How to Choose the Best Translation of the Iliad
Revealing the Quality and Fidelity
Compared to Homer’s Greek
by John Prendergast
The one and only Iliad of Homer, the primordial, Western masterpiece of epic adventure about a pivotal battle during the Trojan War should transport readers through the mind of its long-dead composer to an earlier world, where heroes and heroines perform glorious deeds that have lived forever after in our collective memory, and where gods are indivisible from natural things. How well readers become transported depends on the quality and fidelity of translation. But how do you decide which translation of the Iliad to choose? Are you really reading what Homer said? Comparing the words of one against those of another leaves a reader blind. Choice must rely on taste or on which one seems to sound better. This critique is intended to open the eyes and reveal the quality and fidelity of ten leading English translations by comparing passages from each to the original Homeric Greek.
Book 5: The Excellence of Diomedes (lines 439-42)
Translations of the Iliad are composed using one of the following formats:
Line-by-Line Prose: The original lines of Homer are preserved line-by-line and each is translated in prose.
Stacked Prose: The original lines of Homer are ignored and the text is translated in prose. What makes stacked prose different from prose is that after the text starts at the left margin it only goes on for a set number of syllables before breaking to start the next line. This is done so that the text may look and read like verse, but while stacked prose mimics verse, a line of verse shows a strict poetic structure and forms a unit of composition, a line in stacked prose does not.
Prose: The lines of Homer are ignored and the text is translated in prose like a novel.
Line-by-Line Verse, The lines of Homer are preserved line-by-line and translated in some form of verse.
Verse: The original lines of Homer are ignored and the text is translated in verse.
To specify the two most successful formats, two best-selling translations are compared below against the original Greek, one in line-by-line prose by Richmond Lattimore (1951) and the other in stacked prose by Stanley Lombardo (1997). I have transliterated four lines from Apollo’s signature speech in Book Five of the Iliad from the original Greek letters to English letters and I have placed a literal translation of each Greek word below. The translations come from A Lexicon of the Homeric Dialect by Richard John Cuniliffe. The original form of each word has been exactly preserved. For example, the first word, deina (terribly), is an adverb, the third, homoklesas (having called out), is an aorist participle, phroneein (to be minded) in line 441 is an infinitive, and erchomenon (going) in line 442 a present participle. Several Greek words are roots for English words, such as theo (god), iso (equal), homo (same) and anthrop (man).
439 deina d’ homoklesas prosephe ekaergos Apollon:
. terribly and having called out, spoke forth worker from afar, Apollo:
440 “phrazeo Tydeide kai chazeo mede theoisin
. beware son of Tydeus and/also withdraw, and not the gods
441 is’ ethele phroneein, epei ou pote phylon homoion
. equal to wish to be minded, since not ever tribe is the same
442 athanaton te theon chamai erchomenon t’ anthropon.”
. of immortal and gods ground going (and) men
Here is the literal word-for-word translation. The original form of each word remains exactly preserved and the original order of words has been preserved within limits allowed by English syntax.
. 439 and, terribly having called out, spoke forth the worker from afar, Apollo:
. 440 “Beware, son of Tydeus, and withdraw, and not the gods
. 441 equal to wish to be minded, since not ever the tribe is the same
. 442 of immortal gods and ground going men.”
Now let us consider how Richmond Lattimore and Stanley Lombardo translated the passage:
Richmond Lattimore (1951)
. 439 Apollo who strikes from afar cried out to him in the voice of terror:
. 440 “Take care, give back, son of Tydues and strive no longer
. 441 to make yourself like the gods in mind, since never the same is
. 442 the breed of gods, who are immortal, and men who walk groundling.”
Lattimore’s Iliad is acclaimed as the best in fidelity to the Greek and also criticized for awkward wording, a fault wrongly blamed on his alleged fidelity. But as will be shown in this comparison, it is occurrences of infidelity that actually cause the clumsy wording. But first, let us give due praise and recognize his priorities:
WORDS: Lattimore preserved the four lines line-by-line and closely reproduced each Greek word as a word or phrase in English. He did not, however, always choose the exact right word, or use the original word form and he usually did not arrange the words in the original order, or even in the same line. In 439, he even changed Homer’s verb prosephe (spoke forth) to the noun “voice” in a prepositional phrase.
EPITHETS: Lattimore preserved Apollo’s epithet: “striker from afar”. These recurring adjectives are signature features of Homeric verse, which in the original verse structure gave a Greek composer the flexibility to complete a line. Translators like Lattimore, who value faithfulness, preserve the epithets as part of Homer’s distinctive style, while others who want to take liberties with the original text tend to edit these out as superfluous. Apollo has two similar epithets: striker from afar (ekebolos) and worker from afar (ekaergos). Lattimore used the wrong one here, a trivial matter, but I want the reader to understand why Lattimore and I differ.
