… Soon a hum arose, As of a great assembly loosed, and fires Began to twinkle through the fog for now Both armies moved to camp and took their meal …Īrnold wrote a famous essay, “On Translating Homer.” Though he never produced a translation himself, I think he would have recognized his Homer - a poet “eminently rapid…, eminently plain and direct” - in Wilson’s. If Wilson’s version has an English model, it is rather the moving plainness of Matthew Arnold’s “Sohrab and Rustum”: His “Odyssey” was archaic and fragmentary, an artifact forged by firelight and rusted by time. None is independently striking their force comes from their juxtaposition with one another - pat pat pat, like raindrops on a metal roof.Īt first glance one is reminded of the translation from “Odyssey” 11 that opens Ezra Pound’s “Cantos.” Pound wanted to evoke Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse (“We set up mast and sail on that swart ship / Bore sheep aboard her.

The words are short, mostly monosyllables. The wide sea keeps him trapped upon some island, captured by fierce men who will not let him go. The result is an idiom of great spareness and simplicity: But Wilson aims for a direct equation: one line of English for one of Greek. To fit them into his shorter 10-syllable line, Fitzgerald simply used more lines. Homer’s hexameters run from 13 to 18 syllables. Among modern renderings hers is perhaps closest to Robert Fitzgerald’s 1961 version. Wilson returns to strict iambic pentameter. Recent translators have tried to split the difference between Greek and English Stanley Lombardo, Robert Fagles and Stephen Mitchell all use a looser, longer but still five-beat line.

Chapman and Pope did the poems into rhyming couplets. But most have preferred iambic pentameter, the default meter for English poets. A few translators have tried to fashion an English equivalent Richmond Lattimore was perhaps the most successful. The “Iliad” and “Odyssey” are composed in a long dactylic line ( tumpety-tumpety-tum) that’s poorly suited to the natural rhythms of English. Norton trumpets it as “the first English translation of the ‘Odyssey’ by a woman.” (Anne Dacier’s French prose version appeared in 1708.) But Wilson’s rendering is remarkable in other ways as well.Īll English translators of Homer face a basic problem. Now we have an excellent new translation of the epic by the British classicist Emily Wilson. September brought us Daniel Mendelsohn’s “An Odyssey,” his memoir of teaching this poem about fathers and sons to a class at Bard College that included his own father. $39.95.ĭismal as it has been in other respects, the fall of 2017 has been good to readers of Homer. THE ODYSSEY By Homer Translated by Emily Wilson 582 pp.

Emily wilson the illiad