Homer
The Odyssey
translated by
Samuel Henry Butcher and Andrew Lang
New York 1879

[Sample from the Opening of the Poem]

Book I

In a Council of the Gods, Poseidon absent, Pallas procureth an order for the restitution of Odysseus; and appearing to his son Telemachus, in human shape, adviseth him to complain of the Wooers before the Council of the people, and then go to Pylos and Sparta to inquire about his father.

Tell me, Muse, of that man, so ready at need, who wandered far and wide, after he had sacked the sacred citadel of Troy, and many were the men whose towns he saw and whose mind he learnt, yea, and many the woes he suffered in his heart upon the deep, striving to win his own life and the return of his company. Nay, but even so he saved not his company, though he desired it sore. For through the blindness of their own hearts they perished, fools, who devoured the oxen of Helios Hyperion: but the god took from them their day of returning. Of these things, goddess, daughter of Zeus, whencesoever thou hast heard thereof, declare thou even unto us.

Now all the rest, as many as fled from sheer destruction, were at home, and had escaped both war and sea, but Odysseus only, craving for his wife and for his homeward path, the lady nymph Calypso held, that fair goddess, in her hollow caves, longing to have him for her lord. But when now the year had come in the courses of the seasons, wherein the gods had ordained that he should return home to Ithaca, not even there was he quit of labours, not even among his own; but all the gods had pity on him save Poseidon, who raged continually against godlike Odysseus, till be came to his own country. Howbeit Poseidon had now departed for the distant Ethiopians, the Ethiopians that are sundered in twain, the uttermost of men, abiding some where Hyperion sinks and some where he rises. There he looked to receive his hecatomb of bulls and rams, there he made merry sitting at the feast, but the other gods were gathered in the halls of Olympian Zeus. Then among them the father of gods and men began to speak, for he bethought him in his heart of noble Aegisthus, whom the son of Agamemnon, far-famed Orestes, slew. Thinking upon him he spake out among the Immortals:

‘Lo you now, how vainly mortal men do blame the gods! For of us they say comes evil, whereas they even of themselves, through the blindness of their own hearts, have sorrows beyond that which is ordained. Even as of late Aegisthus, beyond that which was ordained, took to him the wedded wife of the son of Atreus, and killed her lord on his return, and that with sheer doom before his eyes, since we had warned him by the embassy of Hermes the keen-sighted, the slayer of Argos, that he should neither kill the man, nor woo his wife. For the son of Atreus shall be avenged at the hand of Orestes, so soon as he shall come to man’s estate and long for his own country. So spake Hermes, yet he prevailed not on the heart of Aegisthus, for all his good will; but now hath he paid one price for all.’

REVIEW COMMENT

Butcher and Lang, as they explain in their preface, render Homer’s Greek accurately in an English prose that deliberately draws upon the language of the King James Bible (the traditional English text most familiar to their readers, especially young students):

Homer has no ideas which cannot be expressed in words that are “old and plain”; and to words that are old and plain, and as a rule, to such terms as, being used by the translators of the Bible, are still not unfamiliar, we have tried to restrict ourselves. It may be objected, that the employment of language which does not come spontaneously to the lips is an affectation out of place in a version of the Odyssey. To this we may answer that the Greek Epic dialect, like the English of our Bible, was a thing of slow growth and composite nature; that it was never a spoken language, nor, except for certain poetical purposes, a written language. Thus the Biblical English seems as nearly analogous to the Epic Greek, as anything that our tongue has to offer. (Butcher and Lang)

The result was popular enough in their time and even in recent years, but nowadays when readers are not nearly so familiar with the style of the King James Version and with so many better and equally accurate translations of Homer available in more accessible English (prose and poetry) there seems little point in recommending this version to a new reader (especially since the diction, odd enough in the descriptions, is often disastrous in the dialogue).

The Butcher-Lang translation of the Odyssey, some have claimed, is the principal source for James Joyce’s knowledge of Homer’s epic. That claim, however, has been contested. For a useful discussion of the issue, please use the following link: Joyce and Homer.

For the complete text of this well-known translation, use the following link: Butcher Lang.

For a contemporary review of the Butcher-Lang translation, please use the following links: London Quarterly Review, Volume 53 (1880).

[List of Printed English Translations of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey]