It is a famous, unexpected, and immensely effective scene. Nothing quite like it ever happens again in the Iliad. Athene's divine intrusion is over almost before it has begun, but its impact on Achilles is total and instantaneous: modern readers have been known to wonder whether the whole thing is a flash of imagination in Achilles' mind. This sudden and daring injection into an all-too-human quarrel of an overriding preternatural element--no sooner glimpsed than gone--depends for its effectiveness to a great extent on its rarity.
I have long nursed an uneasy suspicion that the composer of the Odyssey was not only impressed by the idea but also convinced that it could be repeated ad infinitum, with variations, without losing any of its real creative power. We first meet Athene (1.45-59) at a conclave of the Olympians, complaining that Zeus is not concerned with rescuing Odysseus from detention on Kalypso's remote island. Zeus reminds her (1.63-79) that Poseidon's claims must be considered. But he agrees, in a casual way, that Olympos should arrange for Odysseus' homecoming, and that it's mainly up to Athene to see to this. The result is a staggering sequence of (often preternatural) ad hoc micromanagement on Athene's part. She lectures Telemachos like a fussy schoolmistress on how to grow up (1.112-305), then flies off as a bird (1.320). At 2.224-41, the wise Ithakan Mentor, whom Odysseus, Troy-bound, left in charge of his affairs, makes the first of his own rare appearances: advisedly so, since from soon after this (2.267-95) to the final emergency pact arranged with the dead suitors' surviving relatives (24.545-48), when Mentor seemingly appears, it is in fact, with one exception (17.67-71), Athene in his likeness, and one sometimes wonders (especially in that final case) where in fact the real Mentor was at the time.
When busily arranging Telemachos' trip to Pylos (2.382-87), Athene actually takes on the likeness of Telemachos himself: luckily, this is a one-off, but the repeated alert that the goddess then "had another idea" can lead to endless improbabilities, such as Athene delivering the supposed Mentor's prayer to Poseidon (3.55-61), "while herself was bringing it all to pass." Athene flies off like a sea eagle (3.371-72; Nestor twigs that the bird is her); puts ideas into Odysseus' head from a distance (5.425-29); and visits Nausikaa in a dream in the form of a girlfriend (6.20-40), encouraging her to do the laundry by the seaside (6.112-15), in order to bring about her meeting Odysseus. In fact, she can at a moment's notice take on the likeness of anyone needed to pass on information or in any way advance the narrative, from a girl at the well (7.48-77) to a herald (8.7-15), a well-bred young shepherd (13.221-25), or a handsome woman invisible to Telemachos but seen by Odysseus and the dogs (16.155-77).
However, what must put the heaviest strain on the modern reader's willing suspension of disbelief is Athene's preternatural, instantaneous ability to transform Odysseus' physical appearance. She can spiff up the sleeping Penelope's appearance to make her look sexually desirable to the suitors (18.187-96), and we can accept that; but her treatment of Odysseus defies credulity, and may have something to do with the inherent unlikelihood of no one, even his own wife, recognizing him when he is twenty years older--though Eurykleia comes very close to doing so (19.379-81), before that telltale scar reveals the truth (19.467-75). Athene can, at need, and in a split second, magically transmogrify not only Odysseus' person but also his clothing: from a wrinkled old beggar in rags (13.397-403, 429-38) to a well-dressed, healthy, good-looking middle-aged man in his prime (8.16-23, 16.172-76), and back again (16.207-12, 452-59). In the one form (6.229-35), he not only charms the young Nausikaa but is told by her father (7.311-16) that he'd welcome him as a son-in-law. In the other, his persona as an aged beggar is so real that it seriously confuses his own wife (19.100-360). In the rejuvenation process preceding his final reunion with Penelope, Athene restores his former heroic appearance, including a rich crop of "hyacinthine" hair (23.155-58). At a stroke these preternatural interferences with the naturally irreversible effects of twenty years' physical aging undercut the all-too-real and challenging emotions of husband and wife nervously rediscovering one another after their fraught and seemingly endless separation.
