“And thick and fast they came at last,/ and more, and more, and more.” Those lines from Lewis Carroll’s “The Walrus and the Carpenter” were once quoted to me by Bob Fagles, my teacher at the time, to describe the late-20th-century proliferation of translations of Greek texts, Homer’s poems in particular.
Fagles was at that time preparing to add to the onrush with his 1990 Iliad, a refreshingly limber alternative to the then-standard poetic versions of Robert Fitzgerald (1974) and Richmond Lattimore (1951). The publication of Fagles’ work created an enduring troika of viable translation options for readers and teachers. (His version is still in print from Penguin, and Lattimore’s was reissued in 2011 by the University of Chicago, with a new introduction and notes by Richard Martin and an updated, though hugely unappealing, cover image.)
Then in 1997 came the debut of Stanley Lombardo’s Hackett translation, with its famously iconoclastic cover, a photo of a landing craft arriving on the beaches of Normandy. Lombardo, with his quick, light line and his flirtations with colloquialism and anachronism, posed a brash challenge to the “Big Three,” a challenge that many were eager to embrace. I myself adopted Lombardo’s version in my classrooms for many years, until its typography — space breaks, indentations, false line breaks, and the italicization of similes — began to disturb me, as did the occasional snickers of my students when insults like “bitch!” were encountered.
Since the days of Lombardo, the floodgates of Iliad translations have opened with a vengeance, and the pace of new arrivals grows ever quicker. The last decade has seen Iliads from Rodney Merrill (University of Michigan 2007), Stephen Mitchell (Atria 2011), Edward McCrorie (Johns Hopkins 2012), Barry Powell (Oxford 2013), and Anthony Verity (Oxford World Classics 2011) — to mention only the major editions; several others are available online or from smaller publishers. To say “even my neighbor down the street is doing one” might seem hyperbolic, but in my case it’s literally true, since the poet and Homeric translator Charles Stein lives a few houses from mine.
Now the list has grown once more to include Peter Green, revered classicist and author of many compelling studies of Greek history as well as a 1997 verse translation of Apollonius’ Argonautica. With the University of California’s publication last month of Green’s Iliad, the number of muses singing that baneful/ruinous/murderous/destructive/doomed force, the wrath of Achilles, has become nearly overwhelming — especially for teachers like myself who must ponder anew each year an expanded selection of classroom texts.
Broadly speaking, the roster can be divided into translator-scholars and translator-poets — a distinction clearly signaled by whether or not a separate author has been enlisted to write the introduction. In the olden days of Lattimore and Fitzgerald, scholars might also be poets and poets scholars, and Fagles, in the next generation, still incarnated both (though he handed off his introductions to his friend and collaborator, Bernard Knox). But the two roles have increasingly diverged in the last quarter-century. Rodney Merill alone among recent translators can lay claim to both mantles, and his self-generated introduction is correspondingly colorful and unique, dispensing with historical questions altogether in favor of the topic “Singing the Iliad.” However, Merrill’s translation also employs a strict hexametric line and uses archaisms like “scion” in place of “son,” which for many readers — especially teachers — makes it a non-starter.
It has been surprising in recent years to witness the arrival of translator-scholars like Powell and Green, both professors emeriti with many academic books in print or in progress. In the past such men rarely gave years of their lives to works of translation, unless in service to the Loeb Classical Library, in which case they were also editing a Greek or Latin text. Both Powell and Green describe their Iliad projects in their introductions as a deeply personal quest, a kind of philological Everest climb, undertaken late in life. Neither seems particularly concerned about contributing to overcrowding. “When I told my friends about this project, they said, ‘But hasn’t Homer been translated many times?’” Powell writes. “Yes, sure, I tried to explain, but not by me.” Green too characterizes his Iliad as the fulfillment of a long-held dream, and indicates he may well now begin work, in his nineties, on a version of the Odyssey as well.
Perhaps it is a good thing that so many Hellenists want to take on this challenge, and that the range of choice for teachers of the poem keeps getting wider. But the differences between competing versions also keeps narrowing, and it gets harder for new ones to make any tangible contribution. So, although the publishing industry — recognizing Homer as one of few blue-chip ancient authors in their product lines — seems willing to follow Mao Tse Tung’s maxim and “let a hundred flowers blossom,” many readers and teachers of the Iliad, myself included, are instead tempted to invoke an age-old Yiddish saying and declare “genug ist genug.”
Green’s new version of the Iliad is perhaps best characterized as an update of Lattimore’s. Green, in his introduction, claims Lattimore’s objective as his own: a “determination to get as close as possible in every respect…to the original Homeric Greek” (p. 18). He also takes Lattimore as a model for his metrical form, which combines pentametric with hexametric lines to produce a “declaimable” version of Homer’s dactylic verses — even more declaimable, he implies, than what Lattimore himself achieved. The “variable 6/5 line,” Green says — his own tending more toward 6 beats than 5 — “is the key to producing a version of Homer that gives one’s nonclassical audience some sense of the Iliad as a whole poem” (p. 21). Ungenerously, Green asserts that “most translators, who couldn’t care less about the needs of a Greekless general audience” (p. 20) have failed to realize how crucial it is to get the metrics right.
