Homer Translations

Every single translator has and will fail miserably at translating Homer. Many say this, but for the wrong reasons. My reasons are not that his Greek elegance is inimitable, nor that we are too remote in time and culture, nor even that his genius cannot be surpassed. I shall explicate why these are not valid reasons, and then give my reason for why all translations fall short of the mark. Many scholars (including some distinguished translators) make the claim that the Odyssey can only be truly appreciated in Greek. Nonsense, the elegance of many of the epithets is capturable in english (contrary to what many thhink.) Where Homer refers to ροδοδακτuλος 'Ηώς Lattimore gives us rosy-fingered daw, which, I agree, falls short of the mark. Fitzgerald, on the other hand, uses "young dawn with finger tips of rose." This is prosodically and poetically equivalent to ροδοδακτuλος 'Ηώς. Also "when primeval dawn spread on the eastern sky her fingers of pink light" is a fine translation, perhaps even more so by assigning a gender to dawn in imitation of the Greek Ηώς who was also a goddess. As for the many claims that we are too remote in time and culture to fully appreciate Homer, this would be true if the culture of Homer's Greece were utterly alien to the average person as, say, the culture surrounding that of Gilgamesh. This is not the case however, almost all of us remember being schooled in Hellenic and/or Roman mythology in our school days and thus we can, to a satisfactory extent, connect with Homer's world. Homer's genius, while great, is not entirely unmatchable. There have been poets and translators whose native talent far outshone Homer's. Fitzgerald is one such and so was Pope. Many poets, in my opinion, such as Zhukovsky, Pushkin, Goethe, Nims and others have or had a genius that could blow Homer's out of the proverbial water. Yet all translations of the Odyssey and Iliad have failed. They are boring for the same reason why many scholars of ancient Greek find the original Greek to be boring. The two mega-epics were originally oral entertainment to be heard, not read. Think about our conventions in writing. 22 monotontous mentionings of a "rosy-fingered dawn" and 6 of a "wine-dark sea" and 11 of a "sweet day of return" would definitely resound as cliché in any piece of contemporary literature. Not so to Homer's own contemporaries whose poetic nerves and lexical triggers were used to something very different in an oral illiterate culture. Yet tape-recorded versions of the Odyssey are no more inspiring or useful than a lullabye to lull a child to sleep. This is because another key ingredient is missing. Homer not only recited his poems but used a κίθαρις, a sort of stringed instrument similar to a lyre. Homer did not sing his poems however, but he used the κίθαρις to mark rhythm, to play a musical interlude while he was thinking of something (let us not forget there was a certain amount of improvisation involved) and to indicate tone, pitch, and even mood (playing in a major chord to begin a thought, heightening it to a minor as the action or suspense rises, and resolving into major after some climax.) This musical accompaniment was indispensable to Homer and his contemporaries. The Homeric Epics must not be read, for that would drain them of their power, but recited, with the aid of some instrument, if not the κίθαρις then at least some instrument capable of polytonics such as a piano. If a tape of this caliber were made, I am confident that the English-speaking world would see new virtue in Homer.