{"id":9727,"date":"2018-08-15T16:55:52","date_gmt":"2018-08-15T15:55:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=9727"},"modified":"2018-08-28T19:10:41","modified_gmt":"2018-08-28T18:10:41","slug":"peter-greens-translation-of-homers-the-odyssey-reviewed-by-edmund-prestwich","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=9727","title":{"rendered":"Peter Green’s Translation of Homer’s The Odyssey<\/em><\/strong> | reviewed by Edmund Prestwich"},"content":{"rendered":"

Homer: The Odyssey<\/em>, trans. by Peter Green | University of California Press \u00a324.00<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Historian, translator of Greek and Latin poetry and, in former lives, wartime serviceman in the Far East, journalist and historical novelist, Peter Green is the Dougherty Centennial Professor Emeritus of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin. His translation of The Odyssey<\/em> follows his Homer: The Iliad<\/em> (Berkeley, CA, 2015) and is richly supported by commentary and notes. However, it\u2019s the quality of writing in the actual translation that I want to discuss.<\/p>\n

Until now, my preferred translator of The Odyssey<\/em> has been Robert Fagles. He finds a rival in Green, who offers a significantly different reading experience. Here\u2019s Fagles\u2019s opening:
\n 
\n <\/p>\n

Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns
\ndriven time and again off course, once he had plundered
\nthe hallowed heights of Troy.
\nMany cities of men he saw and learned their minds,
\nmany pains he suffered, heartsick on the open sea,
\nfighting to save his life and bring his comrades home.
\nBut he could not save them from disaster, hard as he strove \u2013
\nthe recklessness of their own ways destroyed them all,
\nthe blind fools, they devoured the cattle of the Sun
\nand the Sungod blotted out their day of return.<\/p>\n

Here are the same lines in Green:<\/p>\n

The man, Muse \u2013 tell me about that resourceful man, who wandered
\nfar and wide, when he\u2019d sacked Troy\u2019s sacred citadel:
\nmany men\u2019s townships he saw, and learned their ways of thinking,
\nmany the griefs he suffered at heart on the open sea,
\nbattling for his own life and his comrade\u2019s homecoming. Yet
\nno way could he save his comrades, much though he longed to \u2013
\nit was through their own blind recklessness that they perished,
\nthe fools, for they slaughtered the cattle of H\u0113lios the sun god
\nand ate them: for that he took from them their day of returning.<\/p>\n

Not having classical Greek I can\u2019t say whether \u201chard as he strove\u201d is a more precise translation than \u201cmuch though he longed to\u201d or vice versa. The difference of impact is obvious, though, and reflects a general difference of style. \u201cHard though he strove\u201d is much more physical, both in terms of the actual muscular activity involved in saying the words and in the way their meaning focuses on physical struggle. \u201cMuch though he longed to\u201d focuses in a more abstract way on the hero\u2019s mind and desires. Throughout this passage and in all his narrative, Fagles\u2019s translation is remarkable for its forward drive, its emphatic rhythms propelled by powerful stresses and alliteration, the directness of his expression and the strength of his verbs. In his opening line and a half, the rapid repetition of \u201cthe man\u201d pushes the line on with a hint of impatience. In Green\u2019s version, the wandering build-up to the repetition dissipates its force. Again, Fagles\u2019s \u201cdriven time and again off course\u201d is powerful and direct. The insertion of \u201ctime and again\u201d piles the pressure on instead of letting it out. Green\u2019s \u201cthat resourceful man, who wandered \/ far and wide\u201d subtly dissolves narrative drive both in the comma-pause after \u201cman\u201d, making \u201cwho wandered\u201d a qualifying phrase rather than a defining one, and in finishing the line with an unstressed syllable, so that we seem to drift into the line ending rather than leaping over it. The result is a style less muscular and forceful, more subdued, meditative and inward. Such different approaches throw differences of colouring over the whole story. <\/p>\n

Each style brings benefits and cost. In Green\u2019s version, there\u2019s a relative loss of narrative impetus. In that by Fagles, the emphatic style can become relentless, and though it\u2019s very well suited to involving you in the urgency of unfolding action, it doesn\u2019t lend itself so well to more subtle and inward effects. Take the tale of the mariners\u2019 sojourn with the master of the winds (Aeolus to Fagles, Aiolos to Green). Aeolus \/ Aiolos gives Odysseus a bag containing all the winds to help him quickly home. In sight of the shores of Ithaca, Odysseus, who\u2019s been steering his ship day and night for nine days, allows himself to fall asleep. When his sailors open the bag, thinking it contains treasure, all the loosened winds sweep them back to Aeolus\u2019s island and they return to their disastrous wanderings. Green makes this episode linger in our minds, first for the wonder of Aiolos\u2019s power over the winds and his existence on a floating island in a palace where his six sons are married to his six daughters and then \u2013 in the bit I\u2019ll quote \u2013 for the haunting closeness of the sailors\u2019 homecoming before disaster strikes:<\/p>\n

For nine days on end we sailed, both by day and by night,
\nand now on the tenth our homeland came into sight \u2013
\nclose enough indeed to see men tending their watch fires:
\nthen it was that sweet sleep came upon me in my exhaustion<\/p>\n

Clearly, some of those words are mere fillers from the point of view of conveying information \u2013 \u201cby\u201d, \u201cnow\u201d, \u201cindeed\u201d for example. However, they have a crucial function of a non-informative kind. They make us linger, creating a mental space for us to absorb the implications of the main statements and encouraging us to imagine ourselves into the sailors\u2019 situation. They throw great weight onto the line about sleep. \u201cSweet\u201d is of course a recurring epithet for sleep in Homer, but the emphasis on the line makes us reflect on the ironies of the way this sleep both is and is not sweet \u2013 on the one hand it\u2019s not just routinely but overwhelmingly sweet for a man who hasn\u2019t let go for nine days; on the other, it\u2019s disastrous in its consequences. Contrastingly, it seems to me that the whole episode of Aeolus and the winds has curiously little impact in Fagles. This is partly because the emphatic style tends to have an inflationary effect \u2013 if everything is emphasized nothing stands out, so shorter episodes get lost in the sweep of action \u2013 and partly because in Fagles\u2019s version everything seems to lean forward as if in anticipation of what will come next. Instead of stilling our imaginations in contemplation of the present situation, Fagles draws them away from it. Perhaps brief quotation can\u2019t fully make my point but if you read these lines aloud I think you\u2019ll see how, despite the presence of what might be thought to be filler words, the rhythm discourages lingering:<\/p>\n

Nine whole days we sailed, nine nights, nonstop.
\nOn the tenth our own land hove into sight at last \u2013
\nwe were so close we could see men tending fires.
\nBut now an enticing sleep came on me, bone-weary<\/p>\n

I should make it clear that I haven\u2019t been trying to compare Fagles\u2019s and Green\u2019s versions in terms of overall merit. I\u2019ll go on reading both because I think they complement each other: each draws different things into the light, and they involve you in different ways, one particularly through action and suspense, the other by encouraging a more contemplative absorption. <\/p>\n

The kind of absorption offered by Green\u2019s translation seems particularly relevant to the reading of a poem from an alien culture and period. It contributes to the opening of the imagination that is surely one of the main pleasures of reading such a work.<\/p>\n

Far more than the world of The Iliad<\/em>, that of The Odyssey<\/em> is densely realised, with vivid detailing of scenery, background and setting, ordinary practical activities and the speech and behaviour of common people. I say \u201cworld\u201d, though of course there are contrasting worlds in this story. The things the hero encounters in his wanderings are in some ways almost as strange to him as to us. But his own home is bound to seem challengingly alien to us in many of its most basic moral beliefs and assumptions. One of the great benefits of Green\u2019s style is the way it encourages us to dwell on this strangeness rather than gliding over it, to breathe in, not just an action but a moral atmosphere, so that we move imaginatively into the mindsets of the characters as well as seeing them with the eyes of our own age. Doing that, we find that for all the profoundly foreign values and assumptions they live by, their animating passions and reflexes are often strikingly like our own. I think seeing these familiar passions and reactions in unfamiliar contexts makes them stand out more vividly in their essential natures. It may be that putting ourselves imaginatively into the world of the story also makes us question assumptions we normally hold in too cosy and unthinking a way. We\u2019re kept on our toes by constant shocks of adjustment between our own viewpoint and that implied by the poem. <\/p>\n

