Making my way through Pope’s Iliad again, I’m struck by its quickness, its poignancy--ultimately its poetry, after reading so much of Fagles. Take the following passage, from the first book, in which Achilles ends the quarrel with Agamemnon. I’ll use Richmond Lattimore’s translation first, which is wonderfully runs line-for-line, as a sort of neutral rendering of the scene:
“So must I be called of no account a coward
if I must carry out every order you may happen to give me.
Tell other men to do these things, but give me no more
commands, since I for my part have no intention to obey you.
And put away in your thoughts this other thing I tell you.
With my hands I will not fight for the girl’s sake, neither
with you nor any other man, since you take her away who gave her.
But of all the other things that are mine beside my fast black
ship, you shall take nothing away against my pleasure.
Come, then, only try it, that these others may see also;
instantly your own black blood will stain my spearpoint.”
So these two after battling in words of contention
stood up, and broke the assembly beside the ships of the Achaians.
Peleus’ son went back to his balanced ships and his shelter
with Patroklos, Menoitos’ son, and his own companions.
But the son of Atreus drew a fast ship down to the water
and allotted into it twenty rowers and put on board it
the hecatomb for the god and Chryseis of the fair cheeks
leading her by the hand. And in charge went crafty Odysseus.
These then putting out went over the ways of the water
while Atreus’ son told his people to wash off their defilement.
And they washed it away and threw the washings into the salt sea.
Then they accomplished perfect hecatombs to Apollo,
of bulls and goats along the beach of the barren salt sea.
The savour of the burning swept in circles up to the bright sky.
-Lattimore, 293-317.
Now for Fagles:
“What a worthless, burnt-out coward I’d be called
if I would submit to you and all your orders,
whatever you blurt out. Fling them at others,
don’t give me commands!
Never again, I trust, will Achilles yield to you.
And I tell you this--take it to heart--I warn you--
my hands will never do battle for that girl,
neither with you, King, nor any man Alive.
You Achaeans gave her, now you’ve snatched her back.
But all the rest I possess beside my fast black ship--
not one bit of it can you seize against my will, Atrides.
Come, try it! So the men can see, that instant,
your black blood gush and spurt around my spear!”
Once the two had fought it out with words,
battling face-to-face, both spring to their feet
and broke up the muster beside the Argive squadrons.
Achilles strode off to his trim ships and shelters,
back to his friend Patroclus and their comrades.
Agamemnon had a vessel hauled down to the sea,
he picked out twenty oarsmen to man her locks,
put aboard the cattle for sacrifice to the god
and led Chryseis in all her beauty amidships.
Versatile Odysseus took the helm as captain. All embarked,
the party launched out on the sea’s foaming lanes
while the sons of Atreus told his troops to wash,
to purify themselves from the filth of plague.
They scoured it off, threw scourings in the surf
and sacrificed to Apollo full-grown bulls and goats
along the beaten shore of the fallow barren sea
and savory smoke went swirling up the skies.
-Fagles, p. 87, lines 342-372
Now, for Pope:
Tyrant, I well deserv'd thy galling Chain,
To live thy Slave, and still to serve in vain,
Should I submit to each unjust Decree:
Command thy Vassals, but command not Me.
Seize on Briseïs, whom the Grecians doom'd
My Prize of War, yet tamely see resum'd;
And seize secure; No more Achilles draws
His conqu'ring Sword in any Woman's Cause.
The Gods command me to forgive the past;
But let this first Invasion be the last;
For know, thy Blood, when next thou dar'st invade,
Shall stream in Vengeance on my reeking Blade.
At this, they ceas'd; the stern Debate expir'd:
The Chiefs in sullen Majesty retir'd.
Achilles with Patroclus took his Way.
Where near his Tents his hollow Vessels lay.
Mean time Atrides launch'd with num'rous Oars
A well-rigg'd Ship for Chrysa's sacred Shores:
High on the Deck was fair Chruseïs plac'd,
And sage Ulysses with the Conduct grac'd:
Safe in her Sides the Hecatomb they stow'd,
Then swiftly sailing, cut the liquid Road.
The Host to expiate next the King prepares,
With pure Lustrations, and with solemn Pray'rs.
Wash'd by the briny Wave, the pious Train
Are cleans'd, and cast th'Ablutions in the Main.
Along the Shore whole Hecatombs were laid,
And Bulls and Goats to Phoebus' Altars paid.