TRANSLATION AND THE HOMERIC HEXAMETER
It is over half a century now since Richmond Lattimore, following up (as I too have now done) on his Iliad, first published his deservedly famous, and ground-breaking, translation of the Odyssey.7 What made his version truly different from its innumerable predecessors was his determination to get as close as possible, in every respect--metre, rhythm, formulaic phrases, style, vocabulary, as well as the rapidity, plainness of thought, directness of expression, and nobility of concept emphasized by Matthew Arnold in his lectures On Translating Homer--to the original Homeric Greek. The stimulus for such an English Odyssey was, of course, the vast expansion of American university education in the humanities, largely fostered by the GI Bill in the years immediately following World War II; and what it sought to do was to give a totally Greekless readership the closest possible idea of what Homer had been about, metrically, linguistically, and in literary terms. My own version, a generation later, has the same objectives in view, with another added: the determination, in dealing with a poem so oral in its essence, that what I have written should be naturally declaimable.
At first sight what Lattimore was attempting did not seem innovative: ever since the Renaissance there had been an ongoing battle between modernist and Hellenizing translators, with the modernists generally winning. The essential modernist principle was famously expressed by Dryden, who declared of his version of Horace (but the same principle applies here), in relation to the original author's work, that "my own is of a piece with his, and that if he were living, and an Englishman, they are such as he would probably have written" (emphasis, except for Englishman, mine).8 This formula at once licensed any Anglicization, however inappropriate. It might have been thought that the Hellenizers, whose aim was the preservation of the original characteristics of the Greek, would suit a Greekless audience better; the trouble was that they, like the modernists, assumed, sometimes unconsciously, an audience that could still read the original Greek, and thus would be capable of making informed comparisons between text and translation. What Lattimore saw, very clearly, was that communicating the ultra-foreign essence, at every level, of Homer to minds that were virtually tabula rasa where any but English poetry was concerned called for a quite new fidelity--rhythmical and rhetorical no less than idiomatic--to the alien original, together with a comparable avoidance of all those comfortingly familiar, yet wildly misleading, fallbacks (blank verse being the most obvious, and the most misleading) that had served translators so well in the past.
Of all the essential features in this new type of translation--retention of formulaic phrases, syntactical empathy, avoidance of factitious pseudo-similarity to familiar English landmarks--the most difficult by far to achieve has always been an acceptable equivalent to Homer's metrical line, the epic hexameter. At the heart of the matter lies a fundamental difference between Greek and English poetics. In Greek (and Latin) verse, all vowels have a fixed quantity, either long or short. Short quantities can be lengthened by position, that is, before two or more consonants, which gives a poet more scope; but every metre is determined by an arrangement of vowel quantities. The power of a line is determined by the contrapuntal play of natural stress (ictus) against this rigid metrical pattern. In English, on the contrary, vowels have no fixed given length (though diphthongs and naturally long or duplicated vowels--think "chain," "groin," "fame," "teeth," "dice," "home," "dune"--to some extent can be made to follow the classical rule), and in the last resort are stressed solely by the natural syllabic emphases given to any sentence. In the strict sense, English doesn't have metres at all.
