Reading the Odyssey
With Eva Brann, Robert Fagles, Emily Wilson, and the High School Teacher Jay Pawlyk
So this summer the Provo Great Books Club I lead is reading Homer’s Odyssey! We just finished several Shakespeare plays, before that it was Chaucer, Conrad, and Thucydides, and this coming week (we meet weekly, half of us via Zoom, half in person) I’ll be trying to pull-off a Greek lamb-kabob dinner for our second session on the Odyssey, books III-V. Excited because my mother, who’s been joining us on Zoom for some time, will be visiting. However, I won’t get to goof-around with efforts to mix and water and wine in weird drinking goblets, since more than half our members are members of the LDS church, as you’d expect in Provo. Maybe grape juice?
The Translation Choice
I’m a sucker for the Robert Fagles translation. To me, he has the right musical feel for epic style, one that evokes manliness, action, war-horror, and sunlight, and it’s one particularly well-suited for Homer’s famous similes. Fagles’ Homeric music/language is grand without feeling overwrought—it’s more like Shakespeare than Milton.
It’s less true to the Greek (and especially when it comes to the numbers of lines) than the Lattimore translation, and likely the Fitzgerald and the Murray(i.e., the Loeb edition translation) ones also. I confess I have not looked that carefully into the question of which translation is best, nor do I have the Homeric Greek necessary to really pass judgment, but I can say you should probably avoid the Allan Mandelbaum one, and the really older translations, such as the Samuel Butler one often used for audiobooks; I also have reservations about a newer, and widely praised translation by Emily Wilson—I was initially quite turned-off by her rendering of the famous first line, the one rendered in Lattimore as
Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways…
and in Fagles as,
Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns…
as
Tell me about a complicated man…
“Muse” gets in there in the next line, but with a word-choice as staggeringly unwise as “complicated,” my mind ran to the pathetic music of our time, that heard in the way a Vox article praises Wilson’s translation for the mere fact of it being done by a woman, for her announced “greater discomfort” with the text versus a presumed greater complacency about it on the part of all its male translators, and most unpromising of all, for her language being “matter-of-fact,” and “plain.” The Vox article also highlights the way her translation is careful not to let certain titles de-emphasize the presence of slavery, which does sound like a needed improvement, and yes, her translation does have certain strengths, especially in terms of meter, nor is it as “plain” as Vox suggests—but still, that first line! I guess “complicated man” isn’t as misleading as Mandelbaum’s “man of many wiles,” but I immediately thought of an annoying contemporary song:
Wilson should have known that in the teens and twenties far too many people have a dumb idea of how special it is to be (supposedly) “complicated,” and for that reason among others, have fled from that word-choice.
For more on the debate about translations, try this from Jay Leeming, who agrees with me that Fagles is best, and seems not to have read Wilson.
The Audiobook Choice
Lots of us these days listen to classic books nearly as much as we read them, and there is extra incentive for listening to a book when it comes to Homer, who at the very least derived his text from elements of an oral tradition, and which was itself most known to the Greeks through the recitations of the rhapsodes.
The top audiobook choice if you are willing to spend a little money (or Audible credits) will be the Fagles translation as read by the actor Ian McKellen, but you should avoid the free audiobook versions of Fagles you can find on youtube, because all the narrators are either robots or humans who read like ones.
So, if you’re determined to save your pennies, your best free audiobook version will be the one by… …Emily Wilson! Not the videos in which she reads her own text, and with a few drama-class gimmicks to liven things up—these are merely so-so—but the video series by the high school teacher Jay Pawlyk, who also provides guide-post lecture videos for his students to go with the series. He is an excellent reader, and while some listeners might be put off by the tinge of melancholy in his voice, and his at times odd-sounding pauses, both of these suit, and seem called forth by, Wilson’s meter. And they usually work well with the story itself:
The Odyssey is one of the few classical texts which our high-schools teach anymore, and I believe I have noticed a trend of its greater use over the last two decades. Pawlyk reports that he’s had greater success with the Wilson text than the Fagles one, but that might be more the result of himself just getting better and better with the epic as he has taught it more. He clearly is a star teacher, and I recommend to one and all, despite a couple of very minor errors, his introduction to the whole epic, and his mini-intros to various sections of it.