DICTION: Lattimore strove with his OWN style of diction to impose a consistent epic tone, free of modern words, expressions, clichés and anachronisms.
LINE STRUCTURE: The original Homeric lines vary in length from 12 to 17 syllables. Each line has a strict metric structure with six stressed syllables at regular intervals and ends with an X-o syllable pattern, where “X” represents a stressed syllable and “o” an unstressed. Lattimore followed Homer by composing each of his translated lines to vary in length from 12 to 18 syllables. He also liked to leave an X-o pattern on the end. Notice that all four of Lattimore’s verses above end in two syllables with an X-o pattern.
Lattimore claimed his lines are “free verse” with six stressed syllables. In fact, his lines are prose. There is no metric structure. The rhythm in Lattimore’s lines is the natural rhythm of English prose, which in a line with 12 to 18 syllables is bound to produce six stressed ones (these I have underlined). This is not a criticism. Lattimore’s great innovation was translating line by line in prose (aka free verse). Before him translations were mainly formatted in prose like a novel, because when translating line by line there was this idea that the lines had to have some kind of strict metric structure, which is very difficult. The metric structure limits the choice and arrangement of words and ends up sounding unnatural in English. No verse translation has ever been popular, except for Alexander Pope’s masterpiece from 1741. But that is a rewrite, not a translation.
FIDELITY: As can be seen in this comparison, Lattimore is habitually unfaithful to Homer’s text in three key ways which contribute to his reputation for clumsy wording:
First, he systematically disregards Homer’s poetic ordering of words and uses instead a prosaic routine with a subject-verb-object order. This is why in line 439, where Homer put the subject “Apollo” at the end and the adverb “terribly” in front, Lattimore completely reversed the order of Homer’s words, so that the last is first and the first last. The same is true of the word “gods”, which Homer put before the verb at the end of line 440, but Lattimore, because it is the object of the verb, moved it to behind in the middle of line 441.
Second, Lattimore’s self-imposed syllable quota for each line often produces clumsy wording from his having to choose long words or adding unnecessary words. An example is the clumsy wording in line 442. To increase the number of syllables from 10 to 15, Lattimore took two words from line 441 (the breed), and added three useless words (who are, who), making the line awkward. The most awkward part of this line is his incorrect use of the noun “groundling” as an adverb at the end. To end the line with two syllables with an X-o pattern, Lattimore could have ended the line with “ground going mankind”, which also has 5 syllables like “men who walk groundling”.
Third, Lattimore’s most common failing is a lack of priority given to choosing the right and defining words, a weakness of every English language translator. His use of “groundling” has already been shown incorrect. Another example is his choice of the word “breed”. A breed is a subgroup of a domestic species, like dogs or cattle, which have been bred for certain traits. Phylon (the root of the English word phylum) appears 14 times in the Iliad and only the word “tribe” can be correct in every case. Lattimore uses six English words (tribe, race, generation, breed, horde and swarm) to translate this one Greek word. Four times in Book Two the word phylon appears and each time Lattimore uses “tribe”. For some reason here in Book Five, and afterward, he chose another. This is characteristic of Lattimore’s style. He habitually uses an assortment of English words to translate one Greek word. He also has favorite English words, such as “bend” and “shining”, which he applies to a variety of Greek words where more defining English words would be right.
Lattimore can finally be freed from the pervasive, but untrue, claim by critics that his translation is “as close as possible to the original Greek”. This, they claim, is what causes his translation to be awkward. D.S. Carne-Ross, a critic of classical literature, even wrote an essay about the Lattimore translation entitled “A Mistaken Ambition of Exactness”. There is a widespread, but untrue, belief famously expressed by the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko that: “if a translation is beautiful it is not faithful and if it is faithful it is not beautiful.” Many hold this adage to be an immutable law of nature.
However, the 4-line passages compared above reveal that Lattimore is not and did not intend to be literal. While closely following Homer line by line, Lattimore does not order his words within a line according to Homer’s distinct poetic style. Instead, he orders with a prosaic subject-verb-object routine. In Greek, verse 439 has a formulaic order for introducing a passage of dialogue, in which the speaker is the sentence subject and his name comes last. In the gap between the name at the end and the words in front, Homer inserted an epithet for Apollo fitting the syllable pattern of the verse. Below are 4 more formulaic verses with this same style, which Homer used almost exclusively for introducing passages of dialogue:
And to her responded thereafter the lover-of-smiles Aphrodite:
. And to her, having been galled, spoke forth divine Aphrodite:
. And to her responded thereafter cow-eyed queenly Hera:
. And to him, having been galled, spoke forth white-armed Hera:
Verse 442 is also formulaic and ends with the phrase: ground going men. If the syllable pattern of the epithet ground going did not fit, Homer had other formulas for ending this line: mortal men (eight times in the Iliad 8x), voice-allotted men (8x) or earthly men (3x).
