The Odyssey of Homer

THE MAN of the MONTH

[Oxford University Press, $3.50]

OTHER reviews of T. E. Shaw’s brilliantly vivid translation of Homer’s Odyssey into English prose will have already appeared, and people will be familiar not only with the author’s remarkable life but with the opinion of critics as to the present work, that it approaches the original less in verbal fidelity than in interest and animation. With this much gained, therefore, it may not be without purpose to examine a little more deeply the causes of difference between the original and the translation.

The study of recent years has made if more than ever clear that the Homeric poems differ radically in composition from other works, modern and ancient, of comparable greatness. In the first place, they were composed from traditional materials. The public knew and expected nothing other than the epic stories. Then they were composed orally by means of traditional phrases and epithets, the polished creation of generations of minstrel poets. Such phrases as ’the rosy-fingered Dawn’ and ’swift-footed Achilles’ were the very body and sinew of the poems. Every person, every act, had its appropriate adjective, and, as the metre required, the poet Composed his verses of these phrases which custom had made the perfect vehicle not only of the metre but of the action, and the characters. One can, therefore, go beyond Matthew Arnold’s description of Homeric style as one rapid, direct in expression, direct in thought, and eminently noble, and can say that these qualities were themselves products of a traditional mode of utterance, fashioned through years by the early Greek poets and finding its culmination in the Homeric poems.

The translator’s method will be best illustrated by examples. The following is a literal translation of a sentence describing the end of the last council of the Greeks at Troy (III, 149-50): ‘Then up leapt the wellgrieved Achæans with an unearthly shout.’ Mr. Shaw translates, ‘The Achæans impatiently sprang up with thrilling, tumultuous cry and clang of armor.’ It will be seen that he does two things here: he writes vividly, somewhat expanding the original: he deduces from the Homeric epithet ‘well-grieved Achæans’ the attendant circumstance ‘clang of armor.’

The following is G. E. Palmer’s close translation of V, 391-3, describing the end of the storm which had wrecked Odysseus’s raft: ‘Then the wind ceased, there came a breathless calm; and close at hand he spied the coast, as he cast a keen glance forward, upborne on a great wave.’ Mr. Shaw translates: ‘Then the gale died away and an ineffable quietness held air and sea. Still the mighty rollers rolled, but when he was on the crest of one of these, he happened to glance quickly up, and behold! land was just ahead.’ The phrase ‘the mighty rollers rolled’ is not in the text; it again is deduced from the fact that Odysseus was lifted by a great wave. Yet this, as well as the added words ‘ineffable’ and ‘behold,’ has its own grandeur and movement.

Finally we choose an example which illustrates his treatment of characters. Palmer translates the opening lines of the eighteenth book: ‘ There came into the hall a common beggar who used to beg about the town of Ithaca and everywhere was noted for his greedy belly, eating and drinking without end. . . . Arnæus was his name, the name his honored mother gave at his birth, but Irus all the young men called him.’ Mr. Shaw translates: ' Then arrived on the scene a vulgar tout who used to cadge his living everywhere round Ithaca and had the champion gluttonous belly of the world, that put no bounds to his eating or drinking. . . . Arnæus his respectable mother had called him at birth; but all the lads nicknamed him Irus.’ The extraordinary combination of archaism and modern slang in the first sentence is apparent. Less obvious is his translation ‘respectable mother.’ For the phrase ‘lady mother’ is another example of Homeric epithet. It recurs constantly and has little further significance than ‘mother,’ To attribute the idea of ‘respectability in the modern sense to Homer is to go very far from the original.

Every page offers similar examples, and it is evident that the translator avails himself unstintedly of polite and colloquial, old and modern forms — in a word, of the English language as it would appear in fullest riches to a mind that lives at once in literature and in action. That state of mind is strangely Elizabethan. To it the intoxication of words, the enchantment of creation, outweigh fidelity; to it, again, action is paramount, but that action has a contemporary color. Homer’s simplicity is lost in such a translation, as is his noble ease of style in the fixed recurrence of phrase and epithet. Instead are given vividness and mastery of language in accordance with our more varied English tradition. Yet the style, if un-Homeric, has this advantage: Homer was not archaic to his hearers. In freshness, the original and the translation are at one.

But if, like Chapman, Mr. Shaw renders Homer imaginatively, unlike him, he does so with a purpose. The preface sets forth his belief that the Odyssey is a derivative work, in time long after its great example, the Iliad, and thus his own varied and derivative language is appropriate. For he sees in the Odyssey both borrowings of language and decline in ability to portray character, views which, based on intuition alone, reflect a real ignorance of the Greek epic age. Diction and poetic method the Iliad and Odyssey possessed in common, and what Mr. Shaw sees as borrowing is dependence on a tradition older than either. Difference in portrayal of character comes from a difference in kind between the two poems. The Iliad is tragic, the Odyssey romantic. We have the additional evidence of the oldest Homeric Hymns to show that lightness and charm, as well as vastness and majesty, were characteristic of the greatest of the Greek ages of poetry. But delineation of character is not to be sought equally in tragedy and romance - as well seek the same inexorability in Othello and The Tempest. Indeed, it could be argued that, seeking tragedy in the Odyssey, and for lack of it treating the poem only as a swift story, the translator misses the chief quality of the poem - its romantic lightness.

Yet, in fact, if the preface sets forth the author’s belief, it is inadequate to explain his practice. For often when the original is clear and simple the translation is varied and allusive. Rather the explanation must be sought in the translator’s gifts which prompt him to make the narrative his own. The result is a work of kindled and brilliant creation which, save in freshness alone, neither verbally nor, at times, imaginatively reflects the original.

JOHN FINLEY, JR.