Word: odyssey
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...explain the promotional muscle being flexed behind yet another translation of Homer's Odyssey, this one provided by Princeton professor Robert Fagles (Viking; 541 pages; $35)? Why expect people to pay $45 for a boxed set of tapes (issued by Penguin Audiobooks) on which the British actor Ian McKellen reads the text of Fagles' translation over a listening time of some 13 hours...
...principal reason seems to rest on precedent. The Fagles translation of Homer's Iliad, published by Viking in 1990 to considerably less hubbub than that heralding the upcoming Odyssey, went on to exceed all commercial expectations by selling 22,000 copies in hardback; the paperback version, now in its eighth printing, has moved 140,000 copies. And an abridged audiotape of the Iliad read by Derek Jacobi surprised Penguin Audiobooks by selling 35,000 copies...
Robert Fagles, 63, has been teaching literature at Princeton since 1960. It was only after translating tragedies by Aeschylus and Sophocles that he began to consider "climbing back to the source" of Greek legends and taking on the herculean tasks of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Fagles knows that well-stocked bookstores will display plenty of competition for his forthcoming Odyssey, including the highly regarded verse renditions of Robert Fitzgerald (1961) and Richmond Lattimore (1965). But, says Fagles, "every generation needs a new translation of Homer. He was a performer, and he can be re-performed...
...years have linguists and anthropologists come up with a plausible theory of how those poems must have been made. Homer--or the collection of bards given that name at some point in the murky past--did not wander around Greece with 12,109 lines of the Odyssey committed to memory. Instead, the Homeric repetitions so familiar to readers of English translations--all those "wine-dark seas" and "rosy-fingered dawns"--were actually stock formulas allowing the bard to fill out his line of verse and get on with the story. The pressure on these performers, composing while they spoke...
...Odyssey starts out speedily: "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 halls of Troy." That man, of course, is Odysseus, the epic hero of all that is to follow, and in calling him "the man of twists and turns" Fagles signals his commitment to economical, concrete descriptions. Fitzgerald's translation introduces Odysseus as "that man skilled in all ways of contending." Some readers may prefer Fitzgerald's rendering, of course, but the contrast shows clearly the straightforward method Fagles pursues...