NOTE: This has been sitting, unfinished, in my pile of
drafts for over two years. It got posted unintentionally during a test.
So it's unlikely to be finished now. You can get some idea of where I was
going from the notes.
I am no John Keats, and this isn't anything like a sonnet. But then,
Emily Wilson's new translation of the Odyssey isn't anything like
Chapman's, either. I think I know a little of how Keats felt, though,
like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his
ken
. (Uranus had just recently been discovered when Keats wrote
that.)
This book reads like a thriller. A page-turner. Plan on losing
some sleep.
The original Odyssey consists of 12,110 lines of dactylic hexameter --
that's the natural rhythm of ancient Greek. The natural rhythm of English
is iambic, and in particular iambic pentameter. That's what Wilson uses
in her translation, keeping the same line count. And English is
actually less compact than Greek in most cases. The pace is
breathtaking.
OK, time for some examples. Here's how Chapman's translation -- the one
that Keats was so impressed by -- starts out:
The man, O Muse, inform, that many a way
Wound with his wisdom to his wished stay;
That wandered wondrous far, when he the town
Of sacred Troy had sack'd and shivered down;
The cities of a world of nations,
With all their manners, minds, and fashions,
He saw and knew; at sea felt many woes,
Much care sustained, to save from overthrows
Himself and friends in their retreat for home;
But so their fates he could not overcome,
Though much he thirsted it. O men unwise,
They perish'd by their own impieties,
That in their hunger's rapine would not shun
The oxen of the lofty-going Sun,
Who therefore from their eyes the day bereft
Of safe return. These acts, in some part left,
Tell us, as others, deified Seed of Jove.
And here's Lattimore's version, which was considered the best modern
translation when I read it in college half a century ago:
Tell me, Muse, of the man of may ways, who was driven
far journeys, after he had sacked Troy's sacred citadel.
Many were they whose cities he saw, whose minds he learned of,
many the pais he suffered in his spirit on the wide sea,
struggling for his own life and the homecoming of his companions.
Even so he could not save his companions, hard though
he strove to; they were destroyed by their own wild recklessness,
fools, who devoured the oxen of Helios, the Sun God,
and he took away the day of their homecoming. From some point
here, goddess, daughter of Zeus, speak, and begin our story.
You'll notice he's using dactylic hexameter; it's only ten lines, the same
as the original. Chapman uses seventeen lines of heroic couplets -- rhymed
iambic pentameter. Here's what Wilson does with it (going halfway through
the eleventh line in the process):
Tell me about a complicated man.
Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost
when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy,
and where he went, and who he met, the pain
he suffered in the storms at sea, and how
he worked to save his life and bring his men
back home. He failed to keep them safe; poor fools,
they ate the Sun God’s cattle, and the god
kept them from home. Now goddess, child of Zeus,
tell the old story for our modern times.
Find the beginning.
Right from the start, you know you're in for a ride.
"Complicated", there, is Wilson's rendering of “polytropos”
-- “poly-” (= "many"), “tropos” (= "turn"). You
can see, in the quotes above, a few of the other choices. Palmer, in
1891, used "adventurous", and Alexander Pope in 1725 used The man for
wisdom's various arts renown'd
. It's also worth noting that Wilson
says of Odysseus's men He failed to keep them safe
. Odysseus isn't
always what we think of as a hero -- among other things he lies
repeatedly, takes unnecessary risks, cheats on his wife with Calypso and
Circe (while expecting Penelope to remain faithful, of course), and can't
resist sacking a few more cities on his way home. Scoundrel doesn't begin
to cover it.
In an interview in The New York Times, Wilson says I
wanted there to be a sense [that] maybe there is something wrong with
this guy. You want to have a sense of anxiety about this character, and
that there are going to be layers we see unfolded.
One also gets the sense that Odysseus might not be a reliable narrator.
One wonders just how many of his adventures are real, given that most of
them -- the Cyclops, Circe, Scylla and Charybdis, the Sirens, the bag of
winds, the Underworld -- are recounted by Odysseus himself, in books 9-13.
Margaret Atwood has a little fun with some of the more mundane
alternatives in The
Penelopiad, her retelling of the story from Penelope's point of view
(which I highly recommend as a follower).
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