Homer

Can Homer's Iliad speak across the centuries?

Three millennia after its composition, there are many obstacles to understanding this pillar of western literature – but the effort is worth it

Sam Jordison
Tue 9 Feb 2016

When I first read Homer, I did not experience the same sublime ecstasy as Keats. No wild surmise for me! Instead, I experienced mild disappointment, considerable confusion and strong annoyance.

That all changed - but for now, let’s focus on the negative. The poem is challenging. I understand why people are so keen to evangelise this incredible artistic achievement, but I also worry that the praise we are all so keen to heap on the poem does few favours to people tackling the Iliad for the first time. People who have been told to expect the ultimate poetic experience – and discover instead a world of hurt.

The most obviously painful experience is the infamous catalogue of the ships in Book Two: three hundred brutal lines naming 50-plus Greek captains and hundreds of related cities and islands – this quickly followed by a similarly challenging 100-line catalogue of Trojans. These passages can be a grind – but at least they have the virtue of eminent skipability. You can sail past it easily enough without feeling you’re missing any of the poem’s more significant landfalls.

Other issues are not so easily avoided. We are given a back story about the parentage and homeland of just about every character we meet, and they themselves love to expound on their parentage and hearth and sheep and other such tiresome details in their speeches. Characters often have alternate names, generally in the form of patronymics – Agamemnon will often appear as Atreides (meaning “the son of Atreus”) for example.

At first read, the control the gods exert over characters’ destinies makes it feel like there’s next to nothing at stake. There’s a scene early on where it looks as if the whole war can be brought to a swift conclusion when Menelaos enters a duel with Paris, the man who stole Helen from him and so launched all those laboriously listed ships. But the duel is inconclusive because Aphrodite conceals Paris in mist, grabs him and puts him back in his bedroom. It’s infuriating. Likewise, Athena grabs Achilles by the hair at a crucial moment, and Zeus is forever tipping his scales this way and that to decide the outcome of battles. Small wonder that Achilles gives it all up to have a sulk by the ships.

On top of all these challenges is the fact that this is an ancient Greek poem. There will always be a suspicion that translations may not do it justice. Reading group contributor daveportivo expressed this fear when he asked: “Is the Iliad supposed to be pleasing in terms of rhythm, tone, rhyme, pacing, flow, etc … any of the stuff that you associate with various types of poetry?”

The short answer to that question is: yes. But the longer one is complicated and gets to the heart of what we may be losing in translation. The issue is obvious from the very first line of the poem, as I’ll try to show here with a few different renderings from across the centuries:

George Chapman, writing in 1616, went for: “Achilles’ baneful wrath resound, O Goddess.”

Alexander Pope, (who also brings in a bit of line two) in 1720 gave us: “Achilles’ wrath, to Greece the direful spring / Of woes unnumber’d, heavenly goddess, sing!”

Samuel Butler in 1898 had: “Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus …”

EV Rieu in 1949: “The wrath of Achilles is my theme, that fatal wrath …”

Caroline Alexander in 2016, has gone for: “Wrath – sing, goddess, of the ruinous wrath of Peleus’ son Achilles.”

All these versions are significantly different – and they all give different weight to the crucial words “wrath”, “sing” and “Achilles”. Here’s the Greek: “μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος οὐλομένην.” (“Menin aeide thea Peleiadeo Achilleos oulomenin.”) A word-for-word translation goes something like: “Wrath sing goddess of the son of Peleus of Achilles deadly.”

You’re hopefully already getting an idea of why that’s so hard to translate – and why there are so many possibilities. In English, we nearly always expect an imperative (“sing”) to come at the start of a sentence. Otherwise, it feels very alien. (We never say, for instance: “Doing that, stop.”) But if we put “sing” at the start we lose a lot of the brute power of Homer’s opening. He comes in big with “wrath” for a reason. It’s the central tragic theme of the poem. Not to mention a meaty word in and of itself.

