Returning to Ithaca

I am very much looking forward to seeing Uberto Pasolini’s The Return, a movie based on the last 10 chapters of Homer’s Odyssey, despite the verdict of Deborah Ross (in The Spectator) that “the narrative is so parched and meditative it’s ultimately enervating and seems as depressed as the hero himself”.

According to an interview for The Guardian, Fiennes (who plays the part of Odysseus) remembers his mother reading the adventure story to him when he was a child, but he singled out Emily Wilson’s 2018 translation as having inspired him.

Pasolini, on the other hand, has credited an original screenplay written in the 1990s by the late Edward Bond and subsequently adapted by John Collee (known for, among other movies, Master and Commander and, more recently, Lee).

Homer in translation

I found myself wondering which Odyssey Bond and Collee (and Fiennes, for that matter) had grown up with.

As a schoolboy, my Odyssey was the 1946 Penguin Classics version by classicist (and founder of the Penguin Classics series) E.V. Rieu, which was continuously reprinted throughout the 1960s. His opening stanza — “The hero of the tale which I beg the Muse to help me tell is that resourceful man who roamed the wide world after he had sacked the holy citadel of Troy” — is, as Rieu promised, a faithful but easy-to-read prose translation, for Rieu was no poet.

I also owned a childhood copy of Richmond Lattimore’s translation of 1965, which seemed at once more epic and more poetic than Rieu’s. Here is his opening stanza — “Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways, who was driven | far journeys, after he had sacked Troy’s sacred citadel” — in which he unobtrusively gave each line six down-beats, to approximate Homer’s dactylic hexameter (itself impossible to reproduce in English).

Sadly, Lattimore’s translation was savagely disparaged by critics who preferred Robert Fitzgerald’s 1961 version. The essayist and translator Donald Carne-Ross was particularly waspish in his championing of Fitzgerald over Lattimore: Fitzgerald’s was poetry, while all that Lattimore could aspire to was mere verse.

Here is Fitzgerald’s opening stanza: “Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story | of that man skilled in all ways of contending, | the wanderer, harried for years on end, | after he plundered the stronghold | on the proud height of Troy”.

It’s poetry, but is it Homer? At university in the 1980s, I finally encountered the 1919 Loeb edition by Professor A.T. Murray. Like Rieu, Murray had attempted a prose version that stuck faithfully to the Greek. (What Carne-Ross would probably have called a “student crib”.)

Here is his opening stanza: “Tell me, O Muse, of the man of many devices, who wandered full many ways after he had sacked the sacred citadel of Troy”. Better than Rieu, but I still preferred Lattimore.

Throughout the twentieth century, translations came and went. (I wasn’t even aware of the version by Oliver Taplin, whose Greek Fire I reviewed for The Sunday Times thirty-odd years ago.) I have only recently discovered the version produced in 1932 by T.E. Lawrence (“of Arabia”) and was dismayed to see his cavalier treatment of the text. (He omits the opening stanza entirely.)

The zenith seemed to have been reached in 1996 with the poetic translation of Robert Fagles. Here is his first stanza:

“Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns | driven time and again off course, once he had plundered | the hallowed heights of Troy”. This was surely an Odyssey to end all Odysseys. Surely?

But publishers have their profits to make and new generations to seduce, and new incentives to exploit, too. Which brings us around to Ralph Fiennes and his innocent plug for the latest Odyssey, the version of Emily Wilson published in 2018, “the first translation”, so Norton and Co. inform us, “of the Homeric Greek by a woman into English verse”. Astonishing. “A cultural landmark”, we are informed, “that exposes centuries of masculinist readings of the poem”. So, is it any good?

Here is her first stanza: “Tell me about a complicated man. | Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost | when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy ...”. Wilson actually runs onto the second stanza, which the manuscripts separate with a semi-colon. But, hey-ho. It’s poetry.

Incidentally, the epithet πολύτροπος (polytropos) which Homer uses to identify his protagonist, indeed to introduce him, perhaps to define him — “man of many devices”, “resourceful man”, “the man of many ways” — is probably meant to sum up Odysseus’ cunning. I’m not sure that Fitzgerald’s “man skilled in all ways of contending” quite hits the mark. Or, indeed, Wilson’s “complicated man”. No, that just won’t do.

But I’m still looking forward to The Return, for, as Fagles observed in his book, the Odyssey stops but never really ends.