Homer relied on the formulas of an art form with centuries of practice. To translate faithfully, the right words must be chosen and the original word order closely maintained. Lattimore instead relied on his own art. He changed and rearranged Homer’s words and thus erased Homer’s style. The blame for clumsy wording must be laid on Lattimore’s penchant for long lines and his own routine for choosing and arranging words.
The 4-line passages compared above also prove Yevtushenko’s adage untrue. My translation is as faithful as possible to the original Greek, and yet fluent, lucid and elevated from Homer’s epic style, like a song when the right notes are hit in the right order. Translations can indeed be faithful and beautiful, if the translators care enough and know what they are doing.
——————————————————————————————————————–
. Stanley Lombardo (1997)
. He heard a voice that seemed to come
. from everywhere at once, and knew it was
. Apollo’s voice, saying to him:
. “Think it over, son of Tydeus, and get back.
. Don’t set your sights on the gods, Gods are
. to humans what humans are to crawling bugs.”
Stanley Lombardo’s stacked prose version of the Iliad is translated with the single-minded priority of not being snobbish. Stacked prose is the format preferred by translators who want to be free from the constraints of Homer’s text, so that they can apply their own words, ideas and interpretations. Lombardo uses brief, fluent lines of 8 to 11 syllables with 4 to 5 beats, so it reads fast and easy.
Lombardo discards Apollo’s epithet and turns the passage from what Apollo says to what Diomedes hears. The dignity of Apollo’s divine dialogue is translated with unsnobbish clichés (“Think it over” “Don’t set your sights on the gods”). Lombardo then adulterates Homer’s narrative by adding his own idea that Homeric gods are to humans as humans are to bugs, forgetting that bugs plague our crops, infest our homes and drink our blood. Olympian gods are like us in form and nature, but immortal and not limited by time or space. Bugs are unlike us in form and nature, but as mortal as we are. Bugs do not build temples or pray to humans. Humans do not interbreed with bugs. Lombardo’s adulteration cannot be more invalid and presents a total lack of understanding about the character of Homer’s pantheon and the nature of bugs.
This is one of several stacked prose versions, which are not strictly translations, but better described as adaptations, personal works of creative writing, based on the Iliad of Homer.
Book 13: Fighting at the Ships (lines 795-800)
Before going on to a comparison of top translations together, I want to focus on the lack of priority given to finding the right and defining words in translations by Classics scholars. A good example is in a translation review by Daniel Mendelsohn in The New Yorker Magazine, October 31, 2011. Mendelsohn studied Classics in college and knows the language of Homer by sight and sound. He used the same approach for his review as I do here: he compared a new translation by Stephen Mitchell and bestselling versions by Richmond Lattimore and Robert Fagles to the Homeric Greek. Mendelsohn reasoned that “a good way of getting a sense of the values and priorities of the Iliad’s many translators is to compare (to the Greek text) how they translate a given passage.” He chose a simile from Book 13, lines 795-800. Below I have transliterated the original Greek letters in these six lines to English letters, as Mendelsohn did, and I also present my own literal translation of what Homer said:
795 Oi d’ isav argaleon avemon atalantoi aelle,
. they and went out of troublesome winds like storm,
796 e ra th’ hypo brovtes patros Dios eisi pedov de,
. which then (and) beneath thunder of Father Zeus goes plain toward,
797 thespesio d’ homado ali misgetai, en de te polla
. god-declared and into commotion with salt sea mingles, within and (and) many
798 kumata paphlazovta polyphloisboio thalasses
. waves upwelling of much-roaring sea
799 kurta phalerioovta, pro men t’ all’, autar ep’ alla,
. billow frothing, before (while) (and) others, but after others,
800 os Troes pro men alloi arerotes, autar ep’ alloi,
. so Trojans before (while) others engaged but after others,
English words in parentheses are not translated, because these add emphasis in Greek, but not in English, or are redundant.