Such shocks of adjustment are present in the very grain of Green\u2019s language, for example in an interweaving of elevated and down to earth diction. When Hermes tells Kalyps\u014d that Zeus has ordered her to release Odysseus, Green writes \u201cSo he spoke; and Kalyps\u014d, bright among goddesses, shivered\u201d. In this line, the formal and formulaic phrases leading up to \u201cshivered\u201d sharpen its impact by contrast. It\u2019s as if the mask of decorum suddenly slips, letting the reality of Zeus\u2019s power and Kalyps\u014d\u2019s fear leap out at us. Or take Green\u2019s use of a word that struck me as jarring at first. When Odysseus wakes on Ithaca after being deposited there by the Phaiakian ship, Green describes Athene as approaching him \u201cin the likeness of a young man, a herder of sheep, \/ one delicately nurtured as are the sons of princes… in her hands a hunting spear\u201d. \u201cDelicately nurtured as are the sons of princes\u201d sounds lovely, but \u201cdelicately\u201d at first seems startlingly inappropriate, given its contemporary meaning and associations. Sheep-herding is an earthy occupation, by modern standards, and the sons of Homer\u2019s princes are bred to bloody battle. On reflection, though, the word becomes effective because its very incongruity provokes a shiver of recognition of how alien Homer\u2019s world is. <\/p>\n

On a larger scale, Green is faithful to the epic\u2019s ritualistic and formulaic descriptions of activities like the bathing, massaging and dressing of guests before they\u2019re feasted, with a great deal of verbal repetition from one such episode to another. Translators sometimes tone down these repetitions. I think they contribute to the richness of the experience the poem gives us, even on a silent reading, though of course the impact would be greater if we were listening to a recitation. Beyond simply reminding us that the physical pleasures and social graces involved in such rituals are as much a part of the changing weather of experience as pain, grief and disaster are, the repetitiveness of the actual words in which they\u2019re presented weaves its own reassuring music out of these recurring patterns. <\/p>\n

I recommend this translation not only for its weighty introduction and notes but above all for the sensitivity of its expression. The Odyssey<\/em> is a poem which contains markedly different kinds of material. In large blocks, we have first T\u0113lemachos\u2019s struggle with his mother\u2019s suitors and his journey to mainland Greece to try to find information about Odysseus; then Odysseus\u2019s wanderings among gods and monsters; and finally a convergence of those plotlines in the tale of Odysseus\u2019s return and the suitors\u2019 defeat. Each block is itself richly varied in subject matter and emotional tone. Aldous Huxley\u2019s classic essay \u201cTragedy and the Whole Truth\u201d praises Homer for the speed and sureness of touch with which he\u2019s able to shift between angles of vision. Green\u2019s Odyssey<\/em> is unified by a flexible hexameter line (adapted, he says, from C Day Lewis\u2019s translations of Virgil) but it combines this unity with great variety of pace and tone, giving vivid but different expression to the contrasting elements that make this work so compelling in detail and wide in imaginative scope.<\/p>\n

by Edmund Prestwich<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Homer: The Odyssey, trans. by Peter Green | University of California Press \u00a324.00 Historian, translator of Greek and Latin poetry and, in former lives, wartime serviceman in the Far East, journalist and historical novelist, Peter Green is the Dougherty Centennial Professor Emeritus of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin. His translation of The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nPeter Green's Translation of Homer's The Odyssey | reviewed by Edmund Prestwich - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=9727\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Peter Green's Translation of Homer's The Odyssey | reviewed by Edmund Prestwich - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Homer: The Odyssey, trans. by Peter Green | University of California Press \u00a324.00 Historian, translator of Greek and Latin poetry and, in former lives, wartime serviceman in the Far East, journalist and historical novelist, Peter Green is the Dougherty Centennial Professor Emeritus of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin. 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