Showing posts with label Homer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Homer. Show all posts
Thursday, September 30, 2010
How I learned to stop worrying and love the Fagles
...It teaches well. 'Nuff said. I still prefer the Fitzgerald Aeneid (for its brilliant and beautiful attempts to define a high style in American English, which I think is more like what Virgil was doing), but the more and more I work with it, I get over the shock of the rawness of Fagles' Homer and appreciate the poetry in that very quality: brutal, quick (if you read it aloud, not silently), yet capacious, it seems to really connect with the students. One still can't get over how frightening this is sometimes: you start to see that the Greek world of the poem might feel a little too close to how things are now, with intense, almost savage forms of honorific struggle among so many uncertainties, which seem to swoop down like so many gods from above... But there's something disturbing--and something that should be disturbing--in all such identifications. I can't recommend it enough.
Thursday, September 16, 2010
Liking Homer straight
I reflected a little while ago on the English of Robert Fagles' translations, not to criticize the translation, but to criticize us who use it--so accurately does Fagles capture contemporary English in all its range. What I mainly wanted to document was basically that English in America lacks the registers that it had in the past, or that if it has registers (low, middle, and high styles), it never subordinates itself to decorum. Now, I'm not saying that this is really a bad thing. Decorum is one of those concepts that looks more internal to the language than it is, when it is really something that comes from a whole cultural agenda: you have to want culture to function a certain way (and have to just expect it to work a certain way, grow up learning that it works that way) in order to appeal to it. "Impact" or "catchiness" might be a more contemporary version of something similar: but you see the sort of assumptions the use of the term makes about how culture should function. And these assumptions don't invalidate the thing either, by the way: they just inform the use of the term and certain appeals to it.
The only thing is that decorum is one of those more fundamental sorts of concepts, which actually contain the idea of a sort of functioning culture within them: it sets the bar really low, in the sense that all it really expects culture should be is something that has a function. Even then, though, decorum projects a certain type of culture that is more functional than... not functioning. I'd say that Britain still has a sense of decorum in speech, if only because they seem to have a sense that the threat of the fragmentation of a functional culture (a culture with a social purpose) is what we get when we lose it (which may or may not be the case). Of course, they also have a longer history of invoking the term and know what happens when it is invoked (particularly throughout the 18th century). All this tends to color certain battles over the use of dialects there: we have something like that, of course, but it seems less, well, important here. Nothing much is at stake culturally in the use of a particular dialect, though it seems to say something about the language user, and vaguely bring up some stupid worry about culture's "decline" (think of the "debates" over rap lyrics, etc.). They are colored as dialects before any sort of rich concept of their cultural function can be developed, and so decorum is never really invoked: only "broadcasting standards," "free speech," etc.
To come to my point: American English mixes what we might have thought was the low and the high. And what is sort of wonderful about this is that it allows us to get some sense of Homer's Greek. This is what I think Fagles is really getting at when he says in an interview that "the English tend to like their Homer, as they take it, 'straight,' meaning in prose. We tend to like our Homer in verse, and I think that may tend to explain why American Homer—American translations, in fact—are with us." He's also referencing his belief that Homer should be less "literary" in the stuffy sense and rather something that should be picked up often, thumbed through, dogeared (though this seems like that make the thing pretty "literary" to me). We like our literature to be a performance, or, in other words, an event. Seems pretty accurate, but concedes too much to an idea of "the media." But the main point is, I think, that rather than something without decorum, England would have nothing. That's a bit of an England-hating statement, but it's important to be biased in these matters: not because of any sort of nationalism, but because that's how you argue about literature an international level (which we should distinguish from a "comparative" sort of point of view). But again it seems right: we don't care about decorum, and so we can actually give you something approximating a real visceral sort of language--and this seems to be very much like what Homer himself (that is, the collective subject we refer to as "Homer") is trying to do.
