Fagles' English

I will be talking a lot about translations of the classics in the coming months, as I will be teaching the Odyssey when the semester begins. In particular, there is a lot to say about Robert Fagles' stark translation which we will be reading. Right now, I'll simply say that as I read it this summer I found it immensely exciting and slightly disturbing at the same time: the colloquialisms are just inspired, but often come from an American business-English that shames rather than surprises you, it is so crass. I never thought I'd hear Homer talk of "prime cuts" (in Book 3) something a yuppie buys for potential clients:

They roasted the prime cuts, pulled them off the spits,
and sharing out the portions, fell to the royal feast.

It's not that the phrase in question is a bastardization of Homer--though the old idea of the primitive nobility of Homer obviously bears on all reflections that go down this line. Indeed, it is better than the straightforward Lattimore:

When they had roasted and taken off the spits the outer
meats, dividing shares they held their communal high feast.

No: the issue is rather that translation of an epic freezes language, sets it off, allows us to inspect it, and thus can easily turn into a critique as well as a celebration of a culture. (This is even more the case with Fagles' recently released Aeneid, which has however been praised much more unreservedly. Here I am even more astonished to see trees, in the famous description of the harbor where Aeneas lands in the first book, loom over cliffs "as a backdrop": "Both sides of the harbor, rock cliffs tower, crowned / by twin crags [...] Over them as a backdrop looms a quivering wood"). And while there's nothing wrong about "prime cuts," it has a certain forceful compression, a blatant directness which, demanding the subordination of its potential richness as a metonymy to a mere descriptive function, pretends to concision rather than achieves it. The phrase's fitness seems to come precisely from its ability to label something for quick consumption, and we can't help but wonder why.

Particularly agitating is the phrase's insensitivity to more elliptical grammatical structure, or rather the way it makes you feel as if all other structures are elliptical. This makes me think long and hard about what happens to the other parts of language in this version, like the expunging of the great Homeric "but." Here it is, in Lang and Butcher's version of the famous invocation, which like Lattimore sticks close to the Greek:

But he saved not his company, though he desired it sore. For through the blindness of their own hearts they perished, fools, who devoured the oxen of Helios Hyperion: but the god took from them their day of returning.

Even though most other translations (Mandelbaum's, Lattimore's, Fitzgerald's, even Cowper's and Chapman's, to go back further) do something similar, in Fagles' version, we get the added sense that such wonderful grammatical surprise would be too complicated, too oblique (though to do him credit, Fagles does include this "but" in the opening of his Iliad). It sets up all sorts of play between expectation and outcome--as Empson so wonderfully argues in Some Versions of Pastoral--the antiquated concerns of a world full of gods. Here, those concerns are at most thematic, if not simply irrelevant: certainly they never intrude on the level of the sentence. So while other translations make an attempt to soften this disjunction that is really a conjunction (via "even so," "therefore"), the solution for Fagles is to erase the problem:

But he could not save them from disaster, hard as he strove--
the recklessness of their own ways destroyed them all,
the blind fools, they devoured the cattle of the Sun
and the Sungod wiped from sight the day of their return.

The effort to shift the play over to tension between two metaphors of blindness ("blind fools" and "wiped from sight") is too neat, and is what really makes this an intolerance of indirectness, an erasure: acting as if metaphor could carry the whole burden of grammar just makes it clear that grammar is now a burden, a hindrance, something keeping us from the story. It is a shift of emphasis that only works on larger scales, in giving you a different holistic experience of the poem that is both more and less metaphoric (more because there simply is more; less because metaphor is trivialized or flattened when it is used so freely, with minimal relation to grammar or other figures), and Fagles carries it out wonderfully. But on the small scale, it makes us feel something is more than lost: that last "and" is sacrificed to some mistaken notion (which is ours more than it is Fagles') of communicability, clarity, plain speaking. And so, even though Homer still isn't bastardized, we feel he might be dumbed-down.

The verbs are more pleasing, however. I particularly enjoy "falling to" in the passage on the meat, above. It is so blandly metaphoric that, like "prime cuts," it similarly makes us retreat from any inquiry into the thing. But instead of disturbing us, we are now content with calling it "idiom," and remembering just how metaphoric our English is. The empty language for action has an appeal for us that an empty language for things just can't: here, directness becomes numinous, and makes the translation fresh and exciting.

But this makes it only more clear that, unlike a truly plain and simple translation (which we can find in Stanley Lombardo's wonderful new version), the purpose of Fagles' translation is to provoke us, to reveal to us the ramifications of our attitudes in language. What's so fascinating about Fagle's Homer, and the reason why his sometimes overhyped translations are worth looking at, isn't his Homer, but his English.