John Prendergast (2023)
795 And they went like, out of troublesome winds, a storm,
796 which then beneath the thunder of father Zeus goes toward a plain,
797 and into a god-declared commotion with salt sea mingles, and within many
798 waves upwelling of much-roaring sea
799 billow, frothing, before others, but after others,
800 so the Trojans before others engaged, but after others,
Below is the word-for-word translation that Mendelsohn presented in his review:
Daniel Mendelsohn (2011)
795 And they went in like a maelstrom of quarrelsome winds
796 that goes earthward beneath Father Zeus’ thunderbolt
797 and with an inhuman din churns with the salt sea, the many
798 roiling waves of the greatly-roaring ocean
799 cresting, flecked with white, some before, and others hard behind;
800 so too the Trojans were packed together, some before, others hard behind.
But Mendelsohn at once disavowed his own translation to declare his priorities: “simply to convey what Homer’s words mean gives no sense of the real challenge that the translator faces, which is to think of ways to reproduce the wonderful sound effects Homer contrives here to evoke the sounds of the roiling sea and give a sense of whitecaps breaking on the beach, one after another.”
I differ with Mendelsohn. I believe that the real challenge a translator faces is to think of ways to convey the meaning of Homer’s words and the imagery these bring to mind. In that regard, a priority to reproduce in English the sound of Homer’s words limits the ability to convey in English the meaning and imagery in Homer’s words.
Mendelsohn presents with his translation THE CONVENTIONAL FALLACY among Classical scholars and critics, which asserts that a close word-for-word translation of ancient Greek will produce unseemly, confused English. This is counter-intuitive. The exact opposite is clearly true. We all know that the best way to convey verbal instructions is to deliver these word-for-word as originally expressed. What Mendelsohn has really done is reveal the truth behind the fallacy: a close word-for-word translation produces unseemly, confused English if the right and defining English words are not chosen. Lattimore has often been accused of being too exact in his translation, but we have already seen that his clumsy language comes from a poor choice of words.
The list below of the differences in my literal version from Mendelsohn’s shows how finding the right and defining words is no simple matter. Keep in mind that Mendelsohn’s purpose is to compare the SOUNDS in the Greek to the sounds in three published Iliad translations. He deliberately composed his translation so that it could NOT be used to judge the WORDS in the published versions. But I intend with my translation to do just that.
795-6: This passage is one the famous Homeric similes, in which Homer describes a scene from the epic by comparing it to a natural or domestic scene. Similes have a typical format: the vehicle (storm) is said to be like the object (Trojans). A vehicle is always in the present tense and separate from the object scene. SIMILARITY between the simile vehicle and object is proven by using the SAME word or words in both, especially the verb. The Trojans went like a storm goes toward a plain. Both verbs are a form of the English verb “to go”.
795: Homer uses the word aella 7 times to describe a storm or squall. Maelstrom is a whirlpool in the sea caused by opposing currents, not a storm of winds.
795: Winds are TROUBLESOME. Homer uses argeleon 34 times in the Iliad, and it must have a general meaning. Winds are troublesome, and so is gasping for breath, and standing against Zeus, and so is mischief and fighting and strife.
796: The storm-cloud is beneath the THUNDER of Father Zeus. A thunderbolt is lightning.
796: The storm-cloud goes TOWARD A PLAIN from off the sea in a horizontal motion, like the advancing Trojans.
797: The first syllable of thespesio comes from theo (god). It appears 20 times in the Iliad and literally means GOD-DECLARED, something a god would create by declaration. Zypheros, the West Wind, and Boreas, the North Wind, as well as storm winds were personified as gods.
797: Homer uses homado 12 times for a large noisy chaotic mass, a COMMOTION, mostly of people, in this case of winds.
797: The word misgetai is a common one for Homer, which only and always means mix or MINGLE. It is often used as a euphemism for sex. To churn means to agitate.
797: WITHIN (the salt sea) many waves billow. This preposition should not be dropped.
797: The word polla and prefix poly in 797 and 798 are common for Homer, and can only be translated as MANY or MUCH. The sea is much-roaring, an epithet Homer uses 6 times in the Iliad. For this simile, it is crucial the sea be MUCH-roaring from waves coming one after another. Greatly-roaring would have mega as a prefix, and does not specify repetition.
798-99: Notice that the second word in 798 and 799 both end with the same last four letters, another Homeric parallel. These are present participles, which I translate as UPWELLING and FROTHING. As waves rise up, the tops start frothing, as beer does when agitated.
800: The word arerotes is used 40 times by Homer and can best be translated by words such as fasten, engage, attach or affix. Thetis in supplication fastened on (or engaged) Zeus’s knees. Cares were fastened onto (or engaged) the Trojans. Paris fastened greaves with silver clasps around his shins. Hera fastened, or engaged, her horses to a yoke. A knife was fastened on Agamemnon’s belt.
