Homer
The Odyssey
Translated by E. V. Rieu
London 1946
(Revised 1991)
Sample from the
Opening of the Revised Edition
I
ATHENE VISITS
TELEMACHUS
Tell me, Muse, the story of that resourceful
man who was driven to wander far and wide after he had sacked the holy citadel
of Troy. He saw the cities of many people and he learnt their ways. He suffered
great anguish on the high seas in his struggles to preserve his life and bring
his comrades home. But he failed to save those comrades, in spite of all his
efforts. It was their own transgression that brought them to their doom, for in
their folly they devoured the oxen of Hyperion the Sun-god and he saw to it
that they would never return. Tell us this story, goddess daughter of Zeus,
beginning at whatever point you will.
All the survivors of the war had reached
their homes by now and so put the perils of battle and the sea behind them.
Odysseys alone was prevented from returning to the home and wife he yearned for
by that powerful goddess, the Nymph Calypso, who longed for him to marry her,
and kept him in her vaulted cave. Not even when the rolling seasons brought in
the year which the gods had chosen for his homecoming to Ithaca was he clear of
his troubles and safe among his friends. Yet all the gods pitied him, except
Poseidon, who pursued the heroic Odyssey with relentless malice till the day
when he reached his own country.
Poseidon, however, was now gone on a visit to the distant Ethiopians, in
the most remote part of the world, half of whom live where the Sun goes down,
and half where he rises. He had gone to accept a sacrifice of bulls and rams,
and there he sat and enjoyed the pleasures of the feast. Meanwhile the rest of
the gods had assembled in the palace of Olympian Zeus, and the Father of men
and gods opened a discussion among them. He had been thinking of the handsome
Aegisthus, whom Agamemnon’s far-famed son Orestes killed; and it was with
Aegisthus in his mind that Zeus now addressed the immortals:
‘What a lamentable thing it is that men should blame the gods and regard
us as the source of their troubles,
when it is their own transgressions which bring them suffering that was not
their destiny. Consider Aegisthus: it was not his destiny to steal Agamemnon’s
wife and murder her husband when he came home. He knew the result would be
utter disaster, since we ourselves had sent Hermes, the keen-eyed Giant-slayer,
to warn him neither to kill the man nor to court his wife. For Orestes, as
Hermes told him, was bound to avenge Agamemnon as soon as he grew up and
thought with longing of his home. Yet with all his friendly counsel Hermes
failed to dissuade him. And now Aegisthus has paid the final price for all his
sins.’
Rieu’s translation is a personal
favourite of mine, since it was my introduction to Homer. In
its day it was extremely popular, and it is still top of the list for the
reader who is looking for a prose translation of Homer’s Odyssey,
especially since the edition has been revised by Peter Jones and D. C. H. Rieu. There’s an
interesting and brief introduction explaining some of the revisions they have
made. The
translation is accurate, idiomatic, and dramatic, far superior to Martin
Hammond’s prose version.
Rieu does have his critics (of course),
some of whom object that he tones down the poem to something less majestic than
it should be (“[Rieu] converts Homer into treacle” is
the way John Crossett—somewhat hyperbolically—puts it) or that he turns the
poem into a Victorian novel (as Adam Parry observed “Rieu
had discovered that Homer was really Trollope”). But if this is treacle,
there’s nothing about it which slows the reader down or gives him an overdose
of saccharine sweetness.
The reader who would like a preview of the revised Rieu translation should use the following link: Rieu Odyssey.
[List of
Published English Translations of Homer’s Iliad
and Odyssey]