Homer

The Odyssey
translation and commentary
R. D. Dawe
Book Guild, Sussex 1993

[Sample from the Opening of the Poem]

Tell me, Muse, of the versatile man who was driven off course many times after he had sacked the holy citadel of Troy.  Many were the peoples whose cities he saw, and whose minds he got to know; and at sea many were the pains he felt in his heart as he tried to secure his own life and his comrades’ return home.  Even so he did not save them, much as he wanted to.  Instead they perished through their own outrageous behaviour, foolish men who ate up the cattle of Hyperion the Sun; and he took from the the day of their homecoming.  From some point or other, goddess, daughter of Zeus, tell us too about these things.

At that point all the others who had escaped an abrupt death were at home, after escaping war and the sea.  But him alone, longing for a return home and for his wife, a nymph, the lady Calypso, divine among goddesses, was detaining in her hollow caves, desiring him to be her husband.  But when the year came, as the anniversaries rolled by, in which the gos had spun <their decree> for him that he should return to Ithaca, not even then was he quit of trials and among his own friends: all the gods pitied him apart from Poseidon, who was unrelentingly angry with the godlike Odysseus before he reached his own country.

But he [sc. Poseidon] had gone off to the Ethiopians far away, the Ethiopians who are divided into two, the most remote of men, some of them where Hyperion sets, the others where he rises, in quest of a sacrifice of bulls and rams.  There he enjoyed himself sitting at the feast.  But the others were all together in the halls of Olympian Zeus.  The father of men and of gods was the first of them to speak. He was thinking in his heart about the good-looking Agisthos, whom, the son of Agamemnon, the far-famed Orestes, had killed.  It was with him in mind that he addressed his words to the immortals.

‘Ah! The way mortals blame the gods!  They say that it is from us that bad things come; but is it they themselves who by their own outrageous behaviour get pains beyond what is fated—as now Aigisthos beyond what was fated married the wedded wife of the son of Atreus, whom he killed on his return, though he [sc. Aigisthos] knew of his <own> abrupt death, since we had told him earlier—sending him Hermes, the sharp-sighted killer of Argos—not to kill him and not to woo his wife.  ‘From Orestes there will be vengeance for the son of Atreus, when he grows up and desires his own land’.  So Hermes spoke, but for all his good intentions he did not persuade the heart of Aigisthos; and now he has paid the penalty for everything
together.’

REVIEW COMMENT

Dawe’s volume is worthy of attention primarily for its very extensive footnotes and explanations, which many readers seeking clarification about particular passages will find useful (although there are other, better commentaries). The translation itself has a number of odd interpolations of different brackets and sudden changes in font size (to indicate an editorial point about the reliability of the Greek text at a particular point), as in the last line of the second paragraph above.  These tend to interrupt the continuity of the narrative.  In his commentary Dawe seems particularly concerned to point out passages which should be excised from the poem as inauthentic or later interpolations (e.g., Book 8).  Still, Dawe’s English prose is far preferable to Hammond’s, though for a prose rendition of Homer I still prefer Rieu.  The translator himself appears to have a low estimate of his success, calling the text “entirely devoid of literary merit.” This volume is not for those who do not want to cope with voluminous footnotes.

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