799-800: Homer proves the SIMILARITY of the waves to the Trojans in the second part of the simile by repeating the same phrase: BEFORE OTHERS, BUT AFTER OTHERS, like the phrase “one after another”, which Mendelsohn himself used in his mission statement above. The common words: pro (before/in front), alla/alloi (others), autap (but), and epei (after) appear on almost every page of Homer’s epic. The meaning cannot be read any other way.
Now let us see how the three translators preserved Homer’s simile.
Richmond Lattimore (1951)
795 They went on, as out of the racking winds the stormblast
796 that underneath the thunderstroke of Zeus-Father drives downward
797 and with gigantic clamour hits the sea, and the numerous
798 boiling waves along the length of the roaring water
799 bend and whiten to foam in ranks, one upon another;
800 so the Trojans closing in ranks, some leading and others
801 after them, …
Mendelsohn liked the alliteration of “d” sounds of “drives downward” in line 2 and those liquid “l” sounds in “boiling waves along the length of the roaring water“. He also said that: “Lattimore’s long six-beat line tries to conjure the grandeur and expansiveness of Homeric verse.”
From a word-fidelity outlook, Lattimore, who was a scholar at the University of Chicago, closely followed line-by-line the six lines, and even the original word order, but his penchant for a careless choice of words is evident:
Homer has the storm advancing. It “goes toward a plain”. For Lattimore it “drives downward”. He dropped the word “plain”, losing the sense of an advancing army, and removed the similarity from the simile. This is a conventional routine for Lattimore throughout the epic and for almost every other translator of Homer. Repeated words are a feature of Homeric songs, but there seems to be an unwritten rule, strictly followed by all translators, that does not allow them to repeat words in translation that Homer repeated within a few verses.
Homer’s storm “mingles” with salt sea. Today, we know that winds pressing on the water, an incompressible fluid, create waves. By choosing the word “hits”, Lattimore modernizes Homer’s vision.
The word “gigantic” in 797 is a strange choice. In Homeric epic, where Giants (Gigantes) actually exist, that word should only be used for translating a form of the word “Gigantes”. Lattimore uses this word for thespesio only here. The other 19 times it occurs Lattimore translates it as: magic (2), magnificent (1), wondrous (2), unearthly (7), immortal (3), inhuman (3) and god-sent (1).
The waves, moving forward, rise up, but “boiling” and “bend” do not convey the image of a rearing wave. Lattimore uses “bend” way too much to translate many different words. As for “along the length” and “in ranks,” these added words clutter the passage only to meet a self-imposed syllable quota, and in 799 violate the Homeric style by putting a martial term in the sea scene.
The last line is the worst of all for Lattimore. Homer tied the simile together by repeating words in 799 in 800. Lattimore does not repeat his words in 799 with the same words in 800, which would be for him: “so the Trojans closed one upon another.” Lattimore again follows his unwritten rule. He composed instead a phrase with different words, which turned out awkward and spills into the next line. This is another example of clumsy wording by Lattimore caused by his LACK OF FIDELITY to the words of Homer.
Robert Fagles (1990)
Down the Trojans came like a squall of brawling gale-winds
blasting down with the Father’s thunder, loosed on earth
and a superhuman uproar bursts as they pound the heavy seas,
the giant breakers seething, battle lines of them roaring,
shoulders rearing, exploding foam, waves in the vanguard,
waves rolling in from the rear. So on the Trojans came,
waves in the vanguard, waves from the rear, closing.
I will not repeat Mendelsohn’s praise for the sound effects by Fagles, who was a scholar at Princeton University. I will only quote five of his statements that go to the heart of the matter. The first two are factual: “Four decades after Lattimore, Robert Fagles’s 1990 translation took the field, establishing itself as the preëminent English translation.” “Fagles uses a loose five-beat line. It can be a bit too loose—it sometimes feels like stacked proses.”
Next, Mendelsohn ironically observes: “Fagles (who wrote poetry of his own) amplifies.”
Then he reflects: “a little of this poeticizing goes a long way.”
Then he criticizes: “The big mistake, to my mind, is the way Fagles blurs the line between the two parts of the simile: the waves and the battle-lines of Trojans. By importing the diction of warfare into the first part of the simile, he actually weakens the impact of the simile overall.
With all due respect to Mendelsohn, the lines in Fagles’ translation ARE stacked prose. Poets are skilled at saying a lot with few words. That is not Robert Fagles. Mendelsohn, Lattimore and myself were able to translate this simile in six lines, because we were under word constraints imposed by Homer’s line structure. A stacked prose format allows Fagles to continue on for seven lines, or as long it takes, to ensure that his bombast be utterly baffling. The simile is not weakened, it is ruined. The stormy sea seems like a battlefield under an artillery barrage. Everything is brawling and blasting and bursting and pounding and rolling and foam is actually exploding and the uproar is superhuman and somebody’s shoulders are rearing in the vanguard and in the rear, but I have become confused. Readers who do not know the Greek want to understand what Homer said. Words convey meaning. Sounds effects, if well done, add artistry. To focus on sound effects in an effort to reproduce a sense of the sea is futile if the words do not make sense.
Fagles himself gives his priority as “lending Homer the sort of range in rhythm, pace and tone that may make an Iliad engaging to a modern reader.” His quest to be engaging is all about sound. It is about “lending” Homer something not in the original. It is NOT about fidelity to the original. Fagles uses modern words, phrases and interpretations and routinely adulterates Homer’s text with loud, bombastic material from his own imagination. Rather than a translation, this version is better described as the Iliad of Fagles, an original work of creative writing based on the Iliad of Homer.
Stephen Mitchell (2011)
The Trojans attacked like a blast of a sudden squall
that swoops down to earth with lightning and thunder, churning
the dark sea into a fury, and countless waves
surge and toss on its surface, high-arched and white-capped,
and crash down onto the seashore in endless ranks:
just so did the Trojans charge in their ranks,
Stephen Mitchell makes his living as a writer. Mendelsohn had a poor opinion of his sound effects, but made one statement which goes to the heart of the matter: “What I like best about Mitchell’s version is its strong five-beat rhythm – arguably the best yet in English.” Mendelsohn faulted Mitchell for “a general heightening of diction – “attacked” for “went in,” “swoops down” for “goes,” “countless” for “many”. The word “fury,” Mendelsohn states, misses the meaning of Homer’s thespesioi homadoi.
But the Trojans are attacking and the waves are countless and Mendelsohn had no problem with Fagles’ “blasting down, loosed on earth”. The word “fury” is not a missed translation. It is an added detail that the squall by churning the sea, which is now dark instead of salty, turns the sea very angry. Mitchell has dropped “Father Zeus” and the “god-declared commotion” to recreate the simile in contemporary language, focusing on the words and even adding details. For instance, the squall has thunder, as Homer reports, but also lightning, and the waves are not only high-arched and white-capped, these also surge and toss on the sea’s surface and crash down onto the shore. Yet Mitchell is able to supply all this added imagery in a coherent narrative with a strong five-beat rhythm and stay within Homer’s six lines, while Fagles with his sound effects took seven lines to ruin the simile and present a bombastic mess.
Mitchell must be judged by his priorities, which certainly are not to produce a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing. Mitchell explains that he intends “to recreate the ancient epic as a contemporary poem in the parallel universe of the English language.” Mitchell further declares his priorities: “the translator of Homer should above all be rapid, plain and direct in thought, expression, syntax, words, matter and ideas. Faithfulness to the Homeric style thus, paradoxically, sometimes requires a good deal of freedom from the words of the Greek. What sounds rapid, direct and noble in ancient Greek may sound cluttered, literary and phony in contemporary English. The translator must without scruple sacrifice, where it is necessary, verbal fidelity to the original, rather than risk producing, by literalness, an unnatural effect.”
Stephen Mitchell proclaims out loud THE CONVENTIONAL FALLACY. He is a writer, not a scholar, yet he also rejects any priority on finding the right and defining words. He is a storyteller with a story to tell and wants to rely on his own words and art. His style is a modern one: rapid, plain and direct. Anything in the way gets tossed: epithets, words, phrases, lines, whole passages, one whole book. But, unlike Fagles, Mitchell has recreated a valid and well-written parallel in English of this Homeric simile that is rapid, plain and direct in thought and expression, but that is also cleansed of Homeric ideas joining thunder and divinity, thus excluding modern readers from a vision of delight and wonder that Homer’s audience beheld in the mysteries surrounding their lives.
Fidelity to the Words vs Freedom from the Words
I also am a writer and share the same values: the translator of Homer should be rapid, plain and direct in thought and expression. Yet paradoxically I take an exactly opposite approach. For me, faithfulness to the Homeric style requires a good deal of faithfulness to the words of the Greek. For me, a translation must be scrupulous; no word should be sacrificed. Verbal fidelity to the original is necessary if there is to be a chance of producing, as a natural effect of literalness, a sense of genuine.
The rule I follow is the maxim of George Steiner, the literary critic and Homer enthusiast: “A translator ought to endeavor not only to say what his author has said, but to say it as he has said it.” I also have my own adage: a translation is like a song played by a musician from sheet music. If he translates the notes on the page to the right keys and in the right order, the song turns out beautiful. If he does not, it does not.
