Homer
The Odyssey
Translated by Robert Fitzgerald
(New York 1961)

 

Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story
of that man skilled in all ways of contending,
the wanderer, harried for years on end,
after he plundered the stronghold
on the proud height of Troy.

                                                           He saw the townlands
and learned the minds of many distant men,
and weathered many bitter nights and days
in his deep heart at sea, while he fought only
to save his life, to bring his shipmates home.                              10   
But not by will nor valor could he save them,
for their own recklessness destroyed them all—
children and fools, they killed and feasted on
the cattle of Lord Hęlios, the sun,
and he who moves all day through heaven
took from their eyes the dawn of their return.

 

Of these adventures, Muse, daughter of Zeus,
tell us in our time, life the great song again.
Begin when all the rest who left behind them
headlong death in battle or at sea                                                 20
had long returned, while he alone still hungered
for home and wife. Her ladyship Kalypso
clung to him in sea-hollowed caves—
a nymph, immortal and most beautiful,
who craved him for her own.

 

                                          And when long years and seasons
wheeling brought around that point in time
ordained for him to make his passage homeward,
trials and dangers, even so, attended him
even in Ithaka, near those he loved.                                             30
Yet all the gods had pitied Lord Odysseus,
all but Poseidon, raging cold and rough
against the brave king till he came ashore
at last on his own land.
                                                                    But now that god
had gone far off among the sunburnt  ,
most remote of men, at earth’s two verges,
in sunset lands and lands of rising sun,
to be regaled by smoke of thighbone burning,
haunches of rams and bulls, a hundred fold.                               40
He lingered delighted at the banquet side.

 

In the bright hall of Zeus upon Olympos
the other gods were all at home, and Zeus,
the father of gods and men, made conversation.
For he had meditated on Aigísthos, dead
by the hand of Agamémnon’s son, Orestęs,
and spoke his thought aloud before them all:

 

“My word, how mortals take the gods to task!
All their afflictions come from us, we hear.
And what of their own failings? Greed and folly                        50
double the suffering in the lot of man.
See how Aigísthos, for his double portion,
stole Agamémnon’s wife and killed the soldier
on his homecoming day. And yet Aigísthos
knew that his own doom lay in this. We gods
had warned him, sent down Hermęs Argeiphontęs,
our most observant courier, to say:
‘Don’t kill the man, don’t touch his wife,
or face a reckoning with Orestęs
the day he comes of age and wants his patrimony.’                    60
Friendly advice—but would Aigísthos take it?
Now he has paid the reckoning in full.”

 

 

Review Comment

Fitzgerald’s Odyssey is one of the best, if not the best, modern rendition of Homer into English verse, mainly because Fitzgerald is a much more accomplished poet than his competitors and because he understands better than almost all his fellow translators (ancient and modern) how best to reconcile the demands of the Greek text with the requirements of a modern readership. He also knows how to use the iambic pentameter line to convey the energy, speed, and beauty of Homer’s original, without being sidetracked by misleading notions of fidelity to the Greek metre or to the original sound of the poem (notions which have infected a number of modern translations): he has “paid less attention to the technicalities of his Homeric verse and more to an inventive American style in [his] mother tongue” (McCrorie).

This translation places Fitzgerald in the tradition of the best and most successful translators of Homer who have rendered the Greek in extraordinarily expressive poetry of their own age:

Fitzgerald’s supreme virtue is to have solved the dilemma of adequate language. . . . he has developed a mode which is at once neutral and modern, lyric yet full of technical resource.  It has many of the qualities of very good prose, being at all times in forward motion and responsive to the claims of precision.  But it has the economy and soar of the poet.  Written in flexible blank verse, Fitzgerald’s narrative moves with such ease of tread that we often forget the sheer virtuosity of the artisan. . . .  Fitzgerald’s book is a primer in the vexed craft of translation.” (George Steiner, Kenyon Review 1961).

Readers who would like a more extensive preview of Fitzgerald’s translation should use the following link: Fitzgerald Odyssey.