Re-read The Iliad
Just finished re-reading The Iliad, Robert Fagles' translation, Bernard Knox' introduction. I first read it nearly thirty years ago, in a cold room in northeastern Indiana at Christmas break (I was a student at IU). That was E.V. Rieu's prose translation, which I still own in paperback (faded, brittle). At several places in the Fagles translation (which is verse), I stopped to compare texts with Rieu. I am often curious why translations don't vary more widely than they appear to, I mean, purely from the perspective of word choice. It's true, how many ways can one render "wine dark sea" into English, and why would you want to anyway? Still, launching into a line-by-line translation of twenty-four books averaging 700-800 lines each ought to offer the translator something more rewarding than a nuanced modernization of some previous rendering. Take Seamus Heaney's recent translation of Beowulf, which at certain crucial points translates a line or a phrase or a word in some subtly anti-English way, so that he identifies his own Irish history somewhat with the fate of Grendel. That seems to me worth the labor of translating a text that has been visited many times by one's predecessors! But I am sure I have not caught the nuances of change in voice and rhythm between a prose translation of The Iliad done two generations ago and one done post-Vietnam, post-fall-of-Iran, and read post-9/11.
I had not recalled how magnificently bloody is The Iliad, and blood is one thing Fagles seems to have concentrated on rendering in technicolor. Reading its carnage in end-stopped lines, "loving" detail and muscular images leaves me a little bit drained, say, the way I felt upon first seeing "The Wild Bunch" or "Scarface." It all happens in slow motion and I am not permitted to look away. It's a testament to the power of Homer's craft that a movie version would be nearly impossible to create, with any appropriate level of horror at least. (As a reference point, a cable channel a few years ago aired a filmed version of The Odyssey, starring Armand Asante. It was cartoonish. It sucked.) One needs the verbal image to register this much destruction upon individuals at war. Only the Normandy invasion scenes of "Saving Private Ryan" can approach what Fagles did in bringing carnage straight to the gut. I have experienced new dreams since finishing that poem!
I look forward to moving on to The Odyssey, another text I've not read in thirty years. Again, it was the Rieu translation then, and will be the Fagles translation soon.
I recently reread AGAMEMNON and OEPDIPUS REX, and those plays are bloody, too. There's not much detail about blood, but the actions, if imagined, are bloody. Seems most western myths are like this.
As a classics student, one of my passions is comparison of translations, and i have to say i usually go for the prose version, because they tend to preserve the true meaning of the original, without contraints of rhyme or metre.
I studied the Rieu translation at school, and when i came to do my degree they wanted us to read the Fagles translation, because our professor felt profoundly offended to see the Iliad rendered in anything but verse! I dont feel the same way, because i think Fagles is too rigid in his expression, and i found it difficult to be swept away by his words the way i was with Rieu. I have to admit i went against the wishes of my professor, and stuck to my original copy, which caused him no small headache with my refences! But that was in first year (i am a masters student now) and i have since found the only adequate solution to the problem of translation- making my own. There really is nothing to compare to the Greek text for poetic beauty, and only then can you pick up on all the subtle nuances of expression in the original language. now i only use translations when im in a hurry and i have to skim through looking for a passage.I thoroughly recommend anyone with a serious love of Homer to have a stab at the greek- just get a bilingual edition!