I applauded Fagles' Odyssey more than the Iliad, because Homer does this more successfully in that poem, blending the mythic and the everyday in a way that Longinus once smartly pointed out (even though he also hated it: it's not that one should decide between the two, but that mix should to be a sort of strong combination, rather than a dissolution of the two terms). But, that said, both really do give something like an idea of Greekishness (I hesitate to say Greek), or rather bring it to life in a sort of new way: we're not dealing with the old stereotypes of Homer that, for so many in England over the years, have kept him and his language in place, somewhere with respect to decorum. I'm warming to these translations, in other words, as poetry. Where I think you see the failure of this sort of approach is in something requiring decorum: the Aeneid. We just don't have what it takes to do this right, on some level, and though Fagles tries, there's just no high style in English that he really can inhabit that will do the job. Robert Fitzgerald, on the other hand, does, but by working with the meter Fagles here doesn't really elect to use--probably because its Miltonic background is just too imposing. But working against the lack of decorum on the one hand and the foreign rhythms creeping into American English on the other, Fitzgerald gives us a nice approximation, building decorum from the ground up, relying on its American sounds rather than its sense (Fagles does the latter marvellously, but neglects the former I think--something again that works better for the Greek than the Latin).
All this reveals that the directness of the American English may be a sort of simulacrum of the Homer, rather than an approximation of it, if we just sit back and don't really feel the English as English, or just expect that what we're getting is Homer in English. We should try and hear an Americanized Homer, as Fagles says, rather than just Homer and American English. Translation is just not about transparency in this sort of simplistic sense: it is about a transparency that is really a sort of combination, addition, which you have to look twice as hard at--and often can enjoy twice as much. But this really means thinking about what then in the Fagles is poetic: we have to sort of invent this much like Fitzgerald does with the Latin. That's a task that is wonderfully left open by Fagles, I think, and gets me exited that the translation is so popular. It's not only great that that so many people are really reading verse: Fagles also really encourages us to look at all the savagery of the Iliad, and treat it less like a "movie" (the parody of a real movie, full of "scenes," to which we now reduce our coneption of novels), than, well, verse poetry in some really undefined, new, American sense.
This was what was important in Fagles' work, I think, for Bernard Knox, though he might not have put it in these terms: their openness, combined with their immediateness, visceral directness (which is not of a cinematic or mediactic type) opens up the possibility that the classics can become relevant in a way that they never really seemed to be in the 20th century. At the same time, his recent death I think marks the end of an era where this sort of openness could be entertained as a possibility of renewal, at the same time as it was used conceptually to undermine the classics Knox defended: now, I think, we actually have to pursue the renewal or the destruction. This means in a sense that the arguments Knox often made are now a bit irrelevant, either because we've benefitted from his efforts or because what he opposed has changed. Arguments about "radical feminists," which really meant classical scholar Eva Keuls, undermining the bases of Western culture are now quite absurd to entertain, because they have exhausted their local purpose just as much as the tactics Knox opposed--and often played more into the hands of those who wanted to get rid of the humanities altogether than those like Keuls who wanted to change it. The game has changed (we now can see that "multiculturalism," the other term he opposed, might have been something much better to focus on, rather than the people who were stupidly killing the Women's Movement that by making sex into violence and victimization--though this did have measurable benefits in making rape and domestic violence much more visible [and prosecutable]) and as we reread these texts we should keep this in mind, I think, especially when the people truly undermining Western culture of whatever sort are those who would focus on this old sort of debate as Knox's only achievement: his NY Times obituary gives him tribute by leaving us with one of his more bitter quotes that is almost twenty (that's 20!!) years old, apparently because replaying early 90's battles in the humanities apparently works better with audiences (and keeps America polarized).
The only thing is that decorum is one of those more fundamental sorts of concepts, which actually contain the idea of a sort of functioning culture within them: it sets the bar really low, in the sense that all it really expects culture should be is something that has a function. Even then, though, decorum projects a certain type of culture that is more functional than... not functioning. I'd say that Britain still has a sense of decorum in speech, if only because they seem to have a sense that the threat of the fragmentation of a functional culture (a culture with a social purpose) is what we get when we lose it (which may or may not be the case). Of course, they also have a longer history of invoking the term and know what happens when it is invoked (particularly throughout the 18th century). All this tends to color certain battles over the use of dialects there: we have something like that, of course, but it seems less, well, important here. Nothing much is at stake culturally in the use of a particular dialect, though it seems to say something about the language user, and vaguely bring up some stupid worry about culture's "decline" (think of the "debates" over rap lyrics, etc.). They are colored as dialects before any sort of rich concept of their cultural function can be developed, and so decorum is never really invoked: only "broadcasting standards," "free speech," etc.
To come to my point: American English mixes what we might have thought was the low and the high. And what is sort of wonderful about this is that it allows us to get some sense of Homer's Greek. This is what I think Fagles is really getting at when he says in an interview that "the English tend to like their Homer, as they take it, 'straight,' meaning in prose. We tend to like our Homer in verse, and I think that may tend to explain why American Homer—American translations, in fact—are with us." He's also referencing his belief that Homer should be less "literary" in the stuffy sense and rather something that should be picked up often, thumbed through, dogeared (though this seems like that make the thing pretty "literary" to me). We like our literature to be a performance, or, in other words, an event. Seems pretty accurate, but concedes too much to an idea of "the media." But the main point is, I think, that rather than something without decorum, England would have nothing. That's a bit of an England-hating statement, but it's important to be biased in these matters: not because of any sort of nationalism, but because that's how you argue about literature an international level (which we should distinguish from a "comparative" sort of point of view). But again it seems right: we don't care about decorum, and so we can actually give you something approximating a real visceral sort of language--and this seems to be very much like what Homer himself (that is, the collective subject we refer to as "Homer") is trying to do.
I applauded Fagles' Odyssey more than the Iliad, because Homer does this more successfully in that poem, blending the mythic and the everyday in a way that Longinus once smartly pointed out (even though he also hated it: it's not that one should decide between the two, but that mix should to be a sort of strong combination, rather than a dissolution of the two terms). But, that said, both really do give something like an idea of Greekishness (I hesitate to say Greek), or rather bring it to life in a sort of new way: we're not dealing with the old stereotypes of Homer that, for so many in England over the years, have kept him and his language in place, somewhere with respect to decorum. I'm warming to these translations, in other words, as poetry. Where I think you see the failure of this sort of approach is in something requiring decorum: the Aeneid. We just don't have what it takes to do this right, on some level, and though Fagles tries, there's just no high style in English that he really can inhabit that will do the job. Robert Fitzgerald, on the other hand, does, but by working with the meter Fagles here doesn't really elect to use--probably because its Miltonic background is just too imposing. But working against the lack of decorum on the one hand and the foreign rhythms creeping into American English on the other, Fitzgerald gives us a nice approximation, building decorum from the ground up, relying on its American sounds rather than its sense (Fagles does the latter marvellously, but neglects the former I think--something again that works better for the Greek than the Latin).
All this reveals that the directness of the American English may be a sort of simulacrum of the Homer, rather than an approximation of it, if we just sit back and don't really feel the English as English, or just expect that what we're getting is Homer in English. We should try and hear an Americanized Homer, as Fagles says, rather than just Homer and American English. Translation is just not about transparency in this sort of simplistic sense: it is about a transparency that is really a sort of combination, addition, which you have to look twice as hard at--and often can enjoy twice as much. But this really means thinking about what then in the Fagles is poetic: we have to sort of invent this much like Fitzgerald does with the Latin. That's a task that is wonderfully left open by Fagles, I think, and gets me exited that the translation is so popular. It's not only great that that so many people are really reading verse: Fagles also really encourages us to look at all the savagery of the Iliad, and treat it less like a "movie" (the parody of a real movie, full of "scenes," to which we now reduce our coneption of novels), than, well, verse poetry in some really undefined, new, American sense.
This was what was important in Fagles' work, I think, for Bernard Knox, though he might not have put it in these terms: their openness, combined with their immediateness, visceral directness (which is not of a cinematic or mediactic type) opens up the possibility that the classics can become relevant in a way that they never really seemed to be in the 20th century. At the same time, his recent death I think marks the end of an era where this sort of openness could be entertained as a possibility of renewal, at the same time as it was used conceptually to undermine the classics Knox defended: now, I think, we actually have to pursue the renewal or the destruction. This means in a sense that the arguments Knox often made are now a bit irrelevant, either because we've benefitted from his efforts or because what he opposed has changed. Arguments about "radical feminists," which really meant classical scholar Eva Keuls, undermining the bases of Western culture are now quite absurd to entertain, because they have exhausted their local purpose just as much as the tactics Knox opposed--and often played more into the hands of those who wanted to get rid of the humanities altogether than those like Keuls who wanted to change it. The game has changed (we now can see that "multiculturalism," the other term he opposed, might have been something much better to focus on, rather than the people who were stupidly killing the Women's Movement that by making sex into violence and victimization--though this did have measurable benefits in making rape and domestic violence much more visible [and prosecutable]) and as we reread these texts we should keep this in mind, I think, especially when the people truly undermining Western culture of whatever sort are those who would focus on this old sort of debate as Knox's only achievement: his NY Times obituary gives him tribute by leaving us with one of his more bitter quotes that is almost twenty (that's 20!!) years old, apparently because replaying early 90's battles in the humanities apparently works better with audiences (and keeps America polarized).
Friday, August 13, 2010
Dryden's version
Achilles cut him short; and thus replied:
My worth allow'd in words, is in effect denied.
For who but a poltroon, possess'd with fear,
Such haughty insolence can tamely bear?
Command thy slaves: my freeborn soul disdains
A tyrant's curb; and restive, breaks the reins.
Take this along; that no dispute shall rise
(Though mine the woman) for my ravish'd prize:
But, she excepted, as unworthy strife,
Dare not, I charge thee dare not, on thy life,
Touch ought of mine beside, by lot my due,
But stand aloof, and think profane to view:
This falchion, else, not hitherto withstood,
These hostile fields shall fatten with thy blood.
He said; and rose the first: the council broke;
And all their grave consults dissolv'd in smoke.
The royal youth retir'd, on vengeance bent,
Patroclus follow'd silent to his tent.
Mean time, the king with gifts a vessel stores;
Supplies the banks with twenty chosen oars:
And next, to reconcile the shooter god,
Within her hollow sides the sacrifice he stow'd:
Chryseis last was set on board; whose hand
Ulysses took, entrusted with command;
They plough the liquid seas, and leave the lessening land.
Atrides then, his outward zeal to boast,
Bade purify the sin-polluted host.
With perfect hecatombs the god they grac'd;
Whose offer'd entrails in the main were cast.
Black bulls, and bearded goats on altars lie;
And clouds of savory stench involve the sky.
-in Fables Ancient and Modern, lines 411-441
The break in the speech, where Homer makes Achilles' speech buckle under the force of his anger, is wonderfully rendered. Where Pope smoothes it out, and Fagles makes too big a deal of it, Dryden simply repeats: "Dare not, I charge thee dare not, on thy life..." You'll notice it takes advantage of the line, which Dryden always segments deftly: never breaking it up, and never shooting for too much equipoise or balance, he nevertheless uses all its parts to help him out. He doesn't treat the form as an empty container, or rather is happy to let what is transfused (his famous metaphor for translation), settle into the form in this or that way, and be moulded by it. It's like blowing glass, to use another metaphor from manufacture (Dryden, by the way, was fond of these: "the genius of our countrymen in general [is] rather to improve an invention than to invent themselves, as is evident not only in our poetry but in many of our manufactures"). You blow the glass and try to get the shape as perfect as you can, but you're constantly having to negotiate the ways this very fluid material changes, under the influence of time, heat, gravity. So you work with these forces and the changes they make in the material: you turn the shape around, smooth it out, or sometimes puff it out more and change its whole dimension (if you can't get it the way you want it on the small scale, you simply switch scales, shifting between them). You'll see what I mean when you look again at the passage and see the amount of enjambment, and find the heavy use of very hard caesuras--which start as medial but then, falling too early and too late, make the middle of the line a space of action instead of a place of balance (this is why the "Dare not" line is so great).
But there are also just some really crazy, creative choices, which just win you over. "Poltroon" is just amazing, a wonderful blurty sort of word, strange and foreign. It doesn't so much break propriety as transform itself into a cussword--the effect of this being differently forceful. Something similar happens with "in effect," which sounds way too familiar to our ears now but, if you hear it and stress it a little can hear has a wonderful sort of poignancy. There's also "ravish'd," which is quite unexpected, though you might miss it the first time through. And "dissolv'd in smoke." And then a wonderful metonymy, "the shooter god." "And leave the lessening land" is wonderful, and works well with the longer hexameter closing the scene. This also highlights Dryden's relatively sparing use of alliteration and assonance: unlike Pope, who (in my opinion) uses it too much in an effort to speed up the line, Dryden uses it economically, in select moments. This makes it stick.
Overall, though, there is that vigorousness that you can see in the first phrase, "cut him short": what a surprising, fresh way to lead you into the rest of the speech. If both Pope makes Homer energetic, nimble, rapid, restoring what he calls the "light" in the classic, Dryden's version of that energy is a sort of directness, forthrightness, even plainness, a willingness to be satisfied with less and with something rougher, but weirder or more curious.
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Translations of Homer
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.
“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.
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
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.
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.
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