Homer
The Odyssey
translated by E. V. Rieu
Harmondsworth, 1945

[Sample from the opening of the poem]

I

ATHENE VISITS TELEMACHUS

The hereo of the tale which I beg the Muse to help me tell is that resourceful man who roamed the wide world after he had sacked the holy citadel of Troy. He saw the cities of many peoples and he learnt their ways. He suffered many hardships on the high seas in his struggles to preserve his life and bring his comrades home. But he f ailed to save those comrades, ini spite of all his efforts. It was their own sin that brought them to their doom, for in their folly they devoured the oxen of Hyperion the Sun, and the god saw to it that they should never return. Thisis the tale I pray the divine Muse to unfold to us. Begin it, goddess, 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. Odysseus alone was prevented from returning to the home and wife he longed for by that powerful goddess, the Nymph Calypso, who wished 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 were sorry for him, except Poseidon, who pursued the heroic Odysseus with relentless malice till the day when he reached his own country.

Poseidon, however, was now gone on a visit to the distant Ethiopians, the farthest outposts of mankind, half of whom live wehre 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 that nobleman, Aegisthus, whom Agamemnon’s son Orestes killed, to his own great renown; 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 wickedness that brings them sufferings worse than any which Destiny allots them. Consider Aegisthus, who flouted Destiny by stealing Agamemnon’s wife and murdering her husband when he came home, though he knew the ruin this would entail, since we ourselves had sent Hermes, the keen-eyed Giant-slayer, to warn him neither to keill the man nor to make love to his wife. For Orestes, as Hermes pointed out, was bound to avenge Agamemnon as soon as he gew up and though with longing of his home. Yet with all his friendly counsel Hermes failed to dissuade hm. And now Aegisthus has paid the final price for all his sins.”

Review Comment

Rieu’s translation is a personal favourite of mine, because it was the first to awaken my imagination to the wonders of Homer. Hence, I am perhaps somewhat biased in its favour. Rieu’s prose is direct, clear, and for the most part free of deliberate archaisms and traditional chivalric paraphernalia. He also handles the direct speech well, producing language that sounds as if it is something someone might actually say (in marked contrast to a few other modern translations). True, some critics have voiced the opinion that Rieu makes Homer’s poems sound like a Victorian novel, but if that criticism has some merit (and I’m not sure that it does), well-written Victorian prose is vastly preferable to some ersatz artificial Arthurian dialect. This translation has been around a long time and is still popular—deservedly so. It is still the translation to choose if one is looking for Homer rendered into modern English prose.

[Back to Homer Translation Page]

[Back to johnstonia Home Page]