The Iliad (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

468 Pages·1998·2.75 MB·English

by  Homer

Table of Contents
TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE
INTRODUCTION
THE ILIAD
THE TROJAN WAR
THE TROJANS
THE GODS
ACHILLES
THE SPELLING AND PRONUNCIATION OF HOMERIC NAMES
BOOK ONE: The Rage of Achilles
BOOK TWO: The Great Gathering of Armies
BOOK THREE: Helen Reviews the Champions
BOOK FOUR: The Truce Erupts in War
BOOK FIVE: Diomedes Fights the Gods
BOOK SIX: Hector Returns to Troy
BOOK SEVEN: Ajax Duels with Hector
BOOK EIGHT: The Tide of Battle Turns
BOOK NINE: The Embassy to Achilles
BOOK TEN: Marauding Through the Night
BOOK ELEVEN: Agamemnon's Day of Glory
BOOK TWELVE: The Trojans Storm the Rampart
BOOK THIRTEEN: Battling for the Ships
BOOK FOURTEEN: Hera Outflanks Zeus
BOOK FIFTEEN: The Achaean Armies at Bay
BOOK SIXTEEN: Patroclus Fights and Dies
BOOK SEVENTEEN: Menelaus' Finest Hour
BOOK EIGHTEEN: The Shield of Achilles
BOOK NINETEEN: The Champion Arms for Battle
BOOK TWENTY: Olympian Gods in Arms
BOOK TWENTY-ONE: Achilles Fights the River
BOOK TWENTY-TWO: The Death of Hector
BOOK TWENTY-THREE: Funeral Games for Patroclus
BOOK TWENTY-FOUR: Achilles and Priam
NOTES
THE GENEALOGY OF THE ROYAL HOUSE OF TROY
TEXTUAL VARIANTS FROM THE OXFORD CLASSICAL TEXT
NOTES ON THE TRANSLATION
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
I. Editions and Commentaries
II. Critical Works
PRONOUNCING GLOSSARY
The Iliad
HOMER
TRANSLATED BY
Robert Fagles

INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY
BERNARD KNOX

Copyright © Robert Fagles. 1990
ISBN 0-670-83510-2

To the memory of my father and my mother and for Lynne, Katya and
Nina —
humeis gar theai este, pareste te, iste te panta, hemeis de kleos oion
akouomen oude ti idmen —
TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE

Homer makes us Hearers,” Pope has said, “and Virgil leaves us Readers.”
So the great translator of Homer, no doubt unknowingly, set at odds the
claims of an oral tradition and those of a literary one, as we would call the two
traditions now. Homer's work is a performance, even in part a musical event.
Perhaps that is the source of his speed, directness and simplicity that Matthew
Arnold heard — and his nobility too, elusive yet undeniable, that Arnold chased
but never really caught. Surely it is a major source of Homer's energy, the loft
and carry of his imagination that sweeps along the listener together with the
performer. For there is something powerful in his song, “that unequal'd Fire and
Rapture” — Pope again — “which is so forcible in Homer, that no Man of a true
Poetical Spirit is Master of himself” while he experiences the Iliad. “In Homer,
and in him only, it burns every where clearly, and every where irresistibly.”
But it also brings to light the Homeric Question facing all translators: How to
convey the power of his performance in the medium of writing? “Homer makes
us Hearers, and Virgil leaves us Readers.”
Yet the contrast may be too extreme. Virgil the writer was certainly no
stranger to recitation. Homer the performer, as the Introduction speculates, may
have known a rudimentary form of writing. And writing may have lent his work
some qualities we associate with texts in general — idiosyncrasies at times, and
pungency and wit — and with the Iliad in particular, its architectonics, its
magnificent scale, and the figure of Achilles. But even if Homer never used an
alphabet himself, he now seems less the creature of an oral tradition whom
Milman Parry discovered, and more and more its master, as envisioned by
Parry's son, Adam. Homer the brilliant improviser deployed its stock, inherited
features with all the individual talent he could muster. Never more so, in fact,
than in his use of the fixed and formulaic, frequently repeated phrase. Not only is
Homer often less formulaic, but the formulas themselves are often more
resonant, more apt and telling in their contexts than the hard Parryites had
argued for at first. So the original form of Homer's work, while a far cry from a
work of literature as we know it now, is not exactly a song either, pure and
simple. It may be more the record of a song, building over the poet's lifetime
perhaps, or what Marianne Moore would call “a simulacrum of spontaneity.”
Obviously at a far remove from Homer, in this translation I have tried to find
a middle ground (and not a no man's land, if I can help it) between the features
of his performance and the expectations of a con-temporary reader. Not a line-
for-line translation, my version of the Iliad is, I hope, neither so literal in
rendering Homer's language as to cramp and distort my own — though I want to
convey as much of what he says as possible — nor so literary as to brake his
energy, his forward drive — though I want my work to be literate, with any luck.
For the more literal approach would seem to be too little English, and the more
literary seems too little Greek. I have tried to find a cross between the two, a
modern English Homer.
Of course it is a risky business, stating what one has tried to do or, worse, the
principles one has used (petards that will probably hoist the writer later). But a
word or two of explanation seems in order, and the first refers to the more fixed
and formulaic parts of Homer. I have treated them in a flexible, discretionary
way, not incompatible with Homer's way, I think — especially when his
formulas are functional as well as fixed — while also answering to the ways we
read today. It is a matter of “riding easy in the harness,” as Robert Frost once
said of democracy, and my practice ranges from the pliant to the strict. With one
of the most frequently repeated phrases, for example — the line that introduces
individual speeches — I have been the freest, trying to anticipate the speaker's
nuance of the moment yet retaining, at least, the ritual of introductory words for
every speech. When Homer introduces a speech of “winged words,”
However, I rarely if ever omit that well-known phrase, though I like the flight
of the words to vary, with a quick burst at times and a longer drift at others,
according to what a character has to say. And so with Hector's flashing helmet,
in the epithet that clings to Hector's name: I like to ally its gleaming with his
actions, now nodding his head in conversation, now rushing headlong into the
front lines. But a flashing helmet it is, again and again, and not only to make his
own career appear more meteoric and abruptly snuffed out but also to support a
chain of tragic ironies throughout the poem. For the flashing helmet — Hector's
own at first — is soon replaced by the one he strips from Patroclus When he kills
him: the helmet of Achilles. So as prophecy would have it, when Achilles
destroys Hector in revenge he must destroy himself as well, his flashing mirror-
image embodied in his victim, and the helmet he will wear, fire-new and forged
by Hephaestus, flashes like the helmet of Ares when Achilles closes for the kill
(Book 20.45,22.158).1 The more the epithet recurs, in short, the more its power
can recoil. And the inevitability of its recoil for Hector is further stressed by a
repeated passage in the Greek repeated verbatim in the English version. The
words that describe the death of Patroclus are exactly those that describe the
death of Hector six books later (16.1001-5, 22.425-29): the first death, both in
the mind of Achilles the avenger and in the style of his maker, will have served
as warrant for the second. All in all, then, I have tried for repetition with a
difference when variation seems useful, repetition with a grim insistence when
the scales of Zeus, the Homeric moral balance, is at issue.
Turning briefly to Homer's metrics: though my way is more remote, it is also
meant to occupy a flexible middle ground, here between his hexameter line —
his “ear, ear for the sea-surge,” as Pound describes it — and a tighter, native
English line. If, as the Introduction claims, the strongest weapon in Homer's
poetic arsenal is variety within a metrical norm, the translation opts for a freer
give-and-take between the two, and one that offers a good deal more variety than
uniformity. Working from a loose five-or six-beat line but inclining more to six,
I expand at times to seven beats — to imply the big reach of a simile or some
vehement outburst in discourse or the pitched fury of combat on the field — or
contract at times to three, to give a point in speech or action sharper stress. Such
interplay between variety and norm results, I suppose, from a kind of tug-of-war
peculiar to translation, between trying to encapsulate the meaning of the Greek
on the one hand and trying to find a cadence for one's English on the other, yet
joining hands, if possible, to make a line of verse. I hope it results, at any rate,
not only in giving my own language a slight stretching it may need and
sometimes gets these days, but also in lending Homer the sort of range in
rhythm, pace and tone that may make an Iliad engaging to a modern reader. It
may be a way as well, again at a far remove, of trying to suggest the tension in
Homer's metrics, his blend of mass and movement both — so much ongkos yet
so much grace and speed.
In aiming for these and other objectives in a version of the Iliad, I have had
many kinds of help. The greatest has come from my collaborator, Bernard Knox,
whom I would rather call a comrade. Not only has he written the Introduction
and Notes to the translation but he has commented on my drafts for several
[1]
years. And when I leaf through those pages now, his commentary seems to
ring my typescript so completely that I might be looking at a worse-for-wear,
dog-eared manuscript encircled by a scholiast's remarks. Or is it something of a
battle-map as well? The vulnerable lines at the center are shored up by a combat-
tested ally, whose squads reinforce the weakest sectors and who deciphers
Homer's order of the day and tells a raw recruit what war — the movements of
armies and the sentiments of soldiers — is all about. And more, what tragedy —
in this, the first tragedy — really means. In Book 9 of the Iliad old Phoenix calls
for a man of words and a man of action too. My good fortune has been to work
with such a man.
Several modern scholars and critics, cited in the bibliography, have helped as
well, and so have several modern translators of the Iliad, in whole or part. Each
has introduced me to a new aspect of the poem, another potential for the present.
“For if it is true,” as Maynard Mack proposes, “that what we translate from a
given work is what, wearing the spectacles of our time, we see in it, it is also true
that we see in it what we have the power to translate.”
So my debts to others are considerable, and here I say my thanks to William
Arrowsmith, Robert Graves, Martin Hammond, Richmond Lattimore,
Christopher Logue, Paul Mazon, Ennis Reese and E. V. Rieu. A few I have
known in person, most I have never met. Yet I suspect we all have known each
other in a way, having trekked across the same territory, perhaps having all
encountered the nightmare that haunted Pope — “that he was engaged in a long
journey,” as Joseph Spence reports, “puzzled which way to take, and full of
fears” that it would never end. And if you reach the end, the fears may start in
earnest. In any event, the translator I have known the best is the one to whom I
owe the most, Robert Fitzgerald, both for the power of his example and because,
at a sensitive moment, he heartened me to “fit on your greaves and swordbelt
and face the moil or the melee.”
Many other friends have come to my side, some by reading, some by
listening to me read the work-in-progress, and responding in close detail with
criticism or encouragement or a healthy combination of the (wo. Most
encouraging of all, none has asked me, “Why another Iliad?” For each
understood, it seems, that if Homer was a performer, then his translator might
aim to be one as well, and that no two performances of the same work — surely
not of a musical composition, so probably not of a work of language either —
will ever he the same. The timbre and tempo of each will be distinct, let alone its
deeper resonance, build and thrust. My thanks, then, to Marilyn Arthur, Paul
Auster, Sandra Bermann, Charles Beye, Claudia Brodsky, Beth Brombert, Victor
Brombert, Clarence Brown, Rebecca Bushnell, Robert Connor, Robert F. Go-
heen, Rachel Hadas, Robert Hollander, Samuel Hynes, Edmund Keeley, Nita
Krevans, Janet Lembke, David Lenson, William Levitan, Herbert Marks, J. D.
McClatchy, Earl Miner, William Mullen, Georgia Nugent, Joyce Carol Oates,
Joanna Prins, Michael Putnam, David Quint, Richard Reid, James Richardson,
Charles Segal, Steven Shankman, Michael Simpson, Raymond Smith, Paolo
Vivante and Theodore Weiss.
And several classicists have lent a steady hand: William A. Childs, George
Dunkel, Elaine Fantham, John Keaney, Richard Martin, Glenn Most and Froma
Zeitlin. The published commentaries of other scholars, cited among the further
readings, and even some unpublished have helped us on our way, thanks to the
kindness and alacrity of their authors. Our book was in its later stages when M.
M. Willcock sent the galleys of his second volume, Books 13 through 24. And
the remaining parts of the commentary-in-progress under G. S. Kirk's editorship
— his own work on Books 5 through 8, J. B. Hainsworth's on 9 through 12,
Richard Janko's on 13 through 16, Mark W. Edwards' on 17 through 20 and
Nicholas Richardson's on 21 through 24 — luckily arrived while each was still
in proof or typescript. The first impulse for the translation, however, came from
the late W. B. Stanford, who, one afternoon in County Wicklow many years ago,
sketched out my route for returning to the source.
The roofs of some great houses have extended welcome shelter to the
translator and his work. Theodore and Mary Cross have turned Nantucket into
Ithaca West with their Homeric hospitality. The Rockefeller Foundation
provided a resident fellowship at the Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio during May
1985. Princeton University gave me leaves of absence in the spring semesters of
1982, 1985 and 1989, and, more important, the chance to study Homer with
many students who have been an education to me. The Program in Hellenic
Studies at the university twice appointed me to a Stanley J. Seeger Fellowship,
first to begin the translation on Greek terrain, then to complete it there years
later. The secretariat of Comparative Literature, from its leader, Carol
Szymanski, to Gary Fuchs, to the Quietwriter and lately, the LaserJet, have been
invaluable in helping to prepare the final manuscript. And close to the zero hour
Deborah Fryer shared the task of placing the Greek line numbers throughout the
text.
To produce the book at hand, my editor, Kathryn Court, assisted by Caroline
White, has treated the writing and the writer, too, with energy, affection and
address. Beena Kamlani's efforts to copy-edit a fairly large and unruly
manuscript have been heroic. Ann Gold, with all her artistry joined by Amy
Hill's, has designed a volume to companion the two that came before it. Anita
Karl and James Kemp have drawn up the fine maps to guide the reader through
the wilds of Homer's world. Mary Sunden has labored long and hard with Joe
Marcey and Peter Smith to find this version of the Iliad some readers. And the
good people at Viking Penguin — Michael Jacobs, Christine Pevitt, Leigh
Butler, Paul Slovak, Marcia Burch, Faye Darnall, Maureen Donnelly, Daniel
Lundy, Cynthia Achar, Roni Axelrod — all have been loyal allies in New York.
In London Peter Carson and Paul Keegan have been generous hosts to the latest
Homer in the house. Before he left the publisher my former editor, Alan
Williams, who saw me through the troubles of Aeschylus and Sophocles, gave
my plans a happy push toward Troy. Prior to the present volume, Ben
Sonnenberg graciously opened the pages of Grand Street and ran three books of
the translation. Reginald Gibbons gave another book a timely berth in