Books: March 5, 1997
An Odyssey for Our Age
Robert Fagles's translation is the "Homer to bring home"
Homer: The Odyssey
Translated by Robert Fagles
Introduction and notes by Bernard Knox
Viking, $35
In an era when the book market seems to be focused on little more than celebrity, sex, and Simpson, the translation of a long, archaic poem that has been translated hundreds of times before hardly sounds like a candidate for a bestseller. And that makes the achievement of Robert Fagles, the Arthur W. Marks Professor of Comparative Literature, all the more impressive.
The Fagles translation of The Iliad, published in 1990, has sold 160,000 copies already, and sales are increasing every year. The audio version, meanwhile, has become one of the hottest literary cassettes since the invention of books-on-tape. Now Fagles has completed his translation of the second Homeric epic-and it looks as if his crisp, contemporary, and compelling version of The Odyssey will be an even bigger success.
This latest translation of a 2,700-year-old poem is, astonishingly, a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club. Fagles's Odyssey has drawn uniformly rave reviews. It has even provoked a fiery debate over feminism. In a review in The New Yorker, Garry Wills argued that Fagles has triumphed in this Odyssey largely because he "has been sensitized to women's issues." Meanwhile, an angry feminist, Sharon Ronholt, complained in The New York Times that Fagles has merely produced a "quintessential male fantasy."
As Fagles has said, a key reason for the success of his two large volumes of Greek epic is spectacular source material. The poet, or perhaps poets, (or, as some suggest, poetess) known to us as Homer created the ur-stories of Western civilization. The Iliad is the classic novel of men at war, full of courage and cowardice, arrogant victors and noble losers dying for their cause. The Odyssey is the primeval narrative of a wanderer's quest, of a daring man and his brave, brilliant wife who overcome outrageous fortune through unquenchable moral strength. Both poems are studded with beautiful imagery and timeless tales-the Trojan Horse, the Sirens, the Cyclops, Scylla and Charybdis, and on and on.
Fagles's contribution-Time magazine called it "the Fagles phenomenon"-has been to create a poetic idiom that preserves the drama, majesty, and distinctive color of Homeric poetry, yet sounds perfectly at home in the 1990s.
In Fagles's Odyssey, those loutish suitors are still waiting in Penelope's castle, but now we find them "feasting themselves sick, swilling our glowing wine / as if there's no tomorrow." When Princess Nausicaa beguiles the king into letting her take out the palace ox-cart, we're told that "She stepped up close to him, confiding, 'Daddy, dear, / I wonder, won't you have them harness a wagon for me?' " When the Phaeacians hold their track meet, Fagles becomes a sportswriter: "They toed the line-and broke flat out from the start / with a fast pack flying down the field in a whirl of dust/and Clytoneus . . . turned for home, leaving the pack behind / and raced to reach the crowds."
And yet, Fagles's sailors still pour libations to "Zeus who marshalls the thunderheads" and await the coming of "Dawn with her rose-red fingers" before launching their "well-decked ships" onto "the wine-dark sea."
What we get, precisely as the translator describes it in his postscript, is "a modern English Homer." "I have tried to find a middle ground," Fagles explains, "between the features of Homer's performance and the expectations of a contemporary reader."
A translator of The Odyssey meets the first major challenge at the very beginning-in Line 1 of Book I, when we encounter the great Homeric epithet for Odysseus: polytropos, meaning, literally, "many turns." In Greek, this is a double-entendre, referring both to the many devious turns of the hero's strategic mind and to the various twists of fate that confront him. English doesn't have a word combining these ideas, and most translations get only one of the meanings: e.g., "resourceful," "various-minded," "man of many devices." George Chapman, creator of the famous "Chapman's Homer," came up with "The Man . . . that many a way / Wound with his wisdom," then had to resort to a Latin note in the margin to explain the full import of the Greek adjective.
Fagles, in his stately opening lines, neatly snares both meanings, plus the meter, of the original:
Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns
driven time and again off course, once he had plundered
the hallowed heights of Troy.
As for that debate about feminism, nobody who has actually read The Odyssey could argue that the poem is anti-woman. Nearly all the men Odysseus meets along his twisting, turning way are cruel, stupid, or both. The women are sometimes cruel, sometimes kind, but almost always strong, clever individuals. The star of the drama-the toughest, smartest, and most admirable figure of all-is Queen Penelope, whose Homeric epithets include not only "faithful" but also "judicious," "wise," and "subtle." This has been evident to me since I first encountered The Odyssey some 30 years ago. But then, that first encounter came in a class taught by Robert Fagles, who gives us the heroic Penelope of this new translation.
Reviewing the Fagles Iliad for PAW six years ago, I suggested that every family library should include Homer, and that Fagles's is the Homer to bring home. With the publication of this handsome companion volume-once again including a terrific introduction from Fagles's own Patroclus, Bernard Knox-I proffer the same advice with double force.
But I have to warn you: The combination of Robert Fagles and Homeric epic can have long-range consequences. In my case, I went racing out of Fagles's classroom to sign up for three years of ancient Greek, largely so that I could read Homer in the original (it was, by the way, absolutely worth the effort). And now I'm trying to get an undergraduate of my close acquaintance to put aside his physics and computer courses long enough to take a class-any class-from Professor Fagles. This young man (who will heed his dad's advice some day, I'm sure), bears the name Homer Reid.
-T. R. Reid '66
T. R. Reid, a correspondent for The Washington Post and National Public Radio, is currently on leave from his reporting job while finishing a new book, Confucius Lives Next Door, to be published next year by Random House.
Exploring Nature and Two Naturalists
The Natures of John and
William Bartram
Thomas P. Slaughter *83
Alfred A. Knopf, $27.50
The naturalists John and William Bartram, father and son, were two of the most remarkable men produced by Colonial America. Their botanizing took them far afield from their home in Philadelphia in a search for native plants to send to wealthy patrons in England. But as its title suggests, The Natures of John and William Bartram is as much a study of its subjects' complex and often contradictory characters as it is of their relationships with the natural world. "This is a book," explains the author, "about nature and natures . . . about a father and son who loved each other and sometimes hated each other."
On the surface at least, the characters of the two Bartrams could not have been more different. John was a successful farmer, flinty and practical. This ambitious public man relished his standing within the scientific establishment and the praise of Linnaeus as the greatest botanist of his day. By contrast, his son was a dreamer, introvert, and artist who failed at both farming and business, and whose grasp of reality was at times so tenuous that he could forget what year it was. John despised Indians (understandable, since they had killed his father), while William admired them passionately as children of an American Eden as yet uncorrupted by civilization.
Among the qualities they shared was a fierce stubbornness to remain true to their inner selves. John, after renouncing the divinity of Christ, was disowned by his Quaker meeting, yet continued to attend services anyway. William rebelled from efforts by the elder Bartram and his influential friends to make him a useful citizen.
It might have grated on John to know that, of their respective achievements, William's is the more enduring. Young Billy, as his father called him, spent the years 1773 to 1777 exploring the American South. Out of his peregrinations came a book unique in the annals of nature writing. Published in the United States in 1791, Bartram's Travels was received indifferently at home, but proved a sensation in England when published there the following year. It influenced the Romantic poets and eventually the writings of American transcendentalists.
-J. I. Merritt '66