Review of Dan Mendelsohn's Translation of the ODYSSEY

 

Homer’s Odyssey is the most familiar work of ancient literature besides Aesop’s Fables. It has been translated into most world languages and transformed into countless operas, plays, novels, poems, paintings and video games. Its second half, narrating Odysseus’ return to Ithaca,  has recently been made into an emotional and realistic movie filmed in Greek and Italian sea-washed locations. Directed by Uberto Pasolini and starring Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche, its UK release is imminent. Christopher Nolan’s fantasy-action film of the entire epic, which features Matt Damon as Odysseus, astounding special effects, supernatural encounters with immortal nymphs and the enormous Cyclops, is due to dazzle us next year. I hope this mass-market cultural prominence draws attention to Dan Mendelsohn’s sonorous new translation of the original poem.

         His rendering of the epic into its authentic metre, the dactylic hexameter, has been keenly anticipated; in his memoir-cum-literary-interpretation An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic (2017), he revealed his intense personal engagement with the story, especially Odysseus’ relationship with his son Telemachus as the young man is initiated into Bronze Age manly protocols. Mendelssohn’s skill as translator of Greek verse has also been demonstrated in his sensitive translations of another admirer of the Odyssey, C.P. Cavafy (2009-2012).

         Some of his innovations, such as glossing proper names with their meanings (‘Eurýalos Broad-Sea’), are illuminating to the Greekless reader. His metrical dexterity comes over in the pleasing rhythms he’s found for even the most formulaic of lines: ‘She of the bright owl-eyes, the goddess Athena, addressed him’, where the long vowels of the spondaic ‘bright owl-eyes’ are emphasised by the surrounding patter of dactyls.

His translation of the Odyssey’s celebrated opening couplet is an aesthetic manifesto in itself:

Tell me the tale of a man, Muse, who had so many roundabout ways

To wander, driven off course, after sacking Troy’s hallowed keep.

The alliteration (T/t, m/M, w/w), the enjambement (continuing the phrase beyond the line-end) and the sweet variety of emphasised vowels in the second line (a-oy-a-ee), suggestive of Ezra Pound’s commitment to ‘tone-leading of the vowels’ in sung verse, remind us forcefully that Homeric epic was enjoyed in oral performance accompanied by a lyre. A comparison with the other 21st-century attempt at a hexameter Odyssey (2002), by Rodney Merrill, a former Berkeley Professor of English, is instructive:

 

Tell me, Muse, of the man versatile and resourceful, who wandered

many a sea-mile after he ransacked Troy’s holy city.

 

This is far less euphonious. It also specifies that Homer’s notoriously ambiguous epithet ‘polutropos’ means qualities of character, where Mendelsohn’s ‘who had so many roundabout ways /To wander’ leaves the types of wandering—experiential, psychological, geographical—open to interpretation. His shrewd decision to avoid the standard ‘city’ for the ptoliethron of Troy reminds us that this ‘keep’ was no modern conurbation but a fortress with high defensive walls—which Odysseus had enabled his comrades to penetrate by the ruse of the wooden horse. Such intense intellectual activity has motored his aesthetic choices throughout the remaining 12,107 lines. Where Merrill uses archaisms (‘scion’, ‘no whit’, ‘hither’), and in his desire for fidelity to Homer reproduces word order that is almost incomprehensible in English,  Mendelsohn steers an impeccable course between sounding contemporary and preserving the melancholy and grandeur of the Greek. I would have preferred him not to capitalise the first letter of each line, however; for the reader (though not the listener), this somewhat disrupts the fine flow of the enjambement to which his translation is gloriously sensitive.

         Mendelsohn brilliantly conveys how Homeric lines roll forward hypnotically, each arranged around six rhythmical pulses, vocalized in two clusters or asymmetrical half-lines. They have a measurable physiological impact: medical research has shown that patients’ heart and respiratory rates decelerate when they read them. Yet, since Alexander Pope’s bestseller (1725), many Odyssey translators have chosen the indigenous English iambic pentameter, including Emily Wilson in her vivid, fast-paced Odyssey (2017); Mendelsohn could have refrained in his introductory essay from dyspeptic criticism of the difficulties cramming Homeric verses into iambics without losing words. There is more than room for diverse up-to-date renderings of this timeless poem: my undergraduates love Wilson’s breezy modernity.  But Mendelsohn is correct that only the dactylic hexameter can express the acoustic resonance of the original; since this metre did not relate to the predominantly iambic natural rhythm of Greek speech, Homer sounded elevated and even unearthly to his ancient audiences—an effect worth reproducing.

