Why I Don't Want to Translate Homer

Tell me about a complicated job!

As far as I can see, which translation(s) of Homer is “best” is the subject of a debate currently raging on Twitter/X, driven mostly by political assumptions. While it may be true in some sense that “everything is political,” it also seems pretty obvious that a relentless focus on politics makes everything boring. As a rule I do my best to steer clear of politics, here and everywhere; but am posting now in the vague hope that a few people whose interest in the subject has been kindled by the larger discussion might find my thoughts of interest.

Robert Fitzgerald, in a 1952 review of Richmond Lattimore’s Iliad, claimed that the feat Lattimore had performed was “so decisive that it is reasonable to foresee a century or so in which nobody will try again to put the Iliad into English verse.” A forgivable exaggeration—Fitzgerald tried his own hand at it a couple decades later (his Iliad came out in 1974). I have heard (I believe this story may have been told by Robert Fagles at a reading/conversation I attended not long before his death) that, when asked why he had waited so much less than a century, in defiance of his prediction, to reversify the Iliad, Fitzgerald said simply, “Money.”

If Emily Wilson were more like Robert Fitzgerald (or me), she would probably be working on Vergil’s Aeneid right now, instead of Ovid’s Heroides. But she takes seriously the second of her recently posted Guiding Principles (probably offered as an oblique comment, like mine, on the inherently non-political nature of her work):

If you're doing a re-translation, it's a waste of everyone's time -- yours, your publishers, your potential future readers -- unless you can offer a fresh perspective of some kind.

These aren’t idle words: given a chance to translate the Aeneid, which would sell handsomely no matter what, she refrained for precisely the reason stated. It’s not quite drinking hemlock to prove a philosophical point but it’s admirable nonetheless. Not that I will hold it against her if she reverses course, either for a principled reason (she discovers her fresh perspective on the text) or for Fitzgerald’s (her kitchen needs renovating). If I were her, I would have taken the advance now and fretted later.

As for me, I feel pretty confident that I could do a decent job with the Aeneid, and I would love to try, despite the welter of successful versions approaching it in more or less the same way I would; but Homer, not so much. As with Emily, the crux is my own sense of what I can bring to the job. My abiding interest is poetic form, and my “particular set of skills” consists mostly in an ear for English verse-rhythms and a sense of comparative effects: where does the original poem get its power or interest from, and how might that be replicated in English? Secondarily I like to think I have a healthy respect for living speech, which I try not to allow either the oddities of the original idiom or the formal exigencies of the translation to tarnish or obscure. The latter quality might give me a fighting chance; but it’s really my formal sensibility which the Homeric texts confound.

Why are they so difficult to translate? For starters, in Homer’s work qualities / categories are clustered which in English tend to stand apart from or even opposite to each other. For example, it’s not so easy to wrap our heads around the idea of a primitive oral epic poet. For us, poems are difficult and brief, novels are straightforward and long; if you asked anyone on the street which art is more sophisticated, nine times out of ten you’d hear poetry. “Readings,” too (our closest equivalent to what a Homeric performance may have been like) seem to me obviously better suited to poetry than novels. Yet in Homer we have a straightforward long poem aimed at a listening audience rather than a solitary reader. In many ways, of course, Homer’s text is quite sophisticated, but in its conventions, and vis-à-vis prose, which historically developed later, it is not. One key challenge this combination poses for a translator is that of line vs. length. Homer’s lines are in themselves memorable and quotable, yet his epic flows smoothly from beginning to end; in translation it needs to be about as readable as your average novel to get any commercial traction. Unfortunately, translators often have to choose between these two attributes: where lines are lapidary and well-hewn, the whole bogs down and drags, losing the Arnoldian quality of “rapidity” (see below); while readability at length often produces a certain flatness and shapelessness to the lines as such, and is rarely (again in Arnold’s formulation) “noble.”