Green’s introduction raises methodological questions about which all of us have our own views. I myself have had many occasions, in the course of editing (together with Mary Lefkowitz) a forthcoming volume of Greek tragedy in translation, to ponder “the needs of a Greekless general audience,” and I disagree with Green about how best to meet them. It seems to me that a strongly pentametric line, like that employed by Stephen Mitchell and Stanley Lombardo, works well for undergraduates — the vast majority of Homer’s current readership — who have been trained in it by their reading of Shakespeare. Declaimability, I also believe, is in the ear of the beholder (9.318–25):
Equal the lot of the skulker and the bravest fighter;
courage and cowardice rank the same in honor;
death comes alike to the idler and to the hardest worker.
No profit to me that I suffered agonies at heart,
constantly risking my life in warfare. Just as a bird
brings back to her unfledged chicks whatever morsel
she can find, yet herself will suffer a heap of troubles,
so I too have kept vigil many a sleepless night…
In this famously embittered passage from Achilles’ reply to Odysseus, Green uses a preponderance of six-beat lines, but sprinkles in a few shorter ones, including the first two — which are very short indeed. Variation in line length is something he prides himself on, though it seems to me to run counter to the regularity and flow of the Homeric hexameter and to break up the momentum a narrative poem wants to generate. Some lines defy scansion altogether, like “Equal the lot of the skulker and the bravest fighter,” where we can get to an iambic rhythm only by placing ungainly stress on the last of three iterations of “the.” Considered purely on metric grounds, Green’s version feels to me a good deal less “declaimable” than, say, Stephen Mitchell’s more consistent pentameters:
We all get just the same portion, whether we hang back
or fight on with all our strength in the front lines of battle.
Cowards and brave men are treated with equal respect.
More troubling than the metrical anomalies of Green’s Iliad is its uneven diction. Green has a tendency to use off-tone words that, to my ear at least, evoke a very different world than that to which Homer’s heroes, or the poet himself, belonged. Thus Achilles’ ringing attack on Agamemnon, anaideien epieimene (1.149), “Shameless — armored in shamelessness” in Fagles’ version, is rendered here as “you clotheshorse for shamelessness.” Could anyone in a heroic epic, especially when in a fit of rage, have used the word “clotheshorse”? Similarly in the angry exchanges of Book 9, Ajax protests to Achilles that, if a murder has been committed (9.635–6, emphasis mine),
the kinsman’s emotional passion is duly tempered
by the blood-price he has received. But obdurate and malign
is the spirit the gods have put in your breast…
This professorial Ajax, one suspects, could never have gotten through to Achilles as Homer intended. And when Achilles, in the same book, is heard saying “Honored I think I am by Zeus’s ordinance” (9.608), one cringes at “ordinance,” a word that conjures up rules for municipal trash disposal rather than a decree by the king of gods and men.
Any translator will of course strike the occasional false note in a poem as long as the Iliad, but Green strikes more than his share — certainly more than Lattimore, whom he claims as his inspiration. That fact alone makes it hard to recommend his edition, despite its many excellent ancillary features, including a detailed glossary of names and terms, and a lively book-by-book synopsis of the poem’s plot. In this synopsis — a resource no other Iliad offers, to my knowledge — Green summarizes both action and speeches in a style so droll and colloquial that some purists may well take offense: “Die or win, let’s go for it!” But the ebullient tone of these exclamation-point-riddled pages convey the excitement Green feels when reading the Iliad, as he has done now for over seven decades, and that has to be a good thing.
Often Green’s missteps seem to arise from misguided efforts to preserve authenticity, a pitfall into which translator-scholars almost invariably stumble. Powell also suffers from this syndrome, as critic Daniel Mendelsohn noted in a “Bookends” piece for the October 8, 2013 issue of the New York Times Book Review. “Powell renders areter, a Greek word for ‘priest’ (literally, ‘one who prays’), as ‘a praying man.’ But while this is correct, strictly speaking, it betrays the original.” Greekless readers who, on first opening the Iliad, come across “praying man” on page 1 have had irremediable damage done to their experience of the poem. One can almost hear the philological wheels turning in cases like this, as the translator-scholar seeks an ingenious, if unnatural, way to represent a Greek word’s nuance or etymology.
On the other side of the spectrum are translator-poets like Stephen Mitchell, whose language flows like a golden stream but who are led into other kinds of errors through imperfect knowledge of Homer and his text. I have quoted Mitchell’s version above as a positive exemplar (and am myself quoted in the blurbs on that book’s back cover), and I believe that for sheer poetic beauty it may be the best around. But Mitchell followed the textual principles of his academic guru, Martin West, so slavishly as to excise many contested passages, and all of Book 10, from the poem altogether. In his later Odyssey he adopted a less severe approach and used brackets to indicate possible inauthenticity, so perhaps a subsequent edition of his Iliad will someday do likewise. For now, the book remains off-limits to those seeking a classroom text.
What then remains as a viable choice? Edward McCrorie’s version is, I think, eliminated, both by its awkward enjambments and its even more awkward cover illustration (a photo of Muhammed Ali knocking out Sonny Liston). I have only glanced at Anthony Verity’s translation for Oxford World Classics, but was instantly put off by its frequent line breaks after conjunctions and prepositions, a pattern grossly out of tune with Homer’s style.
In the end, the cascade of recent Iliads has done nothing to improve on the work of the great troika of the previous century, Lattimore, Fitzgerald, and Fagles. A sobering lesson, one hopes, for those setting out to sing the wrath of their own personal Achilles.
James Romm is James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics at Bard College in Annandale, N.Y., and author of several books, including Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero. He reviews regularly for the Wall Street Journal, the London Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement.
