Homer
The Iliad
Translated by Robert Fagles
Viking, NY, 1990
[Selection
from the Opening of the Poem]
Rage—Goddess, sing the
rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,
murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,
hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls,
great fighters’ souls, but made their bodies carrion,
feasts for the dogs and birds,
and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end.
Begin, Muse, when the two first broke and clashed,
Agamemnon lord of men and brilliant Achilles.
What god drove them to
fight with such a fury?
Apollo the son of Zeus and Leto.
Incensed at the king 10
he swept a fatal plague through the army—men were dying
and all because Agamemnon spurned Apollo’s priest.
Yes, Chryses approached the Achaeans’ fast ships
to win his daughter back, bringing a priceless ransom
and bearing high in hand, wound on a golden staff,
the wreaths of the god, the distant deadly Archer.
He begged the whole Achaean army but most of all
the two supreme commanders, Atreus’ two sons,
“Agamemnon, Menelaus—all Argives geared for war!
May the gods who hold the halls of Olympus give you 20
Priam’s city to plunder, then safe passage home.
Just set my daughter free, my dear one . . . here,
accept these gifts, this ransom. Honor the god
who strikes from worlds away—the son of Zeus, Apollo!”
And all ranks of
Achaeans cried out their assent:
“Respect the priest, accept the shining ransom!”
But it brought no joy to the heart of Agamemnon.
The king dismissed the priest with a brutal order
ringing in his ears: “Never again, old man,
let me catch sight of you by the hollow ships! 30
Not loitering now, not slinking back tomorrow.
The staff and the wreaths of god will never save you then.
The girl—I won’t give up the girl. Long before that,
old age will overtake her in my
house, in Argos,
far from her fatherland, slaving back and forth
at the loom, forced to share my bed!
Now go,
don’t tempt my wrath—and you may depart alive.”
The old man was terrified. He obeyed the
order,
turning, trailing away in silence down the shore
where the battle lines of breakers crash and drag.
And moving off to a safe distance, over and over
the old priest prayed to son of sleek-haired Leto,
lord Apollo, “Hear me, Apollo! God of the silver bow
who strides the walls of Chryse and Cilla sacrosanct—
lord in power of Tenedos—Smintheus, god of the
plague!
If I ever roofed a shrine to please your heart,
ever burned the long rich bones of bulls and goats
on your holy altar, now, now bring my prayer to pass.
Pay the Danaans back—your arrows for my tears!”
REVIEW COMMENT
In
the past thirty years Robert Fagles’s translations of
classical works (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Homer, Virgil)
have earned much critical praise and an enthusiastic following among general
readers and academic specialists. And deservedly so. Anyone mulling the purchase of a classical
work in translation should certainly include the Fagles
translation (if there is one available) in the selection process.
Fagles’ Iliad is remarkable, among other things, for its diction—the
language has a certain gravitas and yet is (for the most part) quite familiar.
As a result, the text is much easier to read than Lattimore’s
translation and carries more weight than Fitzgerald’s. The potential
ponderousness of the (more or less) hexameter lines is very skillfully offset
by Fagles’s fluent syntax. This
translation never bogs down or flags. And those who like to have useful
introductory and supplementary material along with the translation will really
like this publication (the introduction to the Iliad by Bernard Knox is excellent, and there are plenty of maps).
I do have a couple of (perhaps minor) cavils. Fagles likes to insert into his text occasional reminders of older times and earlier poets at the expense of a fluent modern idiom: “I’ll roil his body,” “a bowyer good with goat horn,” “armoured in shamelessness,” “Achaean battalions ceaseless,” and so forth. More seriously perhaps, he frequently adopts the alliterative thump of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which at times becomes so over-emphatic that one learns to anticipate it, and thus the sound begins to pre-empt the sense: “As a burly farmhand wielding a whetted ax,/ chopping a field-ranging bull behind the horns,/ hacks through its whole hump and the beast heaves up . . .” or “. . . belching bloody meat, but the fury, never shaken,/ builds inside their chests though their glutted bellies burst.” As I have remarked elsewhere, a little more than a little of this is much too much.
Reviews of Fagles’ Iliad:
Bryn Mawr
Classical Reviews, New York
Times,
Los Angeles
Times,