Mitchell (like Fagles and Lombardo) embraces Yevtushenko’s adage. He is also employing a marketing strategy against his competition. Free-form stacked prose translations printed by commercial publishers, such as the versions by Mitchell, Fagles and Lombardo, are promoted as “accessible”, while versions attempting to be faithful, like Lattimore’s, mostly published by University Presses, are accused of being cluttered, stuffy and phony sounding. But is that true? Let us see.
I am going to challenge Mitchell’s claim that what sounds rapid, direct and noble in the ancient Greek sounds cluttered, stuffy and phony in contemporary English. I contend that conforming English to the Greek delivers wording more powerful and polished and fun and in no way more difficult.
On his website advertising his translation, Mitchell chose, out of the entire epic, one passage of ten lines from Book One (lines 43-52) to challenge by comparison the three best-selling translations from Richmond Lattimore (1951), Robert Fitzgerald (1975) and Robert Fagles (1990). Against Mitchell’s champion passage, I now submit below a faithful word-for-word translation, in which the original meaning, form and order of each word remains scrupulously preserved:
. John Prendergast (2023)
. 43 So he spoke praying, and from him heard Phoebos Apollo,
. 44 and he stepped down from the peaks of Olympus, raging in heart,
. 45 a bow on shoulders holding and covered quiver,
. 46 and clamored then the arrows on his shoulders from the raging
. 47 of him as he moved, and he came as night seeming.
. 48 He sat thereafter far away from the ships, and among an arrow sent,
. 49 and terrible the clamor came to be of his silver bow.
. 50 The mules first he went on and frisky dogs,
. 51 but thereafter at the men themselves, a stinging cast sending on,
. 52 he struck, and forever pyres of corpses burned repeatedly.
. Stephen Mitchell (2011)
. He ended his prayer, and Apollo was swift to answer,
. striding to earth from the pinnacles of Olympus,
. filled with fury. His bow and his quiver were slung
. on his shoulder. The arrows rattled with every step.
. Down he strode, and his coming was like the night.
. He dropped to one knee and drew back a deadly arrow,
. and a dreadful twang rang out from the silver bow.
. First he attacked the mules and the dogs, but soon
. he shifted his aim and struck down the men themselves.
. And the close-packed pyres of the dead kept burning, burning,
. beside the Achaean ships, all day and all night.
Mitchell stays close to the original Greek, matching it line by line, while giving himself license to change, add or drop words. How he differs from Homer is telling.
As in a previous example, Apollo is the subject of the first verse and his name comes last, where it occurs most often in Homeric verse. His epithet Phoebos fills the gap. Mitchell, like Lattimore, reverses the word order, naming Apollo before the verb. He tosses the epithet.
Mitchell, like Lattimore, systematically disregards Homer’s ordering of words in these 10 verses and in the entire epic. Instead, he adheres to a conventional arrangement with a subject-verb-object order. In verse 45, Homer attaches a clause to Apollo’s descent and puts the objects “bow” and “quiver” before the verb “holding”. Mitchell turns the clause into sentence and makes “bow” and “quiver” the subjects, so that the subjects come first. He then must change the verb to “were slung” in the passive voice, because a bow cannot hold or sling, but can only be held or be slung.
Homer put the verb “clamor” before the subject “arrows”. Mitchell reverses Homer’s order. “Clamor” is a general word for a disturbingly loud noisy sound, which Homer uses to describe a wide variety of noises.
Mitchell changes the subject of another sentence: “he came as night seeming” becomes “his coming was like the night”. Homer uses the word formula “as X seeming” throughout the epic when a god takes on a disguise, most often as a person seeming, or as a bird, or as night itself.
Homer says Apollo “sat far away from the ships” and has the striker from afar actually striking from afar. Mitchell’s says he dropped to one knee. Lattimore and Fagles also chose this adulteration. But why? Archers do not shoot on one knee unless from a position of concealment. Mitchell has dropped the signature feature of the god and also the sense of where he is and what he is targeting.
Homer put the object “mules” before the subject and verb. Mitchell reverses Homer’s order.
Homer puts “at the men” first in the sentence, the subject and verb “he struck” last. Mitchell reverses Homer’s order to put the subject and verbs first.
Mitchell chooses the odd word “close-packed” and expands the last verse from one to two. If he had followed his own priorities, Mitchell should have tossed this useless word. The adverb, which I translated as “repeatedly”, Mitchell has mistranslated as an adjective for pyre. But the word means: numerous and close together IN TIME, not in space. The burnings happen repeatedly in intervals without end. From its spelling, the Greek word could be an adjective or an adverb, but in the 14 times it occurs, it always works perfectly as the adverb “repeatedly” and never well as an adjective. That is how translators should be choosing the right and defining words.