The dispute about the appropriate metre for Homeric translation is centuries old. German poets controversially attempted hexameter Odysseys in the 18th century; Goethe’s friend Vasily Zhukovsky’s Russian hexameter translation, however, made an incalculable impression on Slavic aesthetic culture in 1849. It was Matthew Arnold whose On Translating Homer (1861), in response to the turgid ersatz Anglo-Saxon Iliad by UCL Classics Professor Francis Newman (1856), made a cogent case for reviving the ancient metre. Poets including Longfellow and Kingsley began experimenting with it in original poems, and numerous clunky, mediocre hexameter versions of Homer soon followed.

What I feel Mendelsohn has appreciated, in the way most of them have not, is the connection between the Odyssey’s maritime content and the rolling effect of its broad-sweeping verse: as Samuel Taylor Coleridge put it in ‘The Homeric Hexameter’ (1803), 

Strongly it bears us along in swelling and limitless billows,

Nothing before and nothing behind but the sky and the ocean.

 

When Jorge Luis Borges’ eyesight began to fail, he spoke of divining the ‘murmur of glory and hexameters…of black vessels searching the sea for a beloved isle’. The highest compliment I can pay Mendelsohn is that his translation of my favourite episode, Odysseus’ heroic swim to Phaeacia, is the most excitingly energetic I’ve ever read: Odysseus ‘Straddled a plank with his legs as if he were riding a racehorse’. He heard ‘the thundering thud of the reef as the sea crashed against it/ Since the massive swells were dashing against the shoreline, roaring /Fearfully, everything frothed with foam churned up from the sea’. I doubt that even Nolan’s movie can make this ordeal remotely as visceral and spectacular.

Preserving Democracy & Resisting Tyranny with Aristotle

Friends, especially Americans, and people I’ve encountered recently are all asking the same question: when democracy, free speech, truthful journalism and civil society are under attack, and governments are under the influence of malign and financially rapacious individuals, how are ‘ordinary’ people to fight back? 

One answer to this question lies in Aristotle’s dazzling dissection in his Politics 5 of the mechanisms implemented by tyrants to perpetuate their power. He had personally survived several years as a hired hand in the murderous, faction-ridden court of a brutal despot, Philip II of Macedon, and he knew whereof he spoke. 

If a tyrant is to survive, says Aristotle, he must not only silence outstanding opponents but wipe out all the social habits that, by fostering frequent friendly interactions, bind communities together (1313a-b). The customs he identifies as particularly threatening to a tyranny’s perpetuation (practices which were standard in the Athenian democracy where he preferred to live) have always intrigued me. He lists them as these: 

• public, communal eating; 

• membership of clubs and societies; 

• education, including study-circles and other arenas for debate. 

The reason is that such activities engender in those who participate not only intelligent sharing of information but a sense of self-worth, and, crucially, mutual trust. These forms of companionship and sharing of leisure-time, interests, information and views not only make people of different households more educated, but help them to know and understand each other better. 

This congenial and cooperative social fabric ultimately makes it impossible for the tyrant to “divide and rule”. So there is one way to resist--through our everyday behaviours--the atmosphere of suspicion and ignorance the tyrant needs to foster, and that is to participate in a friendly manner in all such interactions and collective activities. 

Get out for a pub meal and talk to other diners; carry on with your quiz nights, photography classes, sports teams and church choirs; enrol for that course at the local Institute of Continuing Education; put down your phone and talk to your postman or window cleaner; start up conversations with your shop assistant, fellow passengers on the train or your taxi driver. 

Discuss, debate, befriend, be kind: no tyrant has ever succeeded in overwhelming a community that behaved as if it were not ruled by a tyrant. Today I'm going to celebrate the blossom in a local wood with other tree-lovers, and then to the pub for banter. Get out there.  It is up to us.