__________________________________________

Odyssey
Translated by
Stephen Mitchell
Atria Books (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013)

__________________________________________

SAMPLE FROM BOOK I

Sing to me, Muse, of that endlessly cunning man
who was blown off course to the ends of the earth, in the years
after he plundered Troy. He passed through the cities
of many people and learned how they thought, and he suffered
many bitter hardships upon the high seas
as he tried to save his own life and bring his companions
back to their home. But however bravely he struggled,
he could not rescue them, fools that they were—their own
recklessness brought disaster upon them all;
they slaughtered and ate the cattle of Hélios,
so the sun god destroyed them and blotted out their homecoming.
Goddess, daughter of Zeus, begin now, wherever
you wish to, and tell the story again, for us.

All the Achaeans who had survived the war
and the voyage home and long since returned to their houses.
That man alone still longed for his land and his wife;
the beautiful nymph Calypso was keeping him
inside her cavern, wanting to make him her husband.
But when the revolving seasons at last brought round
the year the gods had appointed for his homecoming
to Ithaca, not even then was he free of troubles
and among his own people. All the gods pitied him
except for Poseidon, who worked with relentless malice
against him, until the day when he reached his own country.

But that god had gone to visit the distant race
of the Ethiopians, out at the edge of the world
(they live in two different regions; half of them where
the sun god sets, and half of them where he rises);
they had sacrificed hundreds of bulls and rams, and he sat
at the banquet, delighted. Meanwhile the other immortals
were assembled in Zeus’s palace on Mount Olympus,
and the father of men and gods was the first to speak.
He felt troubled because he was thinking now of Ægisthus,
whom Oréstes, Agamemnon’s son, had just killed.
Thinking of him, he spoke out to the assembly:
“How ready these mortals are to accuse the gods!
They say that all evils come from us, though their own
recklessness brings them grief beyond what is fated:
Beyond his fair share Ægisthus slept with the wife
of Agamemnon, then murdered him when he came home.
He knew this would end in disaster; we ourselves told him
when we sent down Hermes to caution him not to kill
the man or to touch his wife, since vengeance would come
from Oréstes once he reached manhood and longed for his country.
That is what Hermes said, but his kind words didn’t
convince Ægisthus, and now he has paid for all his crimes.”

Review Comment

[This review comment is based upon a detailed look at the selection of the poem available on Amazon and thus confines itself to a general remark on the poetic style of the translation].

Mitchell announces that in his translation he has been guided by the criteria set out by Matthew Arnold: a translator should be “eminently rapid,” “eminently plain and direct both in the evolution of his thought and in the expression of it . . . and eminently noble.” Well, Mitchell’s translation appears to be sufficiently plain and direct, but, based on what I have read so far, nobility may be a stretch.

Now, nobility, as Richard Lattimore has observed, is probably not a quality one should (or can) strive for directly. One does one’s best and hopes that other people find the result sufficiently noble. Well, the admittedly limited evidence I have seen so far suggests that Mitchell’s translation—for all its faithful adherence to Homer and its direct English—is curiously lacking in anything one might call nobility. The poetry never sings. One looks in vain for a memorable or even an unexpected turn of phrase. There is little sense of compressed energy, and the lines much of time read like loose prose (as the above opening excerpt reveals) rather arbitrarily chopped up without sensitive attention to the effect of line breaks on the rhythm of a sentence. In moment of dramatic tension the flat, prosaic style limits rather than enhances the imaginative possibilities of the story: “At first I planned to creep up beside him and draw/ my sword from its sheath at my thigh and plunge it straight into/ his chest at the place where the midriff supports the liver./ I was feeling for it with my hand when a second thought stopped me:/ I realized that if I killed him, we too would die/ since, even combined, we would never have had the strength/ to push aside the huge rock he had set in the doorway./ So with moans and tears we sat there and waited for morning” (9.293-300). How does this selection differ from a passage of indifferently written prose (apart from the erratic breaks in the lines)? Yes, we are getting a direct and accurate translation of Homer, but a work presented to us as a poetic English version of a magnificent epic (especially from a translator as well respected as Mitchell) should surely offer more than this.

For a preview of Mitchell’s translation, see Mitchell Odyssey.

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