The - Grier's Musings

H 0MERTheTRANSLATEDBYRobert FaglesINTRODUCTIONANDNOTESBYBERNARD KNOX

PENGUIN@CLASSICSTHE ILIADThe Greeks believed that the Iliad and the Odyssey were composed by asingle poet whom they named Homer. Nothing is known of his life.While seven Greek cities claim the honor of being his birthplace, ancienttradition places him in Ionia, located in the eastern Aegean. His birthdate is undocumented as well, though most modern scholars now placethe composition of the Iliad and the Odyssey in the late eighth or earlyseventh century B.C.ROBERT FAGLES is Arthur W. Marks' 19 Professor of Comparative Literature, Emeritus, at Princeton University. He is the recipient of the 1997PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation and a 1996 Academy Awardin Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Fagles hasbeen elected to the Academy, the American Academy of Arts andSciences, and the American Philosophical Society. He has translated thepoems of Bacchylides. His translations of Sophocles' Three Theban Plays,Aeschylus' Oresteia (nominated for a National Book Award) and Homer'sIliad (winner of the 1991 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award byThe Academy of American Poets, an award from The Translation Centerof Columbia University, and the New Jersey Humanities Book Award)are published in Penguin Classics. His original poetry and his translationshave appeared in many journals and reviews, as well as in his book ofpoems, I, Vincent: Poems from the Pictures of Van Gogh. Mr. Fagles was oneof the associate editors of Maynard Mack's Twickenham Edition ofAlexander Pope's Iliad and Odyssey, and, with George Steiner, editedHomer: A Collection of Critical Essays. Mr. Pagles' most recent work is atranslation of Homer's Odyssey, available from Penguin.BERNARD KNOX is Director Emeritus of Harvard's Center for HellenicStudies in Washington, D.C. His essays and reviews have appeared innumerous publications and in 1978 he won the George Jean NathanAward for Dramatic Criticism. His works include Oedipus at Thebes: Sophodes' 'Tragic Hero and His Time; The Heroic Temper: Studies in SophocleanTrageay; Word and Action: Essays on the Ancient Theatre; Essays AncientandModern (awarded the 1989 PEN/Spielvogel-Diamonstein Award); TheOldest Dead White European Males and Other Reflections on the Classics; andBacking into the Future: The Classical 'Tradition and its Renewal. Mr. Knox isthe editor of The Norton Book of Classical Literature, and has also collaborated with Robert Fagles on the Odyssey and The Three Theban Plays.

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H 0MERTheTRANSLATEDBYRobert FaglesINTRODUCTIONANDNOTESBYBERNARD KNOX

To the memory of my father and my motherand for Lynne, Katya and Nina-humeis gar theai este, pareste te, iste te panta.himeis de kleos oion akouomen oude ti idmen-

TRANSLATOR'SPREFACE"Homer makes us Hearers." Pope has said, "and Virgi/leaves us Readers." So the great translator of Homer, no doubt unknowingly, set atodds the claims of an oral tradition and those of a literary one, as wewould call the two traditions now. Homer's work is a performance. evenin part a musical event. Perhaps that is the source of his speed, directnessand simplicity that Matthew Arnold heard-and his nobility too, elusiveyet undeniable, that Arnold chased but never really caught. Surely it isa major source of Homer's energy, the loft and carry of his imaginationthat sweeps along the listener together with the performer. For there issomething powerful in his song, "that unequal'd Fire and Rapture"Pope again-"which is so forcible in Homer, that no Man of a truePoetical Spirit is Master of himself" while he experiences the Iliad. "InHomer. and in him only, it burns every where clearly, and every whereirresistibly." But it also brings to light the Homeric Question facing alltranslators: How to convey the power of his performance in the mediumof writing? "Homer makes us Hearers, and Virgilleaves us Readers."Yet the contrast may be too extreme. Virgil the writer was certainlyno stranger to recitation. Homer the performer. as the Introductionspeculates. may have known a rudimentary form of writing. And writingmay have lent his work some qualities we associate with texts in general-idiosyncrasies at times. and pungency and wit-and with the Iliadin particular, its archltectonics, its magnificent scale. and the figure ofAchilles. But even if Homer never used an alphabet himself. he nowseems less the creature of an oral tradition whom Milman Parry discovered. and more and more its master. as envisioned by Parry's son,Adam. Homer the brilliant improviser deployed its stock, inherited features with all the individual talent he could muster. Never more so, infact. than in his use of the fixed and formulaic. frequently repeatedphrase. Not only is Homer often less formulaic. but the formulas themselves are often more resonant, more apt and telling in their contextsthan the hard Parryites had argued for at first. So the original form ofHomer's work, while a far cry from a work of literature as we know itnow. is not exactly a song either. pure and simple. It may be more theix

