Translations R Us

The Iliad four ways with a twist

This week my son texted me to let me know the next book up on his TBR pile is Stanley Lombardo’s translation of the Iliad.

Long ago I had CDs of this book narrated by Susan Sarandon. We listened to them on the way back from a sunburned, sandy day trip to the the beach.

They made the 3-hour drive a lot more epic.

Son asked if I knew of another translation that was better, and I said no. I think Lombardo’s Iliad is the best I’ve ever read.

But I remembered after listening to the Classically Trained podcast that the hosts had mentioned a recent translation by a woman.

Emily Wilson’s gorgeous translation of the Odyssey made me wonder about this version, Caroline Alexander’s, which was published in 2015.

I looked at her opening lines, and I have to say I was underwhelmed. 

Wrath—sing, goddess, of the ruinous wrath of Peleus’ son Achilles,

that inflicted woes without number upon the Achaeans,

hurled forth to Hades made strong souls of warriors

and rendered their bodies prey for the dogs,

for all birds, and the will of Zeus was accomplished.

This sounded pretty conventional. And why? I found out why.

Here are Lombardo’s lines:

Rage:

Sing, Goddess, Achilles’ rage,

Black and murderous, that cost the Greeks

Incalculable pain, pitched countless souls

Of heroes into Hades’ dark,

And left their bodies to rot as feasts

For dogs and birds, as Zeus’ will was done.

I love this because it’s like a quick-cutting movie, as hard and immediate and punchy as the war itself.

And now here the venerable translation of Richmond Lattimore, who introduced me to the Iliad in my callow youth.

Sing, Goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilleus

and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaeans,

hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong souls

of heroes, but gave their bodies to be the delicate feasting

of dogs, of all birds, and the will of Zeus was accomplished.

I loved this, too, because it is literal without being flowery. It doesn’t leave things out like Lombardo does for the sake of immediacy. But this type of translation can get to be a bit much. My mentor in teaching mythology once suggested to undergraduates that the best way to read this translation was to go to a bar, order up a pitcher of beer, and begin drinking and reading.

“After a little while, it’ll all come clear,” she said.

As to Alexander, to me it’s as if she’s splitting the difference between Lombardo and Lattimore. That’s why it sounded conventional. She takes some of one and some of the other, and ends up without a voice of her own.

(To be fair—hard to judge someone’s translation on the basis of a few lines.)

Whether good or better or best, all these translations have one thing in common: they’re translations, chained willingly to the post of the Greek text.

Greg Fishbone, my colleague on substack.com, is taking another road. It’s not a translation but an interpretation, a bit like putting Shakespeare in modern dress.

(Lombardo and others have somewhat done this with their book covers—see the image attached to this newsletter that came from this website.)

In the opening installment of his retelling, Fishbone delays till nearly the end the first lines of Homer’s text:

Rage!

Homer’s classic song about Achilles,

son of Peleus and Thetis,

whose fatal anger

dispatched many brave warriors to Hades’s realm,

leaving their bodies

as spoils for dogs and carrion birds.

So it’s faithful to the original.

But the whole thing is written in the voice of the Muse Calliope as a livestreaming disc jockey. She goes through the “top of the charts” in Greek Mythology, mentioning with a play on contemporary rock n’ roll songs the greatest hits of ancient epic poetry.

“Rounding out the list

of this week’s most requested epics,

Witchy Woman by Apollonius of Rhodes

falls three spots to Number 5;

These Arms of Mine by Virgil

sails to the number 4 position,

knocking Hesiod’s Gotta Be Startin’ Somethin’ 

out of the Top Five for the first time in a century,

Changes by Ovid holds steady in the Number 3 spot…”

I love the references, which all come from the sweet spot of my pop-listening youth, but which also “get” the subjects of the epics in a knowing way.

So there’s fun here, but Fishbone also promises relevance. His tagline on substack is “Disrupting Homer with retold myths that restore inclusion, diversity, and equity to Greek mythology.”

You can see all this as a movie for sure, and it reminds me that no one (in Hollywood, at least) has ever done an Iliad in modern dress the same way that, for example, the 1996 movie Romeo + Juliet put Shakespeare decidedly back into the mainstream for a summer.

Especially not with inclusion, diversity, and equity.

There is so much potential in Homer for contemporary reinterpretation that doesn’t get picked up in productions like Troy: Fall of a City.

Here’s one fan hoping to see Fishbone’s “Rage” as a movie, and I’m eager to read more.