There’s No Such Thing as “The Odyssey”

Most of us think we’ve read Homer. But almost none of us have. We’ve read Chapman. Or Pope. Or Fitzgerald.

Or Fagles. Or Wilson. There is no “The Odyssey.” There are only Odysseys.

I. “When a new planet swims into his ken” Which Homer is Which?

John Keats has a wonderful sonnet called “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer,” which I think perfectly highlights how each translation can be a totally new experience. John Keats is a remarkable poet who, despite having died at 25 years old, had a massive effect on British and Romantic poetry. Besides boarding school, Keats never had a formal literary education beyond his own voracious reading, and he never learned how to read ancient Greek. As a young man, he read Homer in translations by John Dryden and Alexander Pope, but he only started loving Homer after reading George Chapman’s translation. He describes the thrill of finding Chapman’s translation (which is, by the way, a century older than Dryden’s and Pope’s) like this:

Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

Round many western islands have I been

Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;

Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men

Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Like an astronomer the enthrallment of discovering a new planet is what a new reading experience, a new translation, can bring. And the fact that it’s a sonnet indicates in its form that it gestures towards love, admiration, and interest.

Matthew Arnold’s classic essay “On Translating Homer” singled out four qualities that any English version should strive to represent Homer.

It should be:

• Rapid

• Plain and direct in expression

• Plain and direct in ideas

• And eminently noble

Interesting enough, the same translation of Homer that awakened Keats’ love for it just did not do it for Arnold. He wrote, “Chapman renders [Homer] ill because he is fantastic in his ideas.” Although he thought that Chapman’s diction was better than Pope’s, for example, he didn’t like how affected and elaborate Chapman’s speech was. Intriguing side-note: scholars widely agree that Shakespeare read Chapman’s translation of Homer and that it heavily influenced his writings. But what Arnold points out indirectly is that each translation of Homer is a new text, a new version, and faithfulness to the original is something he cares about, but not necessarily something we should.

II. Translation as Creation and the Afterlives of Texts

German philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin wrote an essay called “The Task of the Translator,” a perhaps infamously difficult piece of writing–-or at least it was among my peers in my thesis seminar.

While Arnold tells you what he thinks Homer is and how those Homeric principles of poetry can be best recreated, Benjamin totally subverts what translation is to be seen as.

In principle, Benjamin rejects the idea that translation is about replacing an original text in another language and conveying meaning within it. And that there is no such thing as a neutral translation. For example, the fifth word of the Odyssey is πολύτροπον (polytropon) (ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ –– andra moi ennepe, mousa, polytropon, hos mala polla)

is one of the most complex words to translate. It comes from the ancient greek πολύς (po-leehs) (“many” or “much”) and τροπονς (tropos) (“turn” or “twisty”). Fagels translates it as the man of “many twists and turns.” Lattimore translates it to the man “of many ways.” Wilson translates it “complicated,” one of the more controversial choices. Complicated does relate well, however, becomes its Latin etymology “complicare” (com- meaning “together” + plicare meaning “to fold”), which derives from the ancient Proto-Indo-European root *-plek-, meaning to “plait” or “weave,” and some of the Greek in the ‘original texts’ I use airquotes there because we’ll complicate that idea in a second is actually closer to this archaic origin than modern Greek. And she points out that the word syntactically applies to the man, the journey, and the poem itself.

Whatever choice a translator makes, it goes to show Benjamin’s argument that translation is in fact a creative process all on its own in which languages disclose their affinities with one another and that languages are not interchangeable containers. Translation creates literature, which is true: Without George Chapman or Alexander Pope, English literature would be different because Shakespeare wouldn’t have read these poems when he did, nor would Keats have written his poem. Which, notice, is not about Greek or Homer, even. It’s about Chapman’s revival of Keats’ excitement for Homer because of his translation, which brings us to one of Benjamin’s most important revelations: that translations have an afterlife. He writes,

“Just as expressions of life are connected in the most intimate manner with the living being without having any significance for the latter, a translation proceeds from the original. Not indeed so much from its life as from its “afterlife” or “survival” [Überleben].”

While Arnold asks: What is Homer? Benjamin asks: What becomes of Homer?

Because the translations are as much cultural objects as original works, each text survives and perseveres into new historical moments and worlds. We can see this play out in real time. Benjamin McEvoy in his wonderful video about reading the epics, says that which epic resonates with you typically depends on what your life looks like at the moment, and what you need. If the Iliad captures you then it’s because you need to gather the result to fight on whereas if the Odyssey moves you, then it’s likely a sign that you need to return home in your heart. I love that.

Not only is that personally relevant, but historically, different times and eras favor one epic over the other depending on what the world needs. For example, during the “boring age of Victoria” as McEvoy calls it, the Iliad, all about war and rage was more popular whereas nowadays, for example, we see twice as many reviews for the Odyssey as we do the Iliad, we see what the culture is yearning for. So, clearly, these texts have afterlives. And each version of a translation tries to do something different for the age in which it was written.

Moreover, the Odyssey does not have a stable text—it only exists as a series of interpretive reconstructions, where translation, era, and reader each produce a different version of the poem. And this representational and semantic instability is actually eerily applicable and meaningful for the original Homeric text. Because there’s a great amount of uncertainty as to who Homer was.