As more of a “line guy” than a “length guy” I have a certain horror of picking one metrical shape and sticking to it for twenty-four to forty-eight books—what if I choose poorly? As I’ve said elsewhere, on the Schleiermacher spectrum of foreignizing vs. domesticating (bringing the reader toward the writer, or the writer toward the reader), I’m a domesticator; but I don’t see any solution to the (translator’s) Homeric Problem which either hasn’t been tried or which strikes me as definitive enough to want to try it myself. Basically, I have choice paralysis: I’m standing in the shampoo aisle ticking off the pros and cons of each bottle on the shelf.

The following are the options I see and my reasons for dubitation:

Prose / Prose fiction: First I should say that translating Homer into prose is not necessarily the same as translating him into a novel—though in practice the latter approach would have to involve adaptation more than translation. For the most part a straight prose version only seems valuable to me as a trot (though I can imagine a Greekless reader of Nabokovian bent who prides himself on reading without enjoyment, out of some puritan asceticism). Still, the idea of “novelizing” Homer appeals to my ‘domesticating’ preference for matching form to form. The analogy, however, fails for me not strictly because Homer is metrical and novels (mostly) aren’t; I reject it because prose itself, and even more-so novels, are too sophisticated, too writerly, for the father of Greek poetry. The novel doesn’t really emerge in antiquity as a form until well into the common era, and with conventions pretty far away from what we expect from prose fiction. This kind of writing is also so far out of my wheelhouse that, if it did happen to be the best analogy, there would be no reason for me to tackle the job. Probably it goes without saying that a prose translation of Homer focuses entirely on readability at length and ignores the integrity of the line.

Here are a couple prose versions from the beginning of the Odyssey, the more ‘novelistic’ epic according to Carne-Ross, translated by Samuel Butler (1898) and E.V. Rieu (1946). (Robert Graves apparently also did a ‘prosimetric’ Iliad, the opening of which can be read here, with the odd idea that the poem is not tragedy but satire. This guy on Reddit says that, for him, reading it was like watching a war movie, while reading verse translations feels like looking at a slideshow of images from Greek vase-painting. De gustibus!):

Samuel Butler (1898): So now all who escaped death in battle or by shipwreck had got safely home except Ulysses, and he, though he was longing to return to his wife and country, was detained by the goddess Calypso, who had got him into a large cave and wanted to marry him. But as years went by, there came a time when the gods settled that he should go back to Ithaca; even then, however, when he was among his own people, his troubles were not yet over; nevertheless all the gods had now begun to pity him except Neptune, who still persecuted him without ceasing and would not let him get home.

E.V. Rieu (1946): All the survivors of the war had reached their homes by now and so put the perils of battle and the sea behind them. Odysseus alone was prevented from returning to the home and wife he longed for by that powerful goddess, the Nymph Calypso, who wished him to marry her, and kept him in her vaulted cave. Not even when the rolling seasons brought in the year which the gods had chosen for his homecoming to Ithaca was he clear of his troubles and safe among his friends. Yet all the gods were sorry for him, except Poseidon, who pursued the heroic Odysseus with relentless malice till the day when he reached his own country. [E.V. Rieu]

Vers Libre: I write the French name (rather than “free verse”) because the “ghost of meter” does seem to me a large part of the success of an approach like Fagles’. He manages to suggest a six-beat line without being held hostage to it, and feels free to shorten or lengthen it at will. The result is a kind of rhythmically heightened prose, which still allows for more relaxed reading than most poetry, which stops it from bogging down, and so turns out to be a pretty good solution to the line vs. length problem. Of course, this approach is open to the same historical objection as prose—free verse is an even later and more sophisticated development than the prose novel—and it conveys a false impression of the texture of the Homeric poems, which breathe in meter like fish in water. Finally, as also with prose, no one should turn to me for a free verse translation: non omnia possumus omnes. I’m here to scan. Here’s a taste of Fagles:

Robert Fagles (1996): By now,
all the survivors, all who avoided headlong death
were safe at home, escaped the wars and waves.
But one man alone ...
his heart set on his wife and his return — Calypso,
the bewitching nymph, the lustrous goddess, held him back,
deep in her arching caverns, craving him for a husband.
But then, when the wheeling seasons brought the year around,
that year spun out by the gods when he should reach his home,
Ithaca — though not even there would he be free of trials,
even among his loved ones — then every god took pity,
all except Poseidon.