Pawlyk has offered up his fine readings and teachings for free, and I am also grateful that he helped me sense why the metrical aspect of Wilson’s translation might be regarded as an improvement, albeit one which comes with certain trade-offs. For the nitty-gritty on that and a few other key translation issues, see 13:23-19:55 of this lecture, where Wilson also discusses her (I think mistaken) approach to the famous epithets and other repeated phrases.
Commentaries
I’m very open to recommendations on this score, as I just haven’t done a lot of deep study here. I’ve read the fine Bernard Knox introductions to Fagles’ two Homer texts, had the honor of co-leading discussion of the epics at St. John’s College with the great David Bolotin, and have read or heard a number of shorter pieces by Strauss-influenced scholars, but that’s about it. Homer-study has not been a speciality of mine. So any recommendations of commentaries or lectures would be welcome.
I’ve long had a book by John Alvis, Divine Purpose and Heroic Response in Homer and Virgil: The Political Plan of Zeus, on my want-list, but what I’m currently delving into is Homeric Moments: Clues to Delight in Reading the Odyssey (and the Iliad), by another star professor (i.e., “tutor”) of St. John’s College, Eva Brann. I’ve been acquainted with her writing through her commentary on Plato’s Republic, which is among the very best available.
She begins this commentary with a focus upon delight:
Reading Homer’s poems is one of the purest, most inexhaustible pleasures life has to offer—a secret somewhat too well kept in our time. The purpose of this book is to tell anyone who might care—first-time, second-time, or third-time readers, or people who have not yet laid eyes on the epics, some of the causes and details of that delight.
Another taste:
So it does seem to me that each of the two epics contains an overarching wisdom for mediation, and why not state it here? The Iliad shows a harsh truth about human wishing and willing expressed in the prayer of Achilles and the plan of Zeus, the human intention and the divine realization that are the supporting arcs of the Iliad’s incidents: The god grants the prayer and inflects the wish through his own impenetrable purpose. Achilles learns that we may accomplish our will and get what we least wished. The Odyssey raises looser meditations on the enigma of Return: how the ardently focused wish to come home is nevertheless deflected by a diverting desire to wander, gathering goods material and immaterial, and how Home tries and rewards the circuitous Returner.
Finally, in a section title “Delight and Death,” she says
Nevertheless, this epic pleasure, like tragic pleasure, poses a problem, a problem felt, I think, by all readers who give themselves over to the experience. …long stretches [of the Iliad] …consist of nothing but one death or wounding, one pitiless killing and graphic piercing of eye, gullet, chest, and bowel after the other…the Odyssey too has its share of brutality… So when in Plato’s Republic Socrates bans the poets, and Homer in particular, from his political community for making what ought to be excruciating to an audience pleasant to it, he does not do it because he is deaf to poetry but because he is alive to it. He is only facing squarely the ethical problem of the arts: the surreptitious pleasure of representing excruciation, the inherent sadism of esthetic contemplation.
Those are only bits of her wisdom and provocation. And obviously, I’m not sure I will come to agree with all this, but I immediately see these are ideas the reader of Homer needs to wrestle with.
Here’s an old interview with Brann in which she says a bit, 3:00-8:00, about Homer and the Odyssey, saying among other things that Odysseus is “an inspired liar” and both a “pirate” and “poet,” before going on to explain the importance of her own bathtub to her contemplative reading.
That is what a philosophic scholar is like, one who never will have the displeasure of noticing, as Emily Wilson will (even if it may not embarrass her at first), that someone has posted a video praising her scholarship for having “girl-bossed the Odyssey.” Long after the once-snappy “meaning” of a phrase like that is forgotten, Homeric Moments will stand as a secondary book for the ages, one so in conversation with Greats that it takes us entirely away from the contemporary babblings. I look forward to following its explorations, and those of our book-club, of the strange world and delightful song of the Odyssey.
Dear Carl,
fine post! (So fine that you are quite gentle to the prestidigitatrix Wilson...) PoMoCon friend & reader Ken Masugi sends his compliments-
"Sing to me Avril Lavigne of the complicated man..." I think is the most accurate translation from the original Greek, because it was done by a transgender, quadriplegic, albino Eskimo.
I agree with Brann's introduction to her commentary. Delightful. As Charles Péguy once put it: "Homer is new this morning, and perhaps nothing is as old as today's newspaper."
And just to clarify for your audience, the real name of the LDS church is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. We love goofing around and weird drinking goblets... and grape juice is fine. :)