There are further tricks here that are hard to translate. Note how in the Greek – a highly inflected language – we don’t find out who the wrath belongs to, until the end of the line, with emphasis building up to the word “Achilles” by the positioning of that patronymic (Pelieiadeo) before it. Add to that the lovely assonance in all those vowels, and the difficulty of recreating the feel of a syllabic hexameter, and you can understand why translators have such a struggle. Then you have to take into account the theory that the Iliad may have been intended to be sung - and almost certainly relied for its sound and feel on a pitch accent. If academic attempts to recreate that latter are anything to go by, we’re in very strange territory indeed.

But all of this is the counsel of despair. Really, it makes up an argument for coming to a better understanding of Homeric language and culture, rather than for giving up on translations. Homer does have a special music – but so too do plenty of the translations. The trick is not to focus on what we’re losing – but what’s still there.

Meanwhile, even the other frustrations I’ve listed above may unsettle first-time readers, but they are also a great part of the poem’s enduring fascination. They’re a mark of the Iliad’s great distance from us, but also of how lucky we are to be able to peer into this ancient and alien culture, to have these messages from the long vanished past, to have such enticing mysteries.

Even that catalogue of ships becomes interesting if you think of the poem as something that would often be recited orally, from memory. It must have been some feat, to get all those names and their connections in order. I can imagine rapt audiences listening just waiting for the singer to slip.

All those genealogies also take on deeper resonance if you think of memory in a broader sense. The whole poem is about the struggle against mortality, what it means to be remembered, about fame and reputation, and the struggle to maintain “kleos”. Listing ancestors takes on a special meaning in this context. To repeat the names of other men is to keep alive the hope that you’ll be remembered, too. As the Iliad was being put together, Greek societies were only just rediscovering the art of writing. Such memories must have felt like the only line into the past, the only link into the future.

Back on the subject of “kleos”, there’s delicious irony in the fact that men so wrapped up in their own reputations can be so silly. Agamemnon is as greedy and heedless as the worst Tory stereotype; Achilles is so mardy. As the poem goes on, their petulance becomes more and more intriguing – especially as fate gives them more and more cause to regret it.

As for fate, and the gods, the more you read of the poem, the more you come to realise that this power isn’t straightforward. Homer provokes deep questions about the role of fate and human agency. It isn’t much of a stretch to see much of the western philosophical tradition’s obsession with free will starting here.

So much for the challenges in Iliad. I haven’t even started on the good stuff. I remember that on my first reading of Homer, I sometimes felt like I was wandering in deep fog. But that confusion made the moments when the sun broke through feel all the more golden. When a hand reached down to mine, across 3,0000 years, and I felt its reassuringly human touch. It can bring tears to your eyes. Read a passage from Caroline Alexander’s translation from the end of Book VI, of Hector’s encounter with his wife and son before he has to leave them for battle. There’s no misunderstanding that.

And if that whets your appetite, I’m happy to say we’ve got 10 copies of the new translation to give away to the first 10 readers from the UK to post “I want a copy please”, along with a nice, constructive comment in the comments section below. If you’re lucky enough to be one of the first to comment, email Laura Kemp with your address (laura.kemp@theguardian.com) – we can’t track you down ourselves. Be nice to her, too.

THE GUARDIAN

 

 

The Odyssey by Homer – the first step

The sea that separates Odysseus from home was the lifeblood of ancient Greece. Homer’s story of return takes us on a journey that goes beyond geography

Charlotte Higgins

Thu 30 July 2015

This is the first one, the big one, the ur-road movie: the Odyssey. Homer’s poem tells of Odysseus’s decade-long attempt to return to his home island of Ithaca – a “man of twists and turns driven time and again off course, once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy”. (Robert Fagles’ translation for Penguin, which I recommend.)

Here’s some context. Banish the thoughts of modern nation-state Greece and think instead of the Hellenes as they were, a widely scattered, littoral people, linked by language and custom, spread thinly from Massilia (now Marseille, founded by the Greeks in about 600BC) to the Black Sea. Edith Hall’s book Introducing the Ancient Greeks reminds me that Plato said his people liked to live “like frogs or ants around the pond”. They were traders and colonists and explorers. One Marseillais, Pytheas, circumnavigated Britain and perhaps got as far as Denmark and Iceland, and wrote about it in his lost book On the Ocean. The trackless wastes of the sea were the Greeks’ element. Aside from the Odyssey, in antiquity there existed an epic account, called Returns, of other Greek heroes’ homecomings from Troy, thought to have included the stories of Agamemnon’s catastrophic return to Argos, only to be slaughtered by his wife Clytemnestra, and Menelaos’s journey back to Sparta, via a long detour to Egypt. A fragment of Sappho, discovered on papyrus last year, has the narrator-poet anxiously awaiting her brother Charaxos’s return from a voyage. The perilous maritime journey was not only a Greek poetic theme, but part of Greek lived experience.

