The Odyssey of Homer
in English Verse
Arthur S. Way
London, 1880

[Sample from the Opening of the Poem]

BOOK I.

How a Goddess came to the halls of the Isle=King, and 
beheld the riot of froward men.

The Hero of craft-renown, O Song-goddess, chant me his fame,
   Who, when low he had lain Troy-town, unto many a far land came
And many a city beheld he, and knew the hearts of their folk,
And by woes of the sea was unquelled, o’er the rock of his spirit that broke,
When he fain would have won for a prey his life and his friends’ return,
Yet never they saw that day, howsoever his heart might yearn,
But they perished every one, by their own mad deeds did they fall,
For they slaughtered the kine of the Sun, and devoured them,—fools were they all.
So in anger their home-coming day did the God take away for their guilt.              
O Goddess, inspire my lay with their tale: take it up as thou wilt.                      10
   Now all the rest of the host, through the jaws of destruction that passed,
Battle-buffeted, tempest-tossed, were safe in their homes at last.
But the hero Odysseus only was kept from his wife and his rest
By a Goddess in duress lonely, Calypso the beautiful-tressed;
And she longed in her grotto-home to have him her husband for aye.
But at last, when the season was come, as the years rolled slowly away,
When the Gods had his doom-thread spun to return unto Ithaca’s isle,
To his home, yet he had not won unto that sweet rest from his toil,
Nor yet with his friends was he, and with ruth were the Gods all filled,
Save Poseidon, the Lord of the Sea, but his fury would not be stilled                         20
Against godlike Odysseus, before to his fatherland-isle he had won.
But now to the far-off shore of the Aethiops Poseidon was gone,—
The Aethiops, sundered in twain, of all men farthest away,
These where the sun in the main sinks, those by the fountains of day,—
Where the bulls and the fat rams slain for the mighty hecatomb lay.
There did he taste the delight of the banquet, enthroned thereat.
But the rest on Olympus’ height in debate with the Thunderer sat.
And the Father of Gods and men to the rest of the Blessed began,—
For his heart in him brooded then on the fate of a high-born man,
Aegisthus, slain so late by Orestes, son of the dead,—                                       30        
And calling to mind his fate, to the Deathless the Thunderer said:
“Out on it! see how these mortals are wont us Gods to upbraid,
Saying that trouble and sorrow from us are upon them laid!
Yet they of their own blind folly have woes that were never ordained;
Even as Aegisthus now hath o’erleapt his fate, and hath stained
The couch of Atreides, and slain him even as he entered his home,
With vengeance full in his sight, for we told him of that which should come,
For we warned him by Hermes, the Slayer of Argus, the Watcher keen,
That he neither should murder the king of men, neither tempt the queen,
For that vengeance for Atreus’ son should be dealt by Orestes’ hand.
So soon as he grew unto manhood, and longed for his native land.
So Hermes spake, but the soul of Aegisthus would not give heed
To the kindly warning: now doth he reap the reward of his deed.”

REVIEW COMMENT

The selection above is from the Third Edition, Revised (1903). Way’s line-by-line translation surely represents an extreme in the common desire to turn Homer’s poetry into something with a strong flavour of Arthurian romance (as the title of Book I in Gothic script above, among other things, clearly announces).  In my view, this is a serious artistic error, since the effect is to sentimentalize Homer and almost inevitably, given the wretched way in which some translators come up with their own Babylonian dialect as ersatz Medieval diction, ruins the verse.  Here the problems of this approach are obviously visible, and they are compounded by the extremely erratic rhythm and often very odd rhyme. The result is something inferior to McGonagall.  But the translation is a worthy example of some of the more perverse tendencies in the tradition of rendering Homer in English.  Way’s translations was, however, received quite favourably by his contemporaries: the London Quarterly Review called him “unquestionably the most Homeric of English translators of Homer since Chapman” (qu. Young 135)—a remark which reveals more about Victorian poetic taste than about the lasting merits of the translation.