It is also worth noting that there are brilliant free verse adaptations of Homer, chief among them Christopher Logue’s War Music, but also Alice Oswald’s Memorial. These are compelling poems in their own right (Logue is astonishing) but neither is really translation.

(Dactylic) Hexameter: Starting here I move into things I could see myself doing, if I believed in them. Strict dactylic hexameter is certainly possible in English—Longfellow shows the way in Evangeline, which I even enjoy reading. This strategy privileges line over length, and, unfortunately, it does get tedious rather quickly. Robert Fitzgerald puts it well in the review of Lattimore I quoted earlier: “In the space of a single book the meter will have so cloyed and cumbered the ear that the essential narrative pace is lost.” The other issue is that this meter is marked in English, as foreign, strange, rarefied, &c., in a way that Homer’s hexameter is assuredly not in Greek. Meter is important, but it shouldn’t be at the top of your attention, as it would be if you or I gave Homer the Evangeline Treatment.

from Evangeline:
Benedict knew by the hob-nailed shoes it was Basil the blacksmith,
And by her beating heart Evangeline knew who was with him.
"Welcome!" the farmer exclaimed, as their footsteps paused on the threshold.
"Welcome, Basil, my friend! Come, take thy place on the settle
Close by the chimney-side, which is always empty without thee…”

But what about hexameter which is not dactylic, i.e., iambic or loose iambic? This is what Lattimore actually chose and Fitzgerald praised in his review. Lattimore has an interesting take on Homer’s meter, in that you can hear it if you know what to listen for (that is, if you know how Homer’s meter works in Greek), not if not. The problem to my ear is that it’s lumpy and slow— “rapidity” is one of the four qualities Matthew Arnold finds in Homer, along with “plainness,” “directness,” and “nobility,” but Lattimore’s line, though it’s easy for him to match with those of Homer, is anything but rapid in English. Caroline Alexander belongs technically under the heading of vers libre, though her lines mostly hover around six beats; her version is readable, but also a bit dull and slow. In neither case are the lines really memorable as lines—which, to be Homeric, they ought to be.

Interestingly, it seems that Daniel Mendelsohn, in his forthcoming Odyssey, has aimed at a merger of Lattimore and Longfellow. It looks pretty skillful rhythmically, though open to the Arnoldian objection “Not Rapid Enough.” I’ll be interested to hear what reviewers, especially those without classical Greek, think of its readability at length. In this passage from early in Book 1 Athena observes the suitors doing what they do:

Lattimore (1951):
There she found the haughty suitors. They at the moment
in front of the doors were amusing their spirits with draughts games,
sitting about on skins of cattle whom they had slaughtered
themselves, and about them, of their heralds and hard-working henchmen,
some at the mixing bowls were combining wine and water,
while others again with porous sponges were wiping the tables
and setting them out, and others cutting meat in quantities.

Mendelsohn (forthcoming April 2025):
Inside she found the brash Suitors. Some were amusing themselves
Playing at board games, sprawled out in front of the doorway,
Sitting on hides of oxen that they themselves had slaughtered.
Meanwhile there were heralds about, and bustling stewards, too:
Some were blending the wine with water in great mixing bowls;
Others wiped folding tables with thirsty sponges, then set them
Out once again; still others were carving and serving the meats.

Accentual Tetrameter / Ballad Measure: If dactylic hexameter in English is “marked” as rarefied, scholarly, and sophisticated, the opposite is true of these shorter measures. For a formal analogue to the ‘endemic rightness’ of dactylic hexameter in Greek, especially for narrative poetry, you might well turn to one of these two forms. Accentual tetrameter, with heavy alliteration, is the measure of Beowulf, the closest thing English has to a pre-literate epic poem, while ballad meter is also associated with more primitive and popular forms of poetic storytelling. Here is a bit of my favorite Beowulf translation, by Tim Murphy & Alan Sullivan:

That shielder of men meant by no means
to let the death-dealer leave with his life,
a life worthless to anyone elsewhere.
Then the young soldiers swung their old swords
again and again to save their guardian,
their kingly comrade, however they could.