The reader is welcome to compare the two passages line by line to decide which is more fluent and lucid, and whether rearranging Homer’s words is an improvement.
We now go on to compare 10 of the top translations against each other and the original Homeric Greek. Such a comparison has never been done before, because there must first be a literal word-for-word translation against which all others may be judged.
Book 9: The Embassy to Achilles (lines 318-327)
In his introduction to Lattimore’s reissued version of the Iliad in 2011, Richard P. Martin of Stanford University was sure enough to compare Lattimore’s translation of ten lines from Book Nine (9:318-27) to the same passage in competing translations by Robert Fagles, Stanley Lombardo and Robert Fitzgerald. John Talbot of Brigham Young University used this passage for his own review in the New Criterion (September, 2012) to compare new translations by Antony Verity and Stephen Mitchell to Lattimore’s. In these reviews, the English translations were only matched against each other, but I am about to match them all against the original Homeric Greek and add more worthy challengers. Below I provide a literal word-for-word translation of those ten lines:
318 iso moira menonti, kai ei mala tis polemizoi,
. Equal portion/share for staying, and/also if very much one would battle,
319 en de ie time emen kakos nde kai esthlos
. in and one honor, whether bad or (and/also) good,
320 katthan homos o t’ aergos anep o te polla eorgos
. he dies the same, he (and) unworked man he and much worked.
321 ou de ti moi perikeitai, epei pathon algae thymos
. not and any me around lies, after I suffered pain at heart,
322 aiei emen psuchen paraballomenos polemizein.
. forever my psyche/life casting aside to battle.
323 os d’ ornis aptesi neossoisi propheresi
. as and a bird for unfledged young would bear forth
324 mastak,’ epei ke labesi, kakoos d’ ara oi pelei aute
. morsels, after she would grab, bad and then for her it becomes on herself
325 os kai ego pollas men ahypnous nuktas iauon,
. so also I many (while) sleepless nights lay,
326 emata d’ aimatoenta diepresson polemizon
. days and bloody I passed through battling,
327 andrasi marnamenos oaron eneka spheteraon
. with men struggling wives because of, their own.
John Prendergast (2023)
318 Equal the portion for staying, and if very much one would battle,
319 and in one honor, whether bad or good,
320 he dies the same, he the unworked man and he the much worked?
321 And not any around me lies, after I suffered pains in heart,
322 forever my life casting aside to battle!
323 And as a bird for unfledged young would bear forth
324 morsels, after she would grab, and bad then for her it becomes on herself,
325 so also I many sleepless nights lay,
326 and bloody days I passed through battling,
327 with men struggling, wives because of, their own!
In line 322, the idiom “my life (psyche) casting aside” is akin to the modern expression “my life putting at risk.” The thymos in line 321 is a tangible, active agent of thought and feeling located in the chest of Homeric people and gods. It corresponds very well with the English word “heart”. Some translators use “mind” or “spirit,” but ‘spirit” in modern English is not material and not located in the chest. Homer refers to the thymos many, many times in his epic, so to drop this word is to drop a special character of the Homeric world.
This pivotal passage throws off every translator and by doing so reveals how their lack of priority in choosing the right and defining words leads to confusion in meaning. The context is this: a wrathful Achilles is rejecting gifts of appeasement from King Agamemnon, brought to him by his friends Odysseus, Ajax and Phoenix. Agamemnon had wrongly confiscated his portion of the war prizes (the beautiful sex slave, Briseis). Achilles starts these ten lines by switching from 1st person to 3rd person in 318-20 to refer to both himself and a rhetorical person, who stays out of battle.
A need for the right word starts in line 318. For Homer, the word moira means “portion” or “share” but also “fate”. Someone’s fate was their portion or share. In modern English we call it our lot, meaning what we have by chance or from birth. Translators must realize that Achilles complains about not having ANY PORTION of the loot, and therefore not any honor, like someone who stayed out of battle. “Equal the portion” in 318 combined with “in one honor” in 319 means the portion is an honor, and the honor is in the worthiness of the portion.
Achilles in line 320 expands his complaint about his lack of an immediate reward with the principle of an ultimate reward. This slight digression is tricky as it separates the connection between his thought about honor in 319 and the pronoun that refers back to his honor in 321. To avoid confusion from this disconnection, it is important to translate 320 exactly as written in Greek. No published translator below does so.
In line 321, Achilles speaks again in 1st person and says “not any (ou tis) lies around me.” Any what? Homer uses a pronoun here because what Achilles complains about lacking has been named before: his portion of the booty and the honor it represents. The single pronoun can refer to both at once. If moira in 318 is translated as “fate,” the pronoun makes no sense.
Achilles uses the 3rd person and a proverