The following paragraphs offer a brief discussion of the constitutive rules of the epic genre, its meter, and how Homer has been translated into English poetry over the centuries. Any attempt to teach Homer as literature leaves us humbly grateful to the Greeks for almost all of the terminology employed to describe the poems and how they work. The
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
are both “epics”, that is, long poems constructed around the words and deeds of a hero, a man beyond mere human capabilities, not immune to “hubris” (an imbalance or grave flaw, for which he must pay) with gods playing a central, even causal role. Homer used many mythical stories from the collective past, stretching back even five hundred years. Almost immediately after they were written down, the epics themselves were regarded as myths and later poets were free to draw on Homer as upon a mythical past.
Scholars who hold to the argument that “Homer” is the name of one man, who either tied the two epics together from many shorter myths then dictated them to a scribe, or, was the scribe himself, do not fail to acknowledge that the
Iliad
is the more ancient of the two. Whether or not there was indeed one author, one author for each, or multiple authors, one must read the texts as though complete in order to understand their structure. It seems most logical to assert that one man “designed” (made, shaped or plotted) each poem, for they bear the mark of the overseeing artist’s mind, commencing “in medias res”. Both poems focus upon a much shorter actual duration of time within the larger saga, than the “Homerica”, for instance, lesser tales which fill in the missing beginnings and ends.
The
Odyssey
starts late in Odysseus’ voyage, in the present, always reflecting upon the inevitable future and the unforgettable past. Later, we are taken back to the past by Odysseus, who becomes the narrator of his journey up to that point. Even at the point of greatest tension, when all of the past and future seem to be converging upon the action of the present, we are taken on long strolls through past stories as though we had almost forgotten where we were.
The
Iliad
is a very carefully selected story, a war story boldly formed around the anger of its hero, Achilles. Details such as the actual sacking of Troy are purposefully left out, as the story focuses on its tragic hero’s behavior, rather than incorporate the far-flung details of the whole saga. Similarly, stories of the many “Returns” home from Troy are craftily included in the
Odyssey
by way of the speeches of Nestor and Menelaus and the encounters Odysseus has in the underworld, with Agamemnon and the silent Ajax. The many minor plots and adventures are recalled as condensed stories within stories, songs within songs, made subservient to the larger, unified epic movement.
Of course these two epics were constructed from an oral tradition of poetry long established, with many stories from which to draw. The singer, minstrel, harper or poet– as Demodokos, the Phaiakian harper, or Phemios, the poet spared from the wrath of Odysseus as he kills the suitors– was brought in after meals, and, if as skilled as the Homeric bard, became the center of attention and was rewarded handsomely. For in Greek society, where how you live in men’s memories is of ultimate importance, the poet was the one who preserved the glorious deeds and words, was in fact the memory of the tribe. Without the poet little would be remembered. Thus Homer’s epics were as vital to the moral education of Greek youths as the “Torah” to the Hebrews, for within them students, soldiers, philosophers, poets, and statesmen could all find grave lessons about human limitations, about the struggle for power among men, and how the gods get their due. In these poems examples were set how properly to act.
These poets possessed stock material, which they improvised upon, mixing formulaic names and descriptions with spontaneous wordplay. Epithets served many purposes, among them, rhythmical, in that they supplied familiar, recurrent phrases which eased the speed of the narrative; stylistic, in that the constant signature of noble names and descriptions helped to elevate the tone to a constantly noble pitch; and constructive, in that the poet, while searching for the next musical phrase, might fill in the rest of the line with the formula, thereby resting briefly, and adding more power to the line’s ending as a unit. This aspect left over from the oral tradition makes the written work sound odd at first to fresh ears, but intensifies, eventually, the cumulative beauty and mystery of these musical poems. No one can forget, having read the
Odyssey
, such epithets as “The wine-dark sea”, or “The rosy-fingered dawn”, “Gray-eyed Athena” or “Odysseus, master mariner”, “resourceful Odysseus”, “the cunning” and “conqueror of cities”.
Rhythmically, the works of Homer are unrivaled (one lesson involves listening to the poems read on tape by an expert in Greek: the students will have the opportunity of experiencing how the Greek language sounded– its quantities, stresses and pitch). Never less than masterful poems, they were written in dactylic hexameter the traditional epic meter, and the same meter which would be used by Appollonius of Rhodes and Theocritus. It would be adapted to Latin by, among others, Virgil. The dactylic hexameter line consists of six feet, a foot being the smallest unit of metrical measurement, comprising, in the case of the dactyl, three syllables, one long followed by two shorts. Poets composing in English may manipulate quantity, but our meter is based on accent, rather than the length of time needed to pronounce each sound. An accentual dactyl in English would be “history” or “everywhere” or “Mulligan”. The hexameter line is composed, theoretically, of six dactyls; in practice it has four or five dactyls with one or two spondees substituted, either in the third, and/or more often, the last foot of the line. A spondee is comprised of two long syllables, which took approximately the same time to pronounce as one long and two shorts. Scansion allows us to make notations. The dactyl would look like this: ‘; the spondee, like this: ‘ ‘. Thus a dactyl hexameter line with a spondee substituted in the last foot would be scanned like this: ‘‘‘‘‘‘ ‘. An equivalent line in English would be:
-
____
“Lexington Avenue trains run express, irrepressibly, downtown.”
