P.'s translations of Homer, published by Oxford University Press, will be a welcome arrow to add to the Homeric quiver of many British and American College and University professors.
The current review addresses two distinct volumes, one containing a complete translation of the Odyssey, and the other containing selections from the Iliad and Odyssey, anthologising excerpts of P.'s earlier Iliad translation (selections from Books 1–6; 8–9; 11–16; 18–24) and his new Odyssey (selections from Books 1; 4–6; 8–13; 16–17; 19; 21–4).
Upon first looking into P.'s Odyssey, one is immediately struck by a perhaps faintly heretical appreciation of how useful these editions of Homer will be for university instructors. At least in the States, a majority of students enter college knowing very little about Homer, and understanding very little about why the Iliad and Odyssey are significant. It is thus a great boon that, from start to finish, P. presents his work as a helpmeet to teachers. A companion website offers ‘audio files of key passages that I read aloud’. The introduction and text both are liberally sown with maps (including a helpful adaptation of Lorimer's map of Odysseus' palace in Map VI, Odyssey) and timelines (starting with ‘c. 1200 bc: Fall of Troy’ and culminating in ‘1991: Connection of invention of alphabet with recording of Homeric poems').
P.'s visual aids flirt evocatively with recent trends in Homeric scholarship in a sometimes frustratingly unacknowledged manner: for example, p. xix of the Odyssey features a large map of Ithaca and Cephallenia, including even ‘Eumaios' hut’ on Ithaca. The map seems a tacit rebuttal of Bittlestone, Diggle and Understone's geologically-founded thesis that the ‘real’ Ithaca was Cephallenia rather than Thiaki (not to mention Dörpfeld's Leucadian Ithaca hypothesis).
So, too, with his note on Od. 13.14: ‘He seems to be referring to the twelve chieftains of the Phaeacians, each of whom would donate a tripod and cauldron, and presumably the thirteenth would be the gift of Alkinoos. These are valuable gifts'. P. offers the classroom instructor a golden opportunity to advert to the discovery of thirteen bronze tripods in Polis Bay by S. Benton, and to I. Malkin's discussion of the same. While such touches afford valuable jumping-off points for instructors in college mythology classes to expatiate on fun facts external to the textbook, one wishes that P. had given non-specialist teachers more hints as to where the trail of breadcrumbs he drops through such details might lead them.
Though the introduction to the full-length Odyssey translation may prove too dogged in its zeal to advance P.'s own theory of the origins of the Greek alphabet for the taste of some readers, it is nevertheless extremely useful, providing a cogent and engaging overview of scholarly approaches to the ‘Homeric Question’. If there is a thesis to the introduction, it is the strangeness of Homer, the impenetrability of his hapax legomena and the alienness of his culture – a meditation which serves well to justify the value in modern readers engaging seriously, attentively and deeply with Homer's epics.
Disappointingly, P. opted to include a much less expansive introduction to his anthologised Homer's Iliad and Odyssey: the Essential Books, which contains a much more cursory summary of the plots of Homer's epics. The laconic character of this introduction may result from the circumstance that P.'s tacit target audience here is students currently using or freshly graduated from his excellent Introduction to Classical Mythology; nevertheless, the Odyssey introduction, with its many supplementary images and stirring evocation of the strangeness of Homer's language and world, would have served the needs of many readers of The Essential Books better than what P. ends up giving them.
Aliquando bonus P. (or his editor) dormitat. In both introductions, there are a few errors of the sort which inevitably creep into first editions: ‘Homer was such an aoidoi [sic]’ (p. 2 of The Essential Books). Other errors are simply odd: one is puzzled, for example, to learn that ‘the Adapter [of the newly-invented Greek alphabet] also added three new signs to the series of unpronounceable signs: F, X, and C’ (p. 15 of The Odyssey = Φ, Χ, Ψ?).
P. has recourse to a number of verbal and poetic devices to convey the strangeness upon which he expatiates in his introduction, in which his rather edifying knack for lapidary and apophthegmatic utterance first surfaces (‘It is a remarkable situation’; ‘Here is the puzzle of the Homeric poems: You cannot have Homer without the alphabet, but in Homer there is no writing’). This same paratactic compositional style also at times affords the translation itself a quick pace which admirably mimics some of the effects achieved by Homer's own versatile manipulation of spondaic and dactylic feet.
In the cinematic rapidity of action sequences, in particular, P.'s translation shines brightly. Take, for example, Antinoös' death in the Mnesterophonia:
This translation is not just reasonably true to the word order and sense of the Greek; it also conveys the shock and the quick, staccato pace of the violence through a range of devices, such as the strategic word placement and enjambment (the finality of ‘the cup fell / from his hand’ for Homer's δέπας δέ οἱ ἔκπεσε χειρὸς), and the alliteration of voiceless velar and dental stops, fading into fricatives, and returning to dental stops at the ends of words and of cola (‘He quickly / kicked the table away, hitting it with his foot, and he / spilled his food on the ground’).
As is inevitable in any translation of Homer, not every passage arrests, and scholars who have found in the mellifluous undulations of Chapman's Jacobean lyrical rhapsodies echoes of Homer's πολυωφλοισβοῖο θαλάσσης (an evocative and onomatopoeic adjective which P. renders as ‘resounding’) may encounter some disappointment in the impossibly over-translated proems and other purple passages.
Nevertheless, even when traversing such well-worn six-lane highways among the paths of song, P. offers his share of deft tricks. For example, he renders Od. 1.1–2 ‘Sing to me of the resourceful man, O Muse, who wandered / far after he had sacked the sacred citadel of Troy’. If Chapman's (and Homer's) music completely evades P. here (compare Chapman's, ‘The man, O Muse, inform, that many a way / Wound with his wisdom to his wished stay’), P. still manages to convey important nuance. He neatly splices the adjective πολύτροπον, an epithet often celebrated for its sublimely well-suited applicability to Odysseus, who is a man of many turns both geographical and ethical, into two adjectives, importing the implication of ethical polytropeia through the word ‘resourceful’, and of geographical travels by bringing πλάγχθη (‘wandered’) up from line 2 to the end of line 1. If the final effect is prosy, the handling of this issue is nevertheless to be admired.
Both volumes are on the whole well and thoughtfully translated and edited. P.'s new Homer is admirably suited both for a general readership and for the specialised needs of today's college and advanced high school classrooms, and should be considered a strong alternative to favourite old standbys like Fagles, Lattimore and Lombardo by those currently engaged in drafting textbook orders, or simply looking for a pleasurable read.
