On Apr 8, 2010, at 8:00 AM, [log in to unmask] wrote:

> Hackett publishes /The Essential Iliad/, in Stanley Lombardo's
> translation, which retains a well chosen 1/3 the original, with
> brief summaries of the missing bits, along with a good introduction
> and apparatus. They also do a one-volume /Essential Homer/, which
> offers about 1/2 of each epic (both in the Lombardo translations),
> along with apparatus.

Despite the convenience of Lombardo's "The Essential Homer," his
translation is one of the worst possible introductions to Homer. I
covered Lombardo's translations in "Recent Trends in Classical Verse
Translations" (Syllecta Classica 12). Those who teach him should know
what their students are getting.

Lombardo's "Iliad" and "Odyssey" are essentially scripts for
performance. A performance translation by its very nature takes
extreme liberties with the text. Lombardo is neither equirhythmical
nor accurate, both deficiencies serving the interest of dumbing-down
the English to the level we might hear, as one early reviewer noted,
in a checkout line. He stultifies Homer for a simple reason:
audience--and by extension reader--intolerance for complex verse
narrative. In his case, it is the audience that drives the
performance, not the performance the audience. Performance
translators routinely distort or destroy tonal registers because they
believe that Greek or Latin must sound like highly idiomatic
contemporary American English. In translation theory these are called
domesticating translations. With a few notable exceptions, Lombardo
does not think that Homer's Greek can be rendered with a plain, direct
and fairly neutral diction. Over a third of the "Iliad" and "Odyssey"
is direct reported speech, and here precisely we find his worst abuses
of slang. Lombardo goes far beyond Fagles in degrading dialogue.
There are so many lines awful lines like "You keep your goddamn hands
off her, you hear?" ("Iliad" I.319) that they seem to metastasize and
infect the entire narrative.

Unlike Fagles, Lombardo has a selfdeclared "commitment to the poetic
line" ("Odyssey" 383). He implies that his lines have an organic
completeness and well-formedness about them, that they do not simply
end arbitrarily, that their lineation has some inner impulse behind
it. They do in fact have an inner pulse that comes from a fairly
consistent stress meter tending toward four beats per line. Lombardo
expands and contracts that norm frequently, though not as
promiscuously as Fagles, but one can find little rhythmical pretext in
the Greek semantics or imagery for these variations. A rough four-
beat accentual line carries overtones of ancient Germanic metrics and
provides a simple rhythmical matrix for an epic poem. Lombardo
shortened Lattimore's six-beat accentual line because his pruned down,
truncated and simplified narrative required an equally pruned down,
truncated and simplified rhythm. The line permits condensed and
easily-grasped syntax, the very thing for a print-averse audience that
rarely listens to poetry. It accepts blunt, declarative sentences and
parataxis in a way that Lattimore's more expansive--and more Homeric--
line does not. It offers the audience or reader a graceless package
within which dumbed-down English, whether in dialogue or narrative,
can move at a snappy pace that will not fatigue the mind with anything
remotely like syntactical density.

Short snappy lines, however, also have the great liability of
requiring a major expansion of Homer. Compare, for example, Fagles
and Lombardo on "Odyssey" 5.388-405. Both translators invent
picturesque details to give the passage a heightened realism. Fagels
bloats Homer's 18 lines to 21 lines, which seem longer than they are
from the metrical expansion that begins in line 438, and works
mightily to infuse them with a sort of crude, hectic imagery one can
only call rococo. Lombardo, who has plenty of his own bloat
throughout the poem, here matches Homer's 18 lines, but trims,
simplifies, rearranges and generally compacts the passage. His
version also illustrates a little typographical trick he first
developed in the "Iliad": he rearranges and then indents all the epic
similes, set in italics, as if they were little selfcontained
Imagistic 'moments' hanging there in fragmentary independence. This
highlights them in a way that violates their integral role in the
narrative flow.

There is no doubt that Lombardo has achieved the kind of rapidity that
results from elimination, pruning and selective distortion. He has
thus found a satisfactory medium for a modest travesty. Fagles, on
the contrary, is rarely brisk and often ponderously slow, though on
balance he gives a much more accurate impression of Homer.

Among recent translations, I personally think Edward McCrorie's
"Odyssey" (Johns Hopkins) is the most successful for his highly
original approach to meter. His version is line-for-line and employs
an iambic meter that tends to dolnik--20 percent or more unstressed
bisyllabic intervals between main stresses--and ends each line with a
set cadence: / x x / x. The cadence gives each line something like
the cadence of the dactylic hexameter without forcing the English into
an accentual imitation of the meter. This choice of meter drives his
translation forward with a speed and point that no plodding accentual
version can match. Rodney Merrill's "Odyssey" and his recent
"Iliad" (University of Michigan) take a different approach to meter.
Merrill is also line-for-line, but he employs an English accentual
template of the dactylic meter. This is very, very hard to carry off
over thousands of lines. Sometimes he gets it right with stunning
accuracy, but sometimes the lack of polysyllabic words in English
leads to rhythmic ambiguity. Then you have to forcibly put stresses
in unnatural places to entice the meter into prominence. Merrill also
translates the "Iliad" with the same meter. Gregory Nagy, who wrote
the jacket blurb for Merrill, is a fan of the translation. Both
McCrorie and Merrill are more accurate than all other verse
translations with the exception of Lattimore's "Iliad." McCrorie also
has very good notes by Richard P. Martin along with a list of names
and a generous bibliography. Merrill has no notes, but a good list of
names. [Confession: I read both translations for the two presses and
recommended publication.]

Meter tends to be ignored when choosing a Homeric translation, but
this is a cardinal mistake. A long narrative poem is, as the great
Russian poet Anna Akhmatova once said, virtually its meter. Fail in
finding a good rhythmical equivalent for the Greek dactylic hexameter
and you fail absolutely and take the audience along with you.

If price prevents students from buying separate translations of the
"Iliad" and "Odyssey," then I suppose something like Hackett's "The
Essential Homer" is inevitable. But it will often give students the
notion that they're reading an ancient Greek sitcom.


Steven J. Willett
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