Unfortunately, the associations of both alliterative tetrameter and ballad measure are inescapable and all wrong for Homer. The Beowulf measure evokes Vikings, not Greeks; it breaths the air of moors and heaths and the brooding northern sky, far from the pitiless clarity of the Aegean sun. No doubt both Trojans and Greeks would have been happy to have Beowulf on their team, but his exploits, though bearing some superficial resemblance to Heracles and Cadmus, don’t really belong beside theirs. If any 19th century Saxonists tried to do an accentual tetrameter Homer, I’m not aware of it; in our era, however, Stanley Lombardo did one, and did a good job of it too. He avoids the Norse associations by going light on the alliteration, which makes his version feel less formal and incantatory, but easier to read at length (not to mention easier to write); one of his chief missteps, the use of Vietnam-era slang, is not related to his meter, which still is so loose and light it might as well not be there. Like Fagles and Lattimore, he sacrifices memorable lines for readable length:

Lombardo Odyssey (2000):
By now, all the others who had fought at Troy--
at least those who had survived the war and the sea--
Were safely back home. Only Odysseus
Still longed to return to his home and his wife.
The nymph Calypso, a powerful goddess--
And beautiful--was clinging to him
In her caverns and yearned to possess him.
The seasons rolled by, and the year came
In which the gods spun the thread
For Odysseus to return home to Ithaca,
Though not even there did his troubles end,
Even with his dear one around him.
All the gods pitied him, except Poseidon,
Who stormed against the godlike hero
Until he finally reached his own native land.

As for the ballad stanza, in an earlier draft of this piece I had called the idea of using it for the Iliad or Odyssey “self-evidently absurd,” having forgotten that poor Francis Newman, Matthew Arnold’s punching bag in his famous lecture, not only conceived of this notion, but acted on it. Here, according to Newman, is Chryses’ prayer to Apollo from the opening of the Iliad:

“Lord of the silver arrows, hear! Who overshelt’rest Chrysa,
Who bravely reign’st in Tenedos and in the heav’nly Killa;
If ever pleasant offerings to thee, O god of Sminthus!
I hangèd o’er the temple walls, or burn’d upon thy altar 40
The fatten’d limbs of bulls and goats; this for me accomplish!
Cause by thy bolts the Danaï dearly to pay my sorrows.”

Arnold wields the following quotation from Newman as a stick to beat him with:

“The style of Homer is direct, popular, forcible, quaint, flowing, garrulous: in all these respects it is similar to the old English ballad.”

I have to say I am with Arnold. Ballads, even very good ones, do not feel much like Homer, however apt the analogy may seem; nor do I find Homer particularly quaint or garrulous. Arnold claims that ballads, in measure and manner, are incompatible with the grand style; I agree, and would add that their associations are folksy and demotic, and their rhythms jaunty, neither of which qualities suits Homer. Thersites might be capable of speaking in ballad measure, but Sarpedon isn’t.

Blank Verse: Finally I come to the most obviously sensible choice, iambic pentameter. The measure was invented by the Earl of Surrey to translate Vergil, and is used by our supreme English classics, Shakespeare and Milton, as Homer is the supreme classic of the Greek. It is as flexible and expressive as the Homeric hexameter, and equally capable of memorable lines and readability at length. Its sonic effect is not much like dactylic hexameter, and it has fewer syllables, meaning that a translation either needs to exceed its original in length (as in Emily Wilson’s Iliad) or squeeze itself down to match (as in her Odyssey), but neither objection is decisive. My main hesitation is that I see this measure as the obvious solution for Vergil, and Milton as the obvious model; but I can’t bring myself to want Homer to sound like Vergil (or Milton) in English. It’s the oral quality of Homer’s poetry, its pre-literary naivety, that makes me want him and Vergil to sound very different. I do not yet know how to do this in blank verse. Does Fitzgerald, for example, distinguish the sound of his Odyssey from that of his Aeneid? I’m not sure:

Fitzgerald, Odyssey:
Her ladyship Kalypso
clung to him in her sea hollowed caves--
a nymph, immortal and most beautiful,
who craved him for her own.
And when long years and seasons
wheeling brought around that point of time
ordained for him to make his passage homeward,
trials and dangers, even so, attended him
even in Ithaca, near those he loved.
Yet all the gods had pitied Lord Odysseus,
all but Poseidon, raging cold and rough
against the brave king till he came ashore
at last on his own land.

Fitzgerald, Aeneid:
They were all under sail in open water
With Sicily just out of sight astern,
Lighthearted as they plowed the whitecapped sea
With stems of cutting bronze. But never free
Of her eternal inward wound, the goddess
Said to herself:
“Give up what I began?
Am I defeated? Am I impotent
To keep the king of Teucrians from Italy?
The Fates forbid me, am I to suppose?
Could Pallas then consume the Argive fleet
With fire, and drown the crews,
Because of one man’s one mad act—the crime
Of Ajax, sone of Oileus? …”

I am fairly sure that Mandelbaum’s Homer and Vergil (along with his Dante) all sound pretty much the same. Emily Wilson’s celebrated versions (Odyssey; some extended Iliad quotes here) certainly point the way to a non-Vergilian, non-Miltonic blank verse Homer, but rather than take her work as a model for my own it would be far more sensible not to bother. The likeliest solution, as it seems to me, would be to reach toward Robert Frost and a “loose iambic” pentameter, with a high proportion of feminine endings. Fortunately or not, this seems to be what Stephen Mitchell has done:

Stephen Mitchell, Iliad (2011):
Then Hector reached out to take his son, but the child
shrank back, screaming, into his nurse’s arms,
scared by the flashing bronze and the terrible horsehair
crest that kept shaking at him from the peak of the helmet.
At this, his father and mother both burst out laughing;
and right away Hector took off his helmet and laid it,
glittering, on the ground. And he picked up the child,
dandled him in his arms and stroked him and kissed him
and said this prayer to Zeus and the other immortals:
“Zeus and you other gods who can hear my prayer,
grant that this child, this boy of mine, may grow up
to be as I am, outstanding among the Trojans,
strong and brave, and rule over Troy with great power.
And let people say of him, ‘He is a better man
than his father was,’ as they see him returning from battle,
having killed his enemy, carrying back in triumph
the gore-stained armor to gladden his mother’s heart.”

I like this in excerpt—but how readable is it at length? That might depend on the reader; the way this version seems to have been forgotten in the last decade or so suggests that middle schoolers and undergraduates likely find it a slog.

As a translator, I would love to spend my time with Homer—in fact, I can’t think of any poet in whose company I’d rather spend a decade or three—but I can’t get past my aporia about how to approach the task. Then, too, the stakes feel high. The great Persianist Dick Davis, discussing why he chose not to translate Hafez (fortunately, he eventually changed his mind), describes the let-down all readers have experienced when a translation doesn’t quite hit them where they live:

People of a particular linguistic community often automatically assume that their notion of what constitutes the “poetic” is a universal notion, and this can lead to a sense of disappointment or embarrassment when they are confronted with highly praised artifacts from another culture and these artifacts do not conform to local aesthetic expectations; the end result of this can be, and I think often is, a smug sense—openly expressed by the crass, privately believed by the more circumspect—that really only “our” literature is any good. (Dick Davis, On Not Translating Hafez)

On the other side, DS Carne-Ross (criticizing Fitzgerald) suggests that what the Iliad does, and thus what its translations ought to do, is to “leave one shaken and exalted, with the sense of an abounding, transfigured reality.” If that’s the standard—and Carne-Ross is not badly overstating things—it is hard (read: impossible) not to fail. And if you (read: I) are planning on spending the next decade or two of your life on a public face-plant, you’d better at least get a pretty juicy advance.