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).