The
Odyssey
translated
by
Charles Stein
(Berkeley 2008)
Book I
SPEAK THROUGH ME, O MUSE,
of that man of many devices
who wandered much
once he’d sacked the sacred citadel of Troy.
He saw the cities of many men
and knew
their minds,
suffering many sorrows
in order to win back his life-soul
and the return of his companions.
In the end he failed to save them,
10
in spite of his longing to do so,
for through their own heedlessness they perished.
Fools—who ate the cows of Helios-Hyperion,
and the day of their return was taken from them.
Of these matters, goddess, daughter of Zeus, speak
through us
beginning wherever you will.
When all the warriors who’d managed
to escape complete destruction
were back at home
safe from war and the sea,
20
the queenly nymph Calypso, radiant goddess,
detained only him
back in her hollow cavern
longing that he be her husband
though he longed only to return
and yearned for Penelope.
And when as the seasons turned and the year came ’round
that the gods had appointed for him to sail home to Ithaka,
he was not done with affliction even then,
even among his own people. 30
All the gods pitied him but Poseidon,
who raged against Odysseus
until the time when he at last
arrived at his native
country.
Stein eschews the hexameter or
pentameter, neither of which he seems to regard with much favour,
in order to explain his decision to translate Homer into free verse based upon
some of the better-known principles of modern poetry (i.e., post Imagism),
where the musicality and immediacy of the phrase are more important than any
regularity in the rhythm. The result does take some getting used to, since one
can move quickly from a line of two or three syllables to a line of twenty
syllables and back again, and one is constantly shifting one’s eyes here and
there as lines are indented or not, at the translator’s discretion (also for
some reason the position of the line numbers routinely changes: on odd-numbered
pages they are to right of the text; on even-number pages they are to the left
of the text). Reading this poem does not give one the luxury of remaining in a
regular and familiar verse form. This feature may well put off readers so
quickly that they simply set the book immediately aside. However, the text is
worth lingering on: it’s a brave and interesting attempt to tackle the problem
of writing a long narrative poem in a style which is often very
fractured and constantly shifting.
Stein’s language is, for the most
part, plain and evocative (although I have some problem with phrases like “Daimoniac person,” “arrow-emitting Artemis,” and “who have
perished away,” especially in direct speech), and I’m not sure that the style
serves him well in places where some gathering momentum in the verse would help
to bring out important emotional qualities in the speech or action.
However, I have read only selected
portions of the translation, available at the following link: Charles
Stein, Odyssey.
[List of
Published English Translations of Homer’s Iliad
and Odyssey]