Like the myriad literary successors that have grown like branches and leaves from the great trunk of this epic poem, the Odyssey is a story about the journey through life and time, as well as through space. Homecoming is more than a physical arrival. For Odysseus, half the adventure continues after he has seen off Scylla and Charybdis, the Cyclops and Circe, the Lotus Eaters and the Cattle of the Sun. Having found himself washed up – after 10 years of trying to get there – on the shores of his beloved Ithaca, he manages to avoid the pompous mistake that got Agamemnon killed. Instead of arriving all puffed up and victorious, he disguises himself as a beggar. Undercover, he scopes out his palace, his domain, works out what he has to do to regain his kingdom and sets about it carefully, cleverly and ruthlessly. The Odyssey is an object lesson in the power of human cunning. He is, we are told in the earliest lines of the poem, the only one of his comrades who gets home alive: “The recklessness of their own ways destroyed them all.” Meantime his son, Telemachus, embarks on a journey, too: the goddess Athene sends him away from Ithaca on a voyage to visit the heroes Nestor and Menelaos, to discover news of Odysseus – Telemachus’s own Bildungsroman. It is on this journey that he learns to be the true son of his father.

As well as all of this, the Odyssey is a poem of extraordinary pleasures: it is a salt-caked, storm-tossed, wine-dark treasury of tales of terrifying monsters and sexy witches, of alluring sirens and inscrutable queens, a poem that takes you down to the coldly echoing chambers of the dead and back up to the coves and cliffs and winding paths of Ithaca. A poem of many twists and turns, like life itself.

THE GUARDIAN

Achiles and Patroclus

Achilles is brutal, vain, pitiless – and a true hero

Homer’s idolised demigod in the Iliad has plenty of loathsome aspects – but remains a magnetic figure it’s hard not to admire

Sam Jordison
Tuesday 16 February 2016

After a week spent discussing the challenges the Iliad presents modern readers, I’m going to try for something more positive. I say “try” because if there’s one thing that reading ancient Greek literature has taught me, it is to beware of hubris. If I were to try to list all the things that I think matter about this book it might well result in a list as long as the catalogue of the ships. Instead, I’d like to focus on just one aspect of the poem: the man who gets its first line and whose wrath sets it all in motion, Achilles.

Achilles does not fit modern sensibilities. He is a killer, arguably a rapist, certainly a pillager. He is sulky, high-strung and oh boy, is he temperamental. He can be pitiless – actively enjoying the iron in his heart – and he can be murderously cruel. Yet there is still something fundamental about him to which we can all relate, even if it is also something particularly hard to rationalise and explain. He is faster, sharper, bigger, brighter and more important than other men. He is more beautiful. He rides on deeper emotional currents (when Achilles is upset, he is seriously upset). He is semi-divine and wholly precious. Other men cannot even aspire to be like him. At his most resplendent, men cannot even bear to look at him. He is just above and beyond.

Achilles in short, is a hero and taps into a need that most of us have to worship and admire. I was recently listening to a very good Stanford lecture about the Iliad by Marsh McCall, where the genial professor suggests that baseball and American football players play a similar role in modern society. There is also a fantastic video of kids meeting their football idols, viewed more than 69m times on social media, which gives an idea of how primal and overpowering such reverence can be.

To speak personally, I don’t feel much beyond the usual admiration for sports players. I also like to think of myself as rational and keen to judge on actual merit and not mythology. But I’m far from immune to the appeal of the hero, and I imagine few people are. One of the many laments I could relate to, for instance, following the recent loss of David Bowie was the simple expression of incredulity that death could catch even him, that someone who had seemed so much bigger than life should actually have to go.