The sable Fumes in curling Spires arise,
And waft their grateful Odours to the Skies.
-Pope, lines 388-417
Isn’t it amazing how quicker Pope seems! Of course, the thing to remember is just how few lines Lattimore takes to do everything: he uses twenty-four unrhymed six-beat lines. But it’s still sort of unbelievable how much Fagles just sloshes through the whole narrative here: even when he’s allowed the incredible looseness of Lattimore’s line, he needs thirty of them! Pope, of course, uses 30 lines as well, but these are heroic couplets, rhymed and (perhaps what is more remarkable, given how much both Lattimore and--again with less excuse--Fagles uses them) unenjambed. Indeed, if we consider that this means Pope used pairs of lines in iambic pentameter, we realize he almost uses less beats than Lattimore: Pope only has six more, or 150 to Lattimore’s 144. Fagles, however, takes 180 beats to say the same thing, without even having to use iambs or regular feet at all like Pope does.
Of course, poetry isn’t about trying to say things in the least amount of lines or beats or whatever. But Fagles in particular knows swiftness is still a major part of poetry (and especially translations that aim to be poetry) since the sense of rapidity we get when reading verse is often a trace of the economy of poetic language, of the fact that poetry does a lot with a little. So he tries continually to speed things up himself in the passage. Except all of his techniques--using dashes, exclamations, and plenty of deixis (all techniques taken from prose writing, by the way)--don’t seem to do anything at all except shift around register of the poem in a way that is as American as it is uncomfortable.
Pope on the other hand smoothly economizes, particularly embarrassing Fagles by never having to have recourse to something as textual or un-oral (except that this is how Fagles oddly thinks he can make a more performative, oral version of the Greek--seeming to solve things by confusing the issue) in the use of italics. Where Fagles says,
What a worthless, burnt-out coward I’d be called
if I would submit to you and all your orders,
whatever you blurt out. Fling them at others,
don’t give me commands!
Never again, I trust, will Achilles yield to you
Pope says,
Tyrant, I well deserv'd thy galling Chain,
To live thy Slave, and still to serve in vain,
Should I submit to each unjust Decree:
Command thy Vassals, but command not Me.
What’s so unbelievable in Pope’s version is the comprehension of the argument of each speech, the willingness to let the wrath of Achilles come from the force of the point he his making, where Fagles is much more willing to think that the rage comes from the breaking up of the speech, its fragmentation, Achilles’ stuttering.
At the same time, of course, this intense and compressed interplay of meaning and emphasis makes Pope lose a lot of the actual Greek. It’s worth thinking about exactly what we mean by “actual,” though. If we were trained to have a wider sense of the registers and functions of language--particularly the ways grammar opens up into rhetoric and combines with form--we might be more willing to see Pope as just trying to translate the Greek using many of less literal functions, rather than as actually being unfaithful to the original. In other words, we might be willing to argue that what we see as Pope not giving us the actual Greek--not reproducing things like its particular syntactical structures, or changing and refocusing the vehicle of various metaphors rather than giving the nearest English equivalent of them--is really just the exploitation of different techniques which do actually attempt to indeed give us the actual Greek. The emphasis upon the argument of the speeches (something he defends in his Preface as Homer’s moral and didactic aim), for example, which requires the introduction of certain metaphors not present in the original and particularly the introduction of un-Homeric grammatical structures, we could see as just the working of various rhetorical and formal devices--of which we have such limited understanding now and over which we have such little control. What’s at work in Pope, in short, may likely be something other than an extremely literalist notion of translation, where there’s no sense that rhetoric or verse form can help to translate: both of these things seem like fancy grammar getting in the way of the sense, or some effort to “clean up” the Greek. So there’s something to be said for Pope letting “Command thy vessels, but command not me” do so much work (when combined with a similar parallel structure “To live thy Slave, and still to serve in vain” two lines earlier), when we see Fagles use two unrelated phrases “Fling them [orders] at others, / don’t give me commands!” and emphasis in another.
