I remember walking along the Princeton University campus one day talking to my Elizabethan theater professor, Gerald Eades Bentley. This was the fall of 1969, when I was going full tilt in my opposition to the war in Vietnam. I was also under the spell of Harold Goddard, the most humane of Shakespeare scholars, whose consistently anti-war readings of Shakespeare plays I admired but had a tendency to mouth in somewhat half-baked form.
I offered my opinion to Mr. Bentley that “Henry V” was a great anti-war statement. “Or one of the greatest glorifications of war ever written,” he responded, putting me in my place and also teaching me a valuable lesson about the varying reactions that are possible to a work of art.
Such varying reactions also are possible to “The Iliad,” which I recently finished translating after 28 years of hard labor on it.
Still incensed about Vietnam when I taught Homer’s work at The Ellis School in the 1970s, I pushed a fairly hard anti-war line as my interpretation, especially to my students, who often expressed their dismay at the graphic violence. But I wonder how “The Iliad” might be taught at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where students are toughened as warriors.
The great poets are usually rather sphinx-like and loath to be enlisted in our causes. Curiosity about such things and a love of language led me to my translating efforts, which began when I was asked to teach Greek to a single student, David Brown, in the University of New Hampshire’s adult education program.
He had heard that there was an inductive method of learning Greek that utilized Homer’s text, with the student learning the grammar as he or she went along. I myself had been taught Greek by an inductive method employing the Gospel of John. As long as I was going to be teaching a few lines of Homer every week, I thought I might as well translate the lines myself, challenge myself, see how such an exercise would go.
Of course, taking on “The Iliad” was, in the field of translation, like climbing Mount Everest. Just the transliteration of the names can mire one in controversy. Achilles or Akhilléüs, which should it be? Odysseus or Odusséüs?
Had I known how long and how much labor it would take to translate this poem, I’m not sure that I would have started. To do two or three lines every week in preparation for my tutorial seemed manageable. I thought I was just dipping my toe quite safely into the stream to test the strength of its current. I didn’t know how swallowed up and swept away I was going to be.
If nothing else, translating a poem as long as “The Iliad” is one way of getting the poem into one’s head more securely. But I sensed other reasons for working on this project as I went. One of my prime motivations was a dream of bringing into English a certain Mediterranean essence or light.
It can seem quite futile to carry Homer and his qualities into English. He is so concise, and the Greek language allows him to pack so much into one or two words, that an English translator often has to use seven or eight of his own words to unpack a phrase. The Greek language also allows Homer an almost infinite flexibility in word order, and that gave him certain advantages that a poet writing in English lacks. In fact, an English poet has such a limited number of ways in which he can make a Homeric original read well that at times it seems like an insurmountable challenge.
This problem of word order begins for a translator with the famous first word of the poem. “The Iliad” begins with “wrath” in Greek. Many English translations that I’ve examined follow suit, then fall into a trap: Because “wrath” is modified by an adjective, the translators repeat it later in the sentence and fall into glaring inaccuracy from the beginning.
No one who has looked at my translation has failed to call me to task for not beginning with “wrath.” But I tried to turn “The Iliad” into an English poem, with English syntax, and so my first lines read: “Brutal wrath of Akhilléüs,/ Péleus’s son, o goddess sing.”
The rhythm I chose is the one that almost all of my poems have fallen into for years (a basically iambic line flexible as to syllable count). This underlying current is essential. Duke Ellington’s famous dictum applies to translations of Homer: “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.”
Various lists of Homer’s qualities have been compiled, and translators are expected to reproduce all of them. I am most often struck by Homer’s bluntness, the force of his punch.
I sense that this quality makes some translators a bit uneasy, and they often pull Homer’s punch with some verbal evasion. But it is important not to wince when translating a description like the following:
The bone cracked
And the two bloody eyes fell to the ground
Amid the dust beside his feet
And as he fell he doubled over.
The gravity of that man’s dying is real, and it must be there in an English translation. So must this description of a corpse that Akhilléüs has thrown into the River Skamandros:
The eels and fishes occupied themselves with him —
Munching, nibbling at the fat around his kidneys.
One cannot prettify this picture in any way; one must just plainly reproduce it. In my opinion, a terrible beauty is born from the bluntness.
Before beginning work on “'The Iliad,” I already had translated “Beowulf.” In fact, I translated it three times until I found the right form for it. Acquaintances asked me why I attempted “The Iliad”' when there already were something like 100 English translations of it. I knew that the world did not need another version, but I needed to attempt one for myself.
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http://www.post-gazette.com/opinion/Op-Ed/2015/09/13/The-Next-Page-An-epic-adventure-Why-I-spent-28-years-translating-The-Illiad/stories/201509130020