In Homer's case the situation is made still more difficult by the fact that the prevalent unit of emphasis ("foot") in the epic hexameter is the dactyl (--U U), one long syllable followed by two shorts, dah-didi. This six-foot line can be set out as follows: --U U |--UU |--|| U U | -- || UU |--U U |--U. Any dactyl (i.e., any of the first five feet
, though a resolved fifth foot is rare) is resolvable into one long, dah-dah, forming a spondee (----). The sixth foot is an abbreviated (catalectic) dactyl, shorn of its last syllable (-- U). It too can be a spondee (----). The hexameter has a natural mid-break, against the metre most commonly in the third or fourth foot, as marked (||). To illustrate this line in English, here is a Victorian rendering of Iliad 1.44, by C.S. Calverley: "Dark was the | soul of the | god || as he | moved from the | heights of O | lympos." Calverley, a good classicist, knew very well that dactylo-spondaic rhythm runs flat contrary to natural English rhythm, which is essentially iambic (U--) or, in lighter moods, anapestic (UU--), and forms the building blocks of the blank verse line, employed by Milton in Paradise Lost, and by the vast majority of would-be translators of Homer, even though that seriously reduces the speed of the hexameter, and has totally alien associations to it (translators like Pope compounded this error by choosing the tightly rhymed heroic couplet, since rhyming was unknown to Homer). Iambs naturally climb uphill, while dactyls are on the gallop: listen to the onomatopoeia Homer works into a line (Od. 11.598) describing the rock of Sisyphos obstinately rolling and bouncing down to the plain again: Autis epeita pedonde kulindeto laas anaides.
The combination of alien rhythm and absence of stress/metre counterpoint has always made any sustained attempt at an English stress hexameter a lost cause, not least because the English stress pattern tends both to avoid spondaic resolved feet and to coincide exactly with the metrical schema. H.B. Cotterill's Odyssey is typical, its flat dactylic rhythms boringly soporific: Now when at last they arrived at the beautiful stream of the river Here the perennial basins they found where water abundant Welled up brightly enough for the cleansing of dirtiest raiment So their mules they unloosened from under the yoke of the wagon, Letting them wander at will on the bank of the eddying river. (6.85-89) The problem was a daunting one, but most translators, who couldn't have cared less about the needs of a Greekless general audience, never saw it as one at all.
What is still by far the best solution, though by no means a perfect one, was hit on by C. Day Lewis in 1940, when translating Vergil's Georgics, and later developed in his version (1952) of the Aeneid. By a real stroke of luck, this translation was commissioned for broadcasting by the BBC, which meant that it was, precisely, aimed at a nonclassical general public that would, in the first instance, hear rather than read it. It therefore had perforce to be, like its original, declaimable, a quality sadly to seek in most previous versions, but fundamental to all ancient epic. This meant, among other things, capturing something of Vergil's verbal structures and linear rhetoric, which, in turn, demanded a line-by-line adherence to the original text. Thus two crucial necessities were imposed on Day Lewis from the start, and they in turn made him face the dilemma of the English hexameter, one problem with which had always allegedly been that it was unmanageably long.9 What Day Lewis evolved was a variable 6/5 stress line, ranging from 12 to 17 syllables, and (though he did not claim this) largely dactylo-spondaic in its emphases.
The result made for far less boring rhythms, and even for a certain verbal springiness. Amusingly, Day Lewis' declared intention in varying the line's length had been to remove the need in translation to either pad or omit as occasion required.10 What he created was in fact the nearest thing to a truly contrapuntal stress hexameter we're ever likely to achieve. Lattimore, who had clearly seen the potential of such a line in Day Lewis' Georgics, used it for his Iliad (1951) and Odyssey (1965), and I explored its potential further in my version of Apollonius Rhodius (1997). While taking advantage of its variable length while translating the Iliad (2015)--as indeed of English natural rhythms, which allowed, very often, for a short syllable before an initial dactyl (which a strict hexameter wouldn't), quietly converting it to UU--that is, an anapest--I was surprised by how often, in fact, the line wrote itself either as a true hexameter, or with one syllable short (catalectic) in the final foot: The assembly then broke up. The troops now scattered, each man off to his own swift ship, their minds on the evening meal and the joy of a full night's sleep. But Achilles wept and wept, thinking of his dear comrade, so that sleep the all-subduing got no hold on him: he kept tossing this way and that, missing Patroklos--his manhood, his splendid strength, all he'd been through with him, the hardships he'd suffered, facing men in battle and the waves of the cruel sea. (Il. 24.1-8) Controlling the hexameter is, in fact, the key to producing a version of Homer that gives one's nonclassical audience some sense of the Iliad or the Odyssey as a whole poem, and I'm lucky in having had a lifetime of preliminary practice before I finally tackled it.