This human need to venerate was something Homer understood and exploited to glorious effect in the Iliad. Most obviously, and brilliantly, he does this by keeping Achilles off the scene. In the first line of the Iliad, Homer may ask the muses to sing about the wrath of Achilles – but the man himself appears in the poem surprisingly rarely. Homer is careful to give him mainly the big moments – the beginning, the climax, and a few crucial turning points. There are books and books in which he is barely mentioned. But, of course, all the time he is off the scene, his presence only grows. Every other feat of arms, every brutal kill, every spear cast invokes a comparison to the absent hero – and is inevitably found wanting. We know that, even at his most terrible and shining, Hector would not have a hope against Achilles. We know that, big as he may be, Ajax’s achievements are dwarfed by the demigod. We know, saddest of all, that Patroclus is but a shadow of his great friend, the armour he has borrowed from him is an all but empty shell, and that where Achilles would sweep all before him, he is doomed to fall. All the killing, all the struggle, all the pain – all is made futile because we know that if Achilles were on the scene it would turn out differently.

This trick works especially well because when Achilles does return to the field of battle, he does so with (literally) god-given style. First in a blaze of glory and accompanied by the terrifying screech of the goddess Thetis. Next, wrapped up in the astonishing armour Hephaestus gave him, burning with fury and effortlessly smiting anyone who stands before him.

Yet it isn’t just Achilles’ supernatural power that makes him such a compelling hero. It’s also his fallibility. Three thousand years ago, just as today, hero worship had to have its negative aspect – the hands reaching up to drag the star from the podium, the mistakes that make the successes seem all the more remarkable. In among all the adoring articles about Bowie, there were a good number of attempts at muckraking. Likewise for many a sporting idol.

Achilles, too, has to spend his time in the muck. One of the most famous passages in the Iliad comes at the start of Book 18, when Achilles learns that his beloved companion Patroclus has been killed by Hector, stripped of his armour (the very armour Achilles lent him before he sent him off to battle) and that Trojans and Achaeans are now fighting over his naked corpse. A dark cloud of grief shrouds the hero and, we are told, he defiles his handsome face with ashes from the fire and collapses, as Caroline Alexander translates, “outstretched in the dust, a great man in his greatness, and with his own hands he defiled his hair, tearing at it”. He’s at his most moving when he’s at his most human, prostrate, weeping, knowing he’s done the wrong thing, knowing that fate is going to pummel him as a result. Even at the height of his fury, Homer also takes the time to render Achilles helpless, sweeping him up in the river Skamander, reminding us that even he has limitations.

But Homer doesn’t just beg our sympathy. We also see Achilles being bad. Above and beyond the aforementioned sulking, and those actions that don’t square with 21st-century morality, are outrages intolerable even in his battle-hardened society. No one, god or Greek, can approve of Achilles’ attempts to defile Hector’s corpse. But again, such actions are a mark of someone who just has to go that bit further, that bit madder with grief, that bit deeper into the maelstrom. What’s more, the troughs Achilles plumbs just make the heights seem all the more exalted. His calm enjoyment of the funeral games and level-headed generosity to the competitors, the sympathetic hearing he eventually grants poor old Priam – both seem all the more impressive after his previous derangement. The Iliad is a masterful investigation of a character whom we just can’t help but look up to: a lesson in charisma for any age.

One final extra thought, while I’ve shied away from listing Homer’s other fine moments in this article, it might well be fun to compile some ideas in the comments. For starters, I’ll chuck in the fact that the poet clearly loves lions, throwing in references to their power and the way they move throughout the epic. And also how Nestor can be both an “in my day” bore and a brave, resolute man, making the moment Achilles offers him an award in his games feel both poignant and satisfyingly right. Oh, and poor old Hecuba … But that’s enough for now. Over to you.

THE GUARDIAN

My hero / Homer by Madeline Miller

Homer
Illustration by Triunfo Arciniegas

My hero: 

Homer

by Madeline Miller Salmond

'From the very first sentence - "Sing, O goddess, the destructive rage of Achilles" - I fell completely in love'

Madeline Miller
Friday 1 June 2012 22.55 BST

I

first encountered Homer when I was five years old and my mother would read the Iliad and the Greek myths to me as bedtime stories. From the very first sentence – "Sing, O goddess, the destructive rage of Achilles …" – I fell completely in love. I was enthralled by the larger-than-life gods, the epic adventures and most of all by the noble and deeply flawed heroes.