XTRANSLATOR'S PREFACErecord of a song. building over the poet's lifetime perhaps, or whatMarianne Moore would call "a simulacrum of spontaneity."Obviously at a far remove from Homer, in this translation I have triedto find a middle ground (and not a no man's land, if I can help it)between the features of his performance and the expectations of a contemporary reader. Not a line-for-line translation, my version of the Iliadis, I hope, neither so literal in rendering Homer's language as to crampand distort my own-though I want to convey as much of what he saysas possible-nor so literary as to brake his energy, his forward drivethough I want my work to be literate, with any luck. For the moreliteral approach would seem to be too little English, and the moreliteraryseems too little Greek. I have tried to find a cross between the two, amodern English Homer.Of course it is a risky business, stating what one has tried to do or,worse, the principles one has used (petards that will probably hoist thewriter later). But a word or two of explanation seems in order, and thefirst refers to the more fixed and formulaic pans of Homer. I have treatedthem in a flexible, discretionary way, not incompatible with Homer'sway, I think-especially when his formulas are functional as well asfixed-while also answering to the ways we read today. It is a matterof "riding easy in the harness," as Robert Frost once said of democracy.and my practice ranges from the pliant to the strict. With one of themost frequently repeated phrases, for example-the line that introducesindividual speeches-I have been the freest. trying to anticipate thespeaker's nuance of the moment yet retaining, at least. the ritual ofintroductory words for every speech. When Homer introduces a speechof "winged words," however, I rarely if ever omit that well-knownphrase, though I like the flight of the words to vary, with a quick burstat times and a longer drift at others, according to what a character hasto say. And so with Hector's flashing helmet, in the epithet that clingsto Hector's name: I like to ally its gleaming with his actions, now noddinghis head in conversation, now rushing headlong into the front lines.But a flashing helmet it is, again and again, and not only to make hisown career appear more meteoric and abruptly snuffed out but also tosupport a chain of tragic ironies throughout the poem. For the flashinghelmet-Hector's own at first-is soon replaced by the one he stripsfrom Patroclus when he kills him: the helmet of Achilles. So as prophecywould have it. when Achilles destroys Hector in revenge he must destroyhimself as well, his flashing mirror-image embodied in his Victim. andthe helmet he will wear. fire-new and forged by Hephaestus, flasheslike the helmet of Ares when Achilles .closes for the kill (Book 20.45,

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACExi22.158)" The more the epithet recurs, in short, the more its power canrecoil. And the inevitability of its recoil for Hector is further stressed bya repeated passage in the Greek repeated verbatim in the English version.The words that describe the death of Patroclus are exactly those thatdescribe the death of Hector six books later (16.1001-5, 22.425-29):the first death, both in the mind of Achilles the avenger and in the styleof his maker, will have served as warrant for the second. All in all, then,I have tried for repetition with a difference when variation seems useful.repetition with a grim insistence when the scales of Zeus, the Homericmoral balance, is at issue.Turning briefly to Homer's metrics: though my way is more remote,it is also meant to occupy a flexible middle ground, here between hishexameter line-his "ear, ear for the sea-surge," as Pound describes itand a tighter, native English line. If, as the Introduction claims, thestrongest weapon in Homer's poetic arsenal is variety within a metricalnorm, the translation opts for a freer give-and-take between the two,and one that offers a good deal more variety than uniformity. Workingfrom a loose five- or six-beat line but inclining more to six, I expand attimes to seven beats-to imply the big reach of a simile or some vehement outburst in discourse or the pitched fury of combat on the fieldor contract at times to three. to give a point in speech or action sharperstress. Such interplay between variety and norm results. I suppose. froma kind of tug-of-war peculiar to translation, between trying to encapsulate the meaning of the Greek on the one hand and trying to find acadence for one's English on the other, yet joining hands. if possible,to make a line of verse. I hope it results, at any rate, not only in givingmy own language a slight stretching it may need and sometimes getsthese days, but also in lending Homer the sort of range in rhythm, paceand tone that may make an Iliad engaging to a modern reader. It maybe a way as well, again at a far remove, of trying to suggest the tensionin Homer's metrics, his blend of mass and movement both-so muchongkos yet so much grace and speed.In aiming for these and other objectives in a version of the Iliad, Ihave had many kinds of help. The greatest has come from my collaborator, Bernard Knox, whom I would rather call a comrade. Not onlyhas he written the Introduction and Notes to the translation but he hascommented on my drafts for several years. And when I leaf throughI Here and throughout the volume. except for the list of textual variants on p. 619,line numbers refer to the translation. where the line numbers of the Greek text willbe found at the top of every page.