The accents here are on ‘Lex’, ‘ave’, ‘trains’, ‘press’, ‘down’, ‘town’. This example also uses alliteration (repeating the “n” sound), a device employed in Homer’s Greek as well, in such an epithet as “pater andron te theon te” (“father of men and gods both”), where the “th” sound was really a hard “t” sound. One notable American example of dactylic hexameter is Longfellow’s “Evangeline”, which often suffers, as do other experiments here and there throughout the history of English prosody, from too cumbersome a line. To read the experiments of, say, Thomas Campion, or Robert Bridges, shows how English demands a quicker, shorter line, more definite in its accentuation. The line in English which seems best equipped to render Homer’s rapidity of movement, including many run-ons, or enjambments, counterpointed against the consistent meter, is unrhymed iambic pentameter, otherwise known as blank verse. This line was made immortal by Shakespeare in Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy, and Marc Antony’s eulogy “Friends, Romans, Countrymen…” in Julius Caesar. An example would be:
-
____
“The trains below the street will never cease.”
The scansion would look like this: -‘-‘-‘-‘-‘, with the accents on ‘trains’, ‘low’, ‘street’, ‘nev’, ‘cease’. A fair example of a blank verse translation is William Cullen Bryant’s. Alexander Pope’s version of the Iliad has maintained currency in English for more than two centuries. It was composed in heroic couplets, that is, iambic pentameter lines rhymed in rigid pairs. More recent translations have adopted a looser principle of construction, such as Robert Fitzgerald’s, which employs a flexible line with five beats, that is five noticeable accents, with a variable number of syllables unaccented. This translation, with respect to the dynamic qualities and unique demands of the English language, is very powerful, quite readable and exciting to both the beginner and expert alike. He even echoes Pound, Yeats and Shelley, poets familiar to readers in English. The
Odyssey
has been translated into many different meters in English and into prose, as well.
That this look into the varieties of meter not be in vain, I offer a quick series of examples how differently the same lines have been rendered in English over the years. The lines are from Book XI of the
Odyssey
. Perhaps this sample, and some brief comments, will offer a glimpse at the various ways Homer has been perceived, and show how a long tradition can contain many differences of opinion.
-
____
“Much I importun’d then the weak-neck’d dead,
-
____
And vow’d, when I the barren soil should tread
-
____
Of cliffy Ithaca, amidst my hall
-
____
To kill a heifer, my clear best of all,
-
____
And give in off’ring, on a pile compos’d
-
____
Of all the choice goods my whole house enclos’d
-
____
And to Tiresias himself, alone
-
____
A sheep coal-black, and the selectest one
-
____
Of all my flocks.”
This is the work of George Chapman, an Elizabethan. He translated the poems into rhymed iambic pentameter couplets, which, compared to the later heroic couplets of Pope, are rhythmically fluid and volatile. Here’s the Augustan Pope’s rendering, written in the early eighteenth century:
-
____
“Now the wan shades we hail, th’ infernal Gods,
-
____
To speed our course, and waft us o’er the floods,
-
____
So shall a barren heifer from the stall
-
____
Beneath the knife upon your altars fall:
-
____
So in our palace, at our safe return
-
____
Rich with unnumber’d gifts the Pyle shall burn;
-
____
So shall a Ram, the largest of the breed,
-
____
Black as these regions, to Tiresias bleed.”
The unmistakably balanced pace of these couplets is the signature of Pope’s style; they produce in us anticipation for the inevitable rhyme at each line’s end. There are many fewer enjambments than in Chapman. What is sacrificed in rapidity and fluidity is made up for in stateliness and balance. Already we see how diction can vary, and it varies further as we look at the American English version written by Bryant, a century later:
-
“Then I offered prayer
-
Fervently to that troop of airy forms,
-
And made a vow that I would sacrifice,
-
When I at last should come to Ithaca,
-
A heifer without blemish, barren yet,
-
In my own courts, and heat the altar-pyre
-
With things of price, and to the seer alone,
-
Tiresias, by himself, a ram whose fleece
-
Was wholly black, the best of all my flocks.”
The clarity is remarkable, the blank verse often less than remarkable, but it proves, perhaps, better suited to the unrhymed lines of Homer. Since the time of Pope much had been revealed about the Greek of Homer. The Venetian manuscript with its full scholia had been made available. A great boom in the appreciation of Greek had followed on the footsteps of Pope, so that Bryant had much more available to him in the way of solid scholarship.
The next translation comes from Ezra Pound’s
Cantos
. This epic poem commences with the underworld scene from Book XI, although Pound did not use the Greek as his source for this translation. Rather, he rendered his version from the Renaissance Latin of Andreas Divus, a scholar of the 16th century. Pound gives his translation a touch of the accentual/alliterative heritage of earlier English verse. He also condenses the lines into a brief, but loaded, four lines:
-
“Then prayed I many a prayer to the sickly death’s-heads;
-
As set at Ithaca, sterile bulls of the best
-
For sacrifice, heaping the pyre with goods,
-
A sheep to Tiresias only, black and a bell-sheep.”
We can sense here the presence of both Chapman and Bryant, but also something else, a living condensation in English quite poetic in its own right, far from the staid, slower paced version of Pope, more eclectic, but also quite spare. The last two versions are by the most popular twentieth century verse translators, the first by the Poundian Robert Fitzgerald, the second, by Richmond Lattimore. Fitzgerald aimed for poetry in English, with a quicker, shorter, more agile line, while Lattimore’s line is longer, heavier, visually and quantitatively closer to the original Greek.
-
“Then I addressed the blurred and breathless dead,
-
vowing to slaughter my best heifer for them
-
before she calved, at home in Ithaka,
-
and burn the choice bits on the altar fire;
-
as for Teiresias, I swore to sacrifice
-
a black lamb, handsomest of all our flock.”
That’s Fitzgerald: quick, clear, literal, jammed with the signature one-syllable words which keep English clean and riveting. Now, Lattimore:
-
“I promised many times to the strengthless heads of the perished
-
dead that, returning to Ithaka, I would slaughter a barren
-
cow, my best, in my palace, and pile the pyre with treasures,
-
and to Teiresias apart would dedicate an all-black
-
ram, the one conspicuous in all our sheep flocks.”
Every translator knows, and every reader, student and teacher alike, should know, there is more than one way to skin a cat. In many high schools students are given watered-down, simplified, prose versions of the
Odyssey
to read. It is no surprise many of them remember only names and events, and can say nothing about the experience of reading a verse epic from beginning to end. Sophomores in high school need to be challenged. Although contemplation of the variety of ways to translate may be too challenging for some, at first, I am certain that it is never too early to expose them to the uncertainty involved in what they otherwise assume was written in stone. There is very little time for a passive reading. They need to be aware as they read. Consider the numerous descriptions of the shades out of Erebus, the dead, hungry for blood, to whom Odysseus promises a sacrifice. Homer has Odysseus describe them with the words “ameneina kareina,” which, as we see, may be translated in many ways. The essential meaning of the first is “weak, fleeting.” The second means “summits” or “heads”. They are called the “weak-neck’d dead” by Chapman; the “wan shades” by Pope; the “troop of airy forms” by Bryant; and the “strengthless heads of the perished dead” by Lattimore. Lattimore shows precision and great fidelity to the Greek preserving Homer’s lines intact, but no doubt “perished dead” is redundant, despite the need for rhythm. Fitzgerald’s “ blurred and breathless” offers a curious contrast with the “wan shades” and “airy forms” of Pope and Bryant respectively. Pound and Lattimore both mention “heads”, but Chapman mentions their “weak necks”. Wan, airy, weak, blurred and breathless, sickly, strengthless: the point is clear, they are lifeless shades, fleshless ghosts, not solid bodies. We must step back and appreciate the historical, as well as aesthetical, value of such different wordings, each with the stamp of its own time’s terms and concerns, and the individual translator’s perception of, and fidelity to, the original.
Aside from its metrical composition, the Homeric epic uses many rhetorical schemes and figures of speech to condense its concentrated meaning. We see synesthesia (silver voiced); synecdoche (many glad hearts); personification (Ate, the force that brings ruin upon men, for instance, among others, or Athena, who stands for intelligence itself) and most notably, simile, a form of simile known as “epic simile”, wherein an extended comparison is drawn between one thing and another. Thus we may read, to use a generic example, that just as an eagle falls upon its prey, diving at terrible speed, taking it by surprise, killing it instantly, so the warrior fell upon his foe, who never knew what hit him. Epic similes in Homer may run a line or two, or go on for even dozens of lines. Each draws an analogy, enhancing the image of the moral by a comparison between the action at hand and some other vivid action familiar to us from the workings of nature. Such similes may serve as a brief respite from the relentless battle or journey, painting a vivid, exhilarating picture. They may also serve as a means of foreshadowing some terrible, monumental event to come, or remind us of some significant event in the past.