the reverse. The language is not challengingly strange but consolingly
quaint, a conventional way to depict historical romance.
For a poem in which a valiant monarch on a mighty steed smiteth his foe
through a cuirass and lays him low in order to save the damsel is not the same
as poem in which a brave leader strikes his enemy on a powerful horse through
body armour and slaughters him in order to save the woman.
It
may be that this habit of wanting artificially to age the Iliad with a
particular idiom drawn from chivalric traditions stems, in part, from the
misleading notion handed down to us from Matthew Arnold (among others) that the
translator has a responsibility to remember that Homer “is also, and above
all, noble,” that “the Iliad has a great master’s genuine stamp . .
. the grand style” (103, 104). But
the idea that nobility through the grand style is best pursued through a quaint
re-invented quasi-medieval diction is clearly misguided.
The best response to such a notion is probably Lattimore’s comment:
“I do not think nobility is a quality to be directly striven for; you must
write as well as you can, and then see, or let others see, whether or not the
result is noble” (55). Furthermore, any historicist defense of such an idiom
is misplaced, since there is no way reliably to ascertain the level of Homer’s
original diction in relation to the language of his own time. Thus, as Martin
Mueller has pointed out, Arnold’s criterion reflects, not a legitimate demand
arising from the poem, but his own prejudices about what epics ought to sound
like.
Inserting
obvious reminders of a language from the past can be a tricky business, and
different readers will respond in different ways. Any English translator of
Homer has a number of idioms available above and beyond Malory—Spenser,
Shakespeare, the King James Bible, and Milton being the most obvious—and many
translators are not slow to draw from that tradition. Fagles, for example, likes
to insert into his text occasional reminders of older times and earlier poets at
the expense of a fluent modern idiom: “I’ll roil his body,” “a bowyer
good with goat horn,” “armoured in shamelessness,” “Achaean battalions
ceaseless,” and so forth. More seriously perhaps, he adopts the alliterative
thump of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,
which at times becomes so frequent and over-emphatic that one learns to
anticipate it, and thus the sound begins to preempt the sense: “As a burly
farmhand wielding a whetted ax,/ chopping a field-ranging bull behind the
horns,/ hacks through its whole hump and the beast heaves up . . .” or “. .
. belching bloody meat, but the fury, never shaken,/ builds inside their chests
though their glutted bellies burst.” Here, in my case at least, the adoption
of an old style suitable for dramatic recitation long ago becomes something of
an impediment to the modern reader. A little more than a little of this is much
too much. My antipathy to such artificial ageing led me in my own translation
even to eschew almost totally the vocabulary of ancient and medieval armour and
weapons (cuirass, greaves, javelin, helm, lance, targe, buckler, and so on).
One
intriguing aspect of diction is the way the translator handles the names of
people and places. We are, I think, long past the time when using Latin
equivalents for the names of Greek gods is acceptable, and a good thing, too.
I’m never quite sure why that particular tradition lasted as long as it
did. Perhaps it had something to do
with an attempt to inculcate sturdy Roman virtues in public school boys or was
simply continuing an old tradition of referring to pagan gods. What’s
interesting here is the way in which different translators either stick with
well-established forms or use alternative spellings to remind the reader or to
insist upon the alien Greekness of the original: Achilles, Achilleus, Akhilleus,
and so on. Fitzgerald pushes the
foreignness of the names to something of an extreme (with unusual spelling and
accents of various kinds), a practice which has the (to me pleasing) effect of
making the names (and the people they indicate) more remote and strange.
This quality helps to offset the easier familiarity with his pentameter
verse form (although I’m not sure if that’s his intention).
However, the habit does cause problems for student readers and denies
them the chance to become familiar with the more common names (e.g., Ajax,
Clytaemnestra, and so on).
Parnassus
and Beyond
Quite
apart from the various matters discussed above, assessing different translations
on the basis of the quality of the English poetry is a notoriously subjective
task, bound to generate strong disagreements. And any argument on behalf of a
particular text can be carried out persuasively only by a very detailed
comparative look at particular examples, something beyond the scope of this
essay, although, for what it’s worth, my view is that if we’re comparing
modern translations only on the basis of the quality of the result as English
poetry, without taking anything else into consideration, then Fitzgerald’s
texts are clearly the best available, a claim which does not deny that one might
still have a good reason for choosing a rival version.
Whether
one agrees with that assessment or not, let me offer at least one criterion that
underlies my judgment. Long narrative poems are rarely, if ever, totally even in
their poetic quality. The author settles into a basic relatively uninspired
style which carries the narrative and then, when inspiration strikes, launches
his verse into hitherto unexplored realms of truly moving poetry for a while,
before settling down again into the regular style. The greatness of a poem
arises, in large part, out of the frequency and the power of these (often quite
short) transcendent passages when, to use Gerard Manley Hopkins’ useful
analogy, the poetry of inspiration seizes us and lifts us high above the
Castalian or Parnassian plains (154). Such moments, which are quite familiar to
readers of, say, Milton’s Paradise Lost or Wordsworth’s Prelude,
occur in the Iliad as well, and they obviously present a particularly
daunting challenge to the translator (5).
