28. Odysseus sails again: The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fitzgerald

Robert Fitzgerald follows the traditions of the great translators. The rule in that tradition, first formulated by Dryden, is to make your author speak as he would have spoken if he had been your fellow countryman and your contemporary.

I myself think that ideal certainly wrong and probably meaningless. I want a translation, say, of Hafiz, to give me as nearly as possible the experience of a modern Englishman who can read Persian with ease.

I am not at all interested in what Hafiz would have written if he had been a modern Englishman. I know already how modern Englishmen write.

But we must judge Mr Fitzgerald by the rules he accepts. He is trying to do for our age what Chapman, Pope and Morris did for their ages. His version, like theirs, becomes an unconscious critique of the period that begot it. The prevailing taste acts like a stencil: it lets through some Homeric qualities and excludes others.

Chapman made Homer cryptic, Machiavellian, and fantastical. Pope made him elegant and epigrammatic; Morris, romantically Nordic. Mr Fitzgerald makes him tough, stark, colloquial and rather like Stephen Vincent Benét.

Translations are often subjected to very unfair criticism. Nothing is easier than to pick out, even from the best of them, places that conspicuously fail to catch the force of the original.

But the unfortunate translator has to choose, from among the styles his age will accept, one style and keep within it. He knows, no one better, that it will not be the ideal style for every single passage; it may none the less be, in his period, the best on the whole.

I will try to avoid this unfairness. I have also a special reason to be cautious. I know some Greek, but I know very little American.

Some of Mr Fitzgerald's renderings seem to me, by English usage, unpardonable. With us ‘her ladyship Kalypso’ would imply a silly sneer. The statement that Zeus ‘made conversation’ would, with us, imply that the god really had nothing to say but wanted to tide over an awkward pause at the dinner table.

‘Papa’, (from Nausikaa to Alkinoos) would have been right for us 50 years ago: it is now archaic – colloquially archaic, which is the worst sort of archaism. But perhaps the overtones of all these expressions are different on the far side of the Atlantic.

Having once decided to use an essentially modern, hard-hitting, intimate style, free from all poetic diction, Mr Fitzgerald has to give up, once for all, any attempt to represent the ritual, bardic quality of The Odyssey – all its splendid formalities.

I think he made the right choice, and if the price is heavy we must blame the age, not Mr Fitzgerald: if he had done something more like Homer in its texture he would have had few readers.

The price is heaviest in dialogue, and here perhaps the author goes further than he need. Menelaos, describing his ambush for Proteus under the seal-skins says:

a strong disguise; oh, yes terribly strong
as I recall the stench of those damned seals.

It is certainly what a man might say. But a man like Menelaos? No one wants Homer's characters to have the Augustan polish that Pope gave them, but though they may act like savages, they all talk like great aristocrats, descendants of the gods. Mr Fitzgerald makes them too like the next guy you meet in a saloon. But this fault decreases as he goes on.

There remains much on the credit side. This version has a strong, salty flavour of its own. And it makes you see things. Here is Alkinoos's house:

      High rooms he saw ahead, airy and luminous
      as though with lustres of the sun and moon,
      bronze-panelled walls, at several distances,
      making a vista, with an azure moulding
      of lapis lazuli. The doors were golden
      guardians of the great room. Shining bronze
      plated the wide door-sill; the posts and lintel
      were silver upon silver . . .

And here is the great moment at the end of Book XXI:

       . . . so effortlessly
      Odysseus in one motion strung the bow.
      Then slid his right hand down the cord and plucked it,
      so the taut gut vibrating hummed and sang
      a swallow's note.
         In the hushed hall it smote the suitors
      and all their faces changed. Then Zeus thundered
      overhead, one loud crack for a sign.
      And Odysseus laughed within him . . .

It is hard to explain why a long poem where, as in this, the verse, though not technically libre, is very free, produces in the end a greater danger of monotony than one in a regular metre. I think it is because, where an imaginary metronome is ticking away, every departure from it tells: curves show best when there is a straight line near them.

Mr Fitzgerald has much rhythmical vigour: perhaps if he had worn a tighter metrical corsage – a little tighter – we should have felt the vigour more. But then I am a confessed square.

On the whole this version has much to commend it. As a substitute for Homer, tolerable – and what substitute was ever more than that? As a book to send the old back to Homer and goad the young on to Homer, it is very well worth while.

I wish Odysseus were not called ‘the strategist’ at the very moment when he is telling Kalypso that he prefers Penelope. Why not give this immortal liar credit for the least strategical speech he makes in the whole poem?

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