The Iliad
translated by peter green
university of california,
608 pages, $29.95
A
translator of Homer is like a pentathlete, who needs not just sheer stamina but a variety of skills. The first example of European literary writing adapts episodes of the Trojan War myth from a long, winding oral tradition. Homeric poetry speaks of the excitements of the Archaic period (among them a handy new alphabet and the revival of trade), the breakdowns of the recently ended dark age, and the Mycenaean warrior and palace society. Some narrative elements appear not even to be Bronze Age but instead Neolithic. Only a profound and patient scholar can even comprehend all this.
Moreover, the Iliad and the Odyssey are works of singular genius—whether a single man (called “Homer”?) composed them or not. The Iliad’s few weeks of action late in the ten-year Trojan War, and the Odyssey’s homecoming adventures of a single veteran, constitute a tour de force at the beginning of Western poetry. “Homer” blends freshness and tradition, heart-stopping beauty and hard-headed reasoning, violence and tenderness, the drama of the moment and the contemplative gaze down eternity, all to incomparable effect. Any translator of Homer needs to aspire to the same.
But a translator has to do this starting from poetic modes that don’t exist in English. Hardest of all to imitate—but very important to vindicate—is the meter of epic, which depended for its basic rhythms on how long a speaker paused on different types of syllables, not on which ones he emphasized. A syllable with a long vowel, or a syllable ending in two consonants, was dwelt on roughly twice as long as other syllables, regardless of which one in a word was stressed in ordinary speech—stress making no significant difference in the time it took to say a syllable. Thus, the Iliad’s first word, the Greek for “rage,” was pronounced simply máynin outside poetry, but within it had that first long-vowel syllable drawn out, and that drawing out was more audible than the accent. English has only stress meters. To link the two systems through translation is a little like trying to represent on Earth paintings from a planet that has a different color spectrum than ours.
