Homer
The Odyssey
Translated by Edward McCrorie
Baltimore 2004

Short Sample from the Opening

[Homer. Translated by Edward McCrorie. With an introduction and notes by Richard P. Martin . The Odyssey. pp. ll. 1-43. © 2004 The Johns Hopkins University Press.  Reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press.]

Book 1 Trouble at Home

The Man    ♦ The man, my Muse, resourceful, driven a long way
and the Story    after he sacked the holy city of Trojans:
                   tell me all the men’s cities he saw and the men’s minds,

how often he suffered heartfelt pain on the broad sea,

striving for life and a way back home for his war friends.

Yet he saved no friends, much as he longed to:

they lost their lives through their own reckless abandon,

fools who ate the cattle of Helios the Sun-God.

 Huperion seized the day they might have arrived home.

Stranded         Tell us, Goddess, daughter of Zeus, start in your own place.  10

When all the rest at Troy had fled from that steep doom

and gone back home, away from war and the salt sea,

only this man longed for his wife and a way home.

A queenly Nymph, goddess-like, shining Kalupso,

kept the man in a hollow cave. She wanted a husband.

But now the years came round, Gods had arranged it:

the treads were spun for the man’s homecoming voyage

to Ithaka. Even there he would undergo trials,

yes, among those he loved. Most of the great Gods

pitied him; only Poseidon’s rage was unflagging                20

at godlike Odysseus until he came to his own land.

The Gods       Lately Poseidon had gone to remote Ethiopian

Assemble        people, far from us men, cut off from each other—

    ♦   some where the God Huperion sets and some where he rises.

Accepting rams and bulls burned by the hundred,

Poseidon sat and enjoyed the feast there. But other

Gods were joining Zeus in his hall on Olumpos.

The Father of Gods and men wanted to speak first.

His heart recalled the high-born, handsome Aigisthos:

    ♦  Agamemnon’s well-known son Orestes had killed him.      30

He spoke to the deathless Gods, recalling that murder.

“Look at this, how these humans are blaming the high Gods,

saying evil’s from heaven!  No, it’s a reckless

way of their own, beyond what’s fated, that hurts them.

The way Aigisthos lately went beyond measure:

 he wooed Agamemnon’s wife and killed the man when he came home.

 He knew his doom would be headlong. We told him beforehand,

 sending Hermes, the sharp-eyed Splendor of Argos.

 ‘Marry no wife,’ he was told, ‘and murder no husband:

  Orestes will take revenge for Atreus’s offspring                  40

  soon as he comes of age and longs for his own land.’f

  But Hermes, meaning well, failed to deter him;

   now Aigisthos has paid in full for all of his evil.”

REVIEW COMMENT

McCrorie is concerned in his translation to follow the group he calls “close followers of Homer . . . often lovers of every nuance of the Greek, less concerned with passing styles of English poetry, they worked hard to produce faithful translations of the Odyssey.” This desire leads him to pay detailed attention to Greek metre and sound, even though “we’ll never know exactly how Homer sang his poetry.”  McCrorie offer a very personal and interesting introduction to his choice of what at first glance looks like a rather odd metre (“It resembles Homer in that it counts the number of ‘longs’ or stresses but lets the number of ‘short’ or unstressed syllables vary”). His lines, he assures us, can be read aloud “enjoyably and naturally, though a little help from a phorminx or some other tightly strung instrument would help.” I’ll have to take his word for the advantages of musical accompaniment, because, although the diction is clear enough and the translation accurate, I consistently find the rhythm very disconcerting, often unnecessarily padded, even reading it aloud.  This is especially true when the verse needs to drive through a moment of high action and deliver an energy and intensity appropriate to the moment (as in the blinding of Polyphemus, for example).  It’s as if the a priori demands of the allegedly Greek-like metre will make no concessions to the poetical possibilities of more idiomatic English verse. Well, where the metre is concerned, McCrorie’s “frail translator’s craft” (his own words) is determined to stay at the “fidelity to the Greek” end of the spectrum, and the result pays the usual price. That’s particularly true in the dramatic dialogue, especially when strong feelings are at stake. Here’s how McCrorie renders a angry utterance by Antinoos: “Now I am thinking you won’t be gracefully leaving/ the room any longer after mouthing reproaches,” lines remarkable for their inability to deliver any emotional insight into the tense moment.  Here’s another example, one of the most expressive speeches in Homer’s poem:

‘My dear ram: why are you leaving the cavern
last?  The herd has never left you behind here
You’re always the first by far to be cropping the tender
grasses and first to arrive at the stream with your long strides,
first to show your desire to return to the sheepfold
at dusk.  Now you’re last of all.  I think your are mourning
your master’s eye.  An evil man with his wretched
war-friends blinded me.  He’d quelled my brain with a strong wine.
No-one!  He’s not yet fled, I think, from his death here.
If only my ram could feel and speak like a Kuklops—
say where the man scurried away from my anger—
then I could spatter his brains out this way and that way,
beating the ground through the cave, bringing my own heart
rest of the hurt that no-good No-one has brought me.’

All right, it’s faithful enough to the Greek, but as a dramatic utterance in English this falls completely flat (to say nothing of the ram with “long strides”) as a comparison with, say, Fagles’ or Fitzgerald’s rendition of the same passage reveals.  It’s not that McCrorie is incapable of felicitous phrasing or eloquent description; it’s simply the constant feeling that the English is being shaped by some demand foreign to it.

If there is some advantage to using English like this to match what people believe were the effects of the sound and rhythm of the Greek (and I’m not sure that there is), it is more than offset by the uninspired quality of the translation at a particularly moving moment in the entire bloody episode, and one is doing no service to students by presenting them with a Homeric text which, however euphonious it might be for the reader of Greek, fails to deliver imaginative English, particularly at the moment of high drama.

The layout of the translation is a bit odd, too, with headings at the left hand margin throughout and small black diamond shapes to indicate that notes have been supplied for the line (as in the above sample).  The translation comes with fifty pages of useful notes (by Richard Martin)

Some scholars, as one might expect, place a high value on the alleged similarity of McCrorie’s English to the original Greek:

McCrorie’s new translation can be recommended without reservation to the generations of students to whom it is bound to be assigned and to any reader who’d like to get as close to the original as is possible without reading the original Greek. It is refreshing, accurate, and direct. It echoes the rhythms of the original hexameter line and renders the various formulas of epic verse (“rose-fingered dawn,” “long-suffering Odysseus,” and “glow-eyed Athene”) with brilliant poetic sensitivity. (Jay Kenney)

I’ve written about this strange practice of trying to match elements of the Greek rhythm or sound elsewhere.  There’s nothing wrong with the practice except when it leads the translator, as it almost always does, to sacrifice important qualities of the English verse.  If I want the Greek sound, then I’ll read it in Greek.  If I don’t know Greek, then what on earth is the merit of making the poem sound like something I don’t even recognize, at the expense of my own contemporary poetic language with which I am familiar?

For a lengthier (and more favorable although not uncritical) review, please consult the following link: Bryn Mawr Classical Review.