FINAL THOUGHTS
This translation, then, aims to introduce Homer's Odyssey, as far as possible without familiar distracting comparisons or personal additions, to an audience that in essence knows nothing about the poem, its antecedents, or the circumstances of its creation. As far as possible I have done nothing to remove those features--not so many as might be supposed, and fewer in the Odyssey than the Iliad--that are often alleged to militate against modern acceptance. The leading characters, and other entities, all retain their repetitive personal epithets. A reader or listener very soon acclimatizes to these and comes to appreciate the subtly ironic way in which they are often employed. The formulaic oral phraseology governing familiar activities like eating and drinking is no odder than the da capo repetition of a dominant theme in, say, a string quartet.11 Homer's own subtle sentence structure and linear rhetoric are at least as effective as the way translators have chopped and changed his language to make it sound more comfortingly like words written by an English poet.
It is true that sometimes--very seldom, in fact, and again less often in the Odyssey--a point can be reached where close adherence to an idiomatic preference risks, through false associations, sounding ridiculous rather than simply strange or alien.12 In such cases I have modified the original, generally with an explanatory note. But for the most part, these men and women created long millennia ago (not to mention their heavily anthropomorphized deities) combine a wholly alien background and ethos with all-too-familiar habits that are endearing or alarming according to circumstance: filial and marital devotion, status-conscious pride and arrogance, ancient long-windedness, obstinacy and recklessness, passion and despair. It is the universalism captured by this extraordinary epic poem, in a very different way from that achieved by the Iliad, that gives it its remarkable staying power; but the enjoyment it generates comes in great measure from the unexpectedly modern impression it so often achieves. At a distance of nearly three millennia, and despite its preternatural trimmings, this world, and its occupants, present, much of the time, what seems a recognizable familiarity. The problems, mutatis mutandis, are often ours. The reactions are recognizable. The unbridgeable otherness of the ancient world is somehow less of a stumbling-block here than in many later and more sophisticated works that should, on the face of it, be less alien and thus more easily appreciable. And in following the twists of the story, we skim blithely over most of those errors and inconsistencies--some of them described above--that so bedevil the translator and commentator. Any person in search of a compelling and enjoyable narrative is amply rewarded by the Odyssey: like Homer's ancient audience, and the jury of the legal joke, he or she will probably only hear or read it once; and those who return to it, often again and again, will have had their impression of it formed, indelibly, trust me--experto credite--by that first unforgettable exposure.
One last word. It will be noticed that I have made virtually no attempt to dictate the literary terms in which anyone new to the Odyssey should seek to appreciate it as a poem. This is partly because, just as no two historians can fully agree on the poem's genesis, so no two critics are in complete concordance when delineating its literary qualities. But first and foremost, it is because a lifetime devoted to teaching of one sort or another has shown me that initial impressions are crucial, and that if these are imposed externally, they can never be shaken off. First-time readers of
the Odyssey should be allowed to establish their own personal impression of it before listening to the competing chorus of professionals, who are all too ready to shape their opinions for them. My bibliography offers a way into this noisy marketplace. Take my advice and don't consult it until you've familiarized yourself with the great poem itself, preferably on more than one reading, and have established your own personal attitude to it. Then Daniel Mendelsohn's An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic (2017) might be a stimulating place to begin. If the experience leads you to learn Greek and tackle the original, so much the better. You won't regret it.
Book 1
The man, Muse--tell me about that resourceful man, who wandered
far and wide, when he'd sacked Troy's sacred citadel:
many men's townships he saw, and learned their ways of thinking,
many the griefs he suffered at heart on the open sea,
battling for his own life and his comrades' homecoming. Yet
5
no way could he save his comrades, much though he longed to--
it was through their own blind recklessness that they perished,