III. Homer Who? Even the Original Isn’t the Original

Modern scholarship doesn’t take for granted the fact or question of Homer’s identity. Adam Nicolson, the author of Why Homer Matters, suggests that Homer is not a single person. As such, it wasn’t a single person that wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey, but an entire culture. Most scholars nowadays agree with that multiplicitous interpretation of the Homeric Question. There very little reliable information about Homer himself––e.g. at least seven locations have been given as Homer’s birthplace and Samuel Butler, an English writer whom George Bernard Shaw deemed “the greatest English writer of the latter half of the nineteenth century” and who, side note wrote a novel called Erewhon, (yep, like the overly priced supermarkets strewn about California) believed that the person who wrote the Odyssey was a woman and wrote an entire book about it, The Authoress of the Odyssey. There’s a general conjecture that Homer was a blind bard––and there’s a reference to a blind poet named Demodocus who sings tales of the Trojan War in a rather moving scene of the Odyssey in the court of Alcinous. But there’s a clear instability that surrounds his identity.

And there are doubts about when the poems were composed, even in ancient Greek. Caroline Alexander, in her introduction to her translation of the Iliad, writes that translating Homer isn’t a simple task. She says that in the case of the Iliad, the Greek text prepared by Martin L. West that she uses for her translation is based on “over 1,500 manuscript and papyrus fragments dating from the third century b.c. to the fourteenth century a.d., together with considerable ancient scholarly commentary and quotations [which] all have to be consulted” (XIL). The Odyssey is similarly based on over 1,000 manuscripts.

Therein lies another massive instability for the Homer Question. Because the epics are based on a long oral tradition wherein they have been composed and recomposed at large and small scales––with each recitation prior to the development of literacy in the archaic Greek world and each transcription thereafter. So even before we get to the question of inter-linguistic translation, we reach a point of plurality within the original object/text.

Translation is not the first transformation of Homer. It is the latest transformation in a tradition that has always been transforming.

So, I think that the interesting thing isn’t which translation is most faithful to Homer because we now know Homer is an “it” not a “him” or “her.” The really interesting thing is how translation reveals that each version of Homer is a product of its age and the person who translated it.

So let’s look at some examples and see what they say about us, over time:

IV. The Many Faces of Homer, Or What Translation Should You Read?

Now we know, each translator is not just interpreting Homer, but reconstructing a possible Homer, choosing how best to render it into their principles and historical moments––which are of course mutually shaped by one another.

So which one should you read? With over 60 translations available, I would recommend you try out some of the main ones for yourselves before you decide. And you don’t have to buy the books to do that. A redditor on the r/classics reddit that I browsed as I researched posted a website where they have put English translations of select passages that you can compare. And you can look side by side up to 6 translations. It’s a totally awesome––in all senses of the word––resource to have in your back pocket. Shout out to that person.

But I’ll give you six suggestions, and you can choose which Homer you’re trying to meet.

If you, like Arnold, believe that Homer ought best be defined by clarity, speed, and directness, then I would say the most consistent modern attempt is Emily Wilson. I know there’s a lot of controversy around her, but I’ve read her translations, and she really does not have a “postmodernist feminist” take on things as people are trying to claim it. Her foci are meter, sound, verse form, performability, and multivocality. She writes in iambic pentameter, the closest English structure to dactylic hexameter, the epic meter in which Homer poetry was written and recited. And her style is the closest modern approximation to Arnold’s ideal in spirit. It is clean, immediate, structurally simple, and forceful.

If you want to feel epic, poetic grandeur and that reading Homer ought to be polished, rhetorical, and feel monumental, you should go for Alexander Pope’s translations. Or if you like rhyme, because it was written in couplets; that does make it stray from Homeric convention because it was more focused on the metre, not the rhyme.

Two of my dearest friends love the Robert Fitzgerald translation, and I think it’s because of how musical and poetic it is. He, like Wilson, also uses his language and names to keep Homer feeling strange, and removed from present-day society. When you read Fitzgerald’s Homer, it feels like the poem belongs alongside Milton and Shakespeare because of how elegant and smooth it is. Fitzgerald’s translations really embody Arnold’s fourth principle of nobility. It’s a beautiful Homer.

If you want to feel like you’re reading a movie, experience Homer as a forward-driving epic action, read Robert Fagels’ free verse translation, which is one of the most influential attempts to turn Homer into modern storytelling without losing grandeur.

If you’re interested, like Benjamin, in the preservation of the original form, then the Richmond Lattimore translation will get you closest, because he tries to preserve the grammatical and structural skeleton even when it sounds awkward in English.

And if you want to encounter the Homer that produced Keats’ sublime reading experience and read the same Homer Shakespeare read, pick yourself up a copy of Chapmans’ Homer.

Following McEvoy again, I would suggest to you a life-long challenge: every year, read a new translation of Homer. This year I’ve read two of each text, and in the following years I’m thinking of reading the Iliad one year and the Odyssey the other. Let Homer be with you throughout your whole life. And, if you can, read it aloud, or along with an audio-book; I didn’t the first time I read and did the second time, and I can promise you that the experience is so worth it.

V. Conclusion: Palimpsests and Poetry

When we imagine translations, we may typically see palimpsests; one thing written over another. One author looming behind another. But we know now that there is no single Homer behind the translations. There are only the forms Homer has taken in different languages, at different moments, for different readers.

Because we don’t know exactly who or what Homer is, what the chicken and egg story is in the oral-written tradition, and the ‘original’ texts are varied fragments, there is nothing that we can concretely compare the English translation to. The source text and the author are nebulous. There is no “best translation,” because unlike most other written texts where the source text is there for clear comparison, Homer doesn’t allow us that grace. Ultimately, the question of best is inherently speculative at best.

As such, there is no one definitive Odyssey translation or Odyssey text. There may be better and worse ones. But when people say The Odyssey, they are not referring to a single boo; they are referring to a family of reconstructions. Because, as we’ve seen, every translation is a philosophical decision about what the text is. And every time we read a new translation, we are entering one of its afterlives.

So read on, always.