This registered, what is so unbelievably great about Fagles’ translation is the extent to which it takes this literalist sort of fidelity and tries to turn it into poetry, give it something more than the bland, cold, cynical impulse which (except in classicists, for whom it is a way of respecting the original) typically lies behind it: seizing upon the general aim of Lattimore’s work, which is straightforward translation of sense and grammar (and which is not empty of poetry--I prefer it to Fitzgerald explicit attempts to make each line poetic, actually), and he intensifies the accuracy by finding something like the exact equivalent of the expressive force of the Greek as well. And he finds the words to do this in a distinctly American vocabulary, which is why such a big deal is made about this translation: it really feels like the first really modern American version of Homer. Again, this is exciting and disturbing at once, because that vocabulary, we find, is the demanding, stressed, whiny voice of hyperindividuals:
What I really want
is to keep my people safe, not see them dying.
-Lines 136-7
Only when we move away from Agamemnon’s speeches to the world of the Odyssey--and even then to the more pastoral scenes with Eumaeus--does the voice captured in so many idiomatic uses (“want” above being a particularly American use of the word) seem a bit less stressed, more sane, playful:
“My friend,” the swineherd answered, foreman of men,
“you really want my story? So many questions—well,
listen in quiet, then, and take your ease, sit back
and drink your wine. The nights are endless now.
We’ve plenty of time to sleep or savor a long tale.
No need, you know, to turn in before the hour.
Even too much sleep can be a bore.
But anyone else who feels the urge
can go to bed and then, at the crack of dawn,
break bread, turn out and tend our master’s pigs.
We two will keep to the shelter here, eat and drink
and take some joy in each other’s heartbreaking sorrows,
sharing each other’s memories. Over the years, you know,
a man finds solace even in old sorrows, true, a man
who’s weathered many blows and wandered many miles.
-The Odyssey, Penguin, Book 15
And even though we do have a great complaint (“Even too much sleep can be a bore”) this is humorous: “be a bore” has a sort of eagerness and sense of fun about it that couldn’t be uttered in the UK without some sense that it can slip into a sort of sourness, playful whinging.
But my point in all this is that very seldom does rhetoric or versification have a role in helping along the poetic force of the language. Indeed I like “Even too much sleep can be a bore” so much because it actually seems to approach a more regular line. With five-beats, it starts with a trochee at the beginning which you want to sort of keep continuing, then aren’t sure whether it should have slipped into a dactyl; by this point though your indecision makes your resolve to turn things into something anapestic--you’re within some sort of rhythm and are feeling it out--and this turns the line around so that it can be finished off with iambs, which are definite and rewarding and regular. This is extremely odd in a poem where the line seems so loose, so shaggy (even for a line with mere beats), that it seems to have no real role as a line except to be broken up (this is only more apparent in Fagles’ Aeneid).
In short, the language is left to fend for itself, as it were, as Fagles is concerned only with creating poetry by expressiveness and narration. These aren’t bad things in themselves--the last especially--but we can’t help but feel they are symptoms of a sort of despairing view of the role of poetry (one I think we might be on the verge of surmounting) where aim of poetry in the face of so many postmodern weirdnesses and media revolutions is to try and simply tell a story, any story, and give some sense that language is doing something, anything. The telling of stories doesn’t need to involve a position that is this desperate, one whose other reactionary side (which Fagles thankfully couldn’t care less about) involves reducing everything of this world to narrative and linguistic weirdness, so as to show there are more stories than we think. Storytelling and poetry happen in between somewhere, and conceding so much, and seeing such a huge role for the expressivity of various idioms, sets you against versification and rhetoric just like the forces you oppose--and many people do read Fagles and sometimes think they are just reading prose.
Nevertheless, if the role for such an American English isn’t wholly defined, Fagles’ collection and presentation so much vocabulary is something on the way towards renewing or making fresh a certain very old poetic task, involving both establishing the language of the people and finding fitting dialects for particular linguistic tasks. Indeed, Fagles and Pope actually aren’t too far apart in appreciating this in the author they translate (though Fagles accomplishes it as well and with creativity), since this task involves making language work with the poem. I’ll close with Pope in his Preface, who sees this helping with the meter of the work--in Fagles we might only need to substitute something more general and fundamental that is facilitated by such an immense and worthwhile task, like storytelling itself:
He was not satisfied with his language as he found it settled in any one part of Greece, but searched through its different dialects with this particular view, to beautify and perfect his numbers he considered these as they had a greater mixture of vowels or consonants, and accordingly employed them as the verse required either a greater smoothness or strength. Thus his measures,
instead of being fetters to his sense, were always in readiness to run along with the warmth of his rapture, and even to give a further representation of his notions, in the correspondence of their sounds to what they signified.
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