When I got to high school, I was fortunate enough to have a Latin teacher who offered to teach me ancient Greek. Being able to read Homer's words in the original was a life-changing experience. I had always loved his stories and characters, but in the original I was struck by the beauty of his language. It was so poetic and powerful and expansive. No matter how many times I studied it, I was always surprised and delighted by something new.

I continued to study classics through college, and came to realise that I wanted to participate in the stories not just as a reader but as a teller. I returned to the same characters that had always fascinated me – Achilles and his beloved, Patroclus. And once again Homer inspired and surprised me. His rich and fully imagined world generously gave me the scope for my own.

We still don't know if Homer was one person or many people, whether he was truly the blind bard of legend or someone more prosaic. What we do know is that when these poems were written they were intended not just for an elite audience, but for everyone. Homer's eye is all-encompassing; every facet of human life is welcome. His insight into human nature, into such universal experiences as love, loss and war, remain relevant today. Whoever created these gorgeous poems, I owe them a huge debt of gratitude. Almost 3,000 years later they are as fresh as they ever were.

•
 The Song of Achilles (Bloomsbury), Madeline Miller's first novel, has been awarded the 2012 Orange prize.

THE GUARDIAN

Embarking on an epic / Homer's Iliad for February's Reading group

Homer
by Triunfo Arciniegas

Embarking on an epic: Homer's Iliad for February's Reading group

The motherlode of western literature has kept readers and translators busy for 3,000 years. Now it’s our turn


Sam Jordison
Tuesday 2 February 2016 10.00 GMT

This month on the Reading group – deep breath – we’re going for the big one: the Iliad. The ur-text of the western canon. The beginning of everything.

If you’ve read Homer’s epic poem, you’ll have a good idea about why it’s been the bedrock of our literary tradition for so long. But if you haven’t, be prepared to be surprised.

While it’s possible to argue that no book has been more influential, and that all western writing since 800BCE has somehow borne the Iliad’s imprint, it’s also difficult to think of any book quite like it.

The Iliad is strange from the very first lines about dogs and birds feasting on the bodies of dead heroes – and remains so until the funeral rites at the close. This poem is confusing, frustrating, psychologically alien, brutal and unsettling. No one said the western literary tradition was all smiles and flowers.

Fortunately, the Iliad is also alluring, beautiful and astonishing. Even across that huge gulf of time, through the clamour of different translations and the white noise of cultural expectations, Homer’s voice speaks loud. That’s reason enough to take a look at the book on the Reading group – but we’ve also been spurred into action by the fact that Vintage is releasing an impressive new translation by Caroline Alexander. What’s amazing is that the publisher claims she’s the first woman to translate the Iliad into English. After almost 3,000 years. And hundreds of other attempts.

Caroline Alexander will be joining us for a Q&A on 29 February and we’ll be able to ask her about that strange fact, and more. In the meantime, there’s a slight catch in that her new version isn’t published until 25 February, strictly speaking. But we can make a virtue of this absence. In a departure from usual practice, I thought it might be an interesting experiment if we all chose our own translation, compared notes, and tried to see through to the essentials of the story.

If you’re interested in the intricacies, I’ve got the new one beside me, as well as the battered copy of EV Rieu that helped me struggle when I studied classics at university, and an audiobook of the Robert Fitzgerald translation. I’ll also refer tothe very useful Perseus catalogue.

Double-plus points to anyone reading in Homeric Greek (although that’s not by any means necessary – any way of making a connection with Homer is valid). This near-mythical figure, barely visible through the mists of time, sitting in a room shadowy and flickering in torchlight, somewhere near a wine dark sea, possibly plucking a harp, possibly singing, certainly spinning out a yarn that would change the way we think about everything…

More on him (or them?) next week. Until then, thoughts, suggestions for topics to discuss, initial impressions and long-held knowledge will all be much appreciated as usual.

THE GUARDIAN