The Odyssey

  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 somethi