How well do his efforts convey these supercharged moments to his readers (e.g.,
Achilles’ speech to Lycaon, Achilles response to the news that Patroclus has
died, the meeting of Achilles and Priam, and so on)?
Any
comparative evaluation of different translations needs to consider this
question, because such passages in the Iliad are the most powerful
moments in the poem, the single most important reason for its continuing
vitality. One of my reasons for
liking Fitzgerald’s translation so much is that his own considerable poetic
gifts enable him to meet this particular challenge better than any other modern
translation. Other translators (Hammond, in particular) remain as flat and
uninspired in these passages as in the rest of the translation.
Apparatus
Criticus
One
final (and obvious) point, not strictly germane to the quality of a translation:
modern readers, especially students, often expect (and require) some critical
apparatus along with the text (an introduction perhaps, a glossary, maps, and so
on). Here the options range from the
Doubleday paperback of Fitzgerald’s translation which is remarkably deficient
in any such assistance to, at the other extreme, Fagles’ translation, which
has an excellent introduction (by Bernard Knox), the finest short introduction
to the Iliad available anywhere, six pages of maps, twelve pages of
notes, a bibliography, and a useful glossary.
I can well understand someone’s selecting Fagles over other
possibilities largely on the basis of this supplementary material (especially as
a textbook for school use).
Concluding
Remarks
What
all this adds up to is, I would suggest, the idea that we should more or less
abandon all a priori notions of what a translation must do or of what
will or will not work in an English Homer and treat evaluations pragmatically,
judging them by their results. Lattimore got it right when he stated that one
has to write as well as one can (following whatever principles one thinks
appropriate) and then let the readers decide on the basis of the results. In
this process, we might do well, too, to remember Dr. Johnson’s dictum (in the
“Life of Milton”) that no precedents can justify absurdities—scholarly
appeals to the characteristics of Greek metre or to the traditions of English
folk songs, for example, are no defense against a wretched English style which
interferes with the reader’s imaginative response to the English poetry. If we
must have rules, then let’s limit ourselves to the demands that the
translation should be more or less faithful to literal sense of Homer’s text
and that the English poetry should have the energy, clarity, and imaginative
power we demand of our own poetry. Even with those two “rules” in place, we
will still leave plenty of room for energetic arguments.
Notes
(1) Take, for example, a statement like the following
(made by Andre Michalopoulos): “no translation has surpassed, or ever will
surpass the magnificent Victorian translation of Leaf, Lang, and Myers for the Iliad
. . .” (6, emphasis added) or Fitzgerald’s comment on Lattimore: “[the
translation] would survive as long as Pope’s for in its way it is quite as
solidly distinguished” (“Heroic Poems” 699). [Back
to Text]
(2) If we push the notion of the “impossibility” of a
translation, we can soon reach the conclusion that all reading of traditional
poetry (in English or otherwise) is impossible, simply because we cannot
recreate in ourselves the sensitivity to a vocabulary we no longer use or an
intimate emotional familiarity with the situation for which the original was
produced. In a sense, all such reading is a “translation” from something old
and strange into something more immediately accessible (and that’s as true of
Shakespeare as it is of Homer). This general observation holds even if we have
very accurate and complete factual information about that traditional vocabulary
and situation. Those who read the Iliad in Greek or who recite it to
themselves in Greek are not necessarily any closer to the “real” Homer
(whatever that means) than the person reading an English translation. The fact
that they think they are will certainly make their experience of the poem
different from reading it in English and may well enhance their enjoyment of it,
but they are no closer to the original experience of the ancient warrior leaders
listening to a professional bard recite the Iliad than the audience at
those odd productions of Shakespeare which seek to replicate his company’s
stage conditions and pronunciation is to the Elizabethan audience way back when.
For it’s not just a matter of the “tone” of the original, as Boswell
claims; more important than that is the reader’s sensitivity, his response to
tone generally, and that will be inevitably shaped by his reading habits and his
contemporary culture, including the ways that contemporary culture has or has
not educated him to read old poems. [Back
to Text]
(3) Of course, the problem here may not stem solely (or
even principally) from Hammond’s scrupulous fidelity to the Greek, for his
prose seems to indicate an acute insensitivity to modern English. One suspects
that a translator who repeatedly has Homeric characters use the word
“blatherskate” may well be unwilling or unable to make any concessions to
the idiom of his readers. [Back
to Text]
(4) One prominent reviewer of Lattimore castigated his
style, not unfairly, for being full of “misprints, mistranslations,
obscurities, or outrages to the English language” (Knopff 275). [Back
to Text]
(5) This notion of a Parnassian style (not to be confused
with the Parnassian school of poetry) punctuated by inspired moments is useful
in any analysis of a long narrative (not simply in poetry).
One key notion here is that, while it is relatively easy to parody the
basic style (and there is no shortage of parodies of Homer’s Parnassian), one
cannot do so with the inspired parts, where the genius of the artist is fully at
work. The idea is useful for
reminding us that the greatness of a work does not always (or even usually)
reside in the unvaryingly high quality of the style and that some works of great
genius are often written, in large part, in a very bad style (the most obvious
example that comes to mind of this point is Moby Dick, although many
critics, including myself, would offer up Paradise Lost as an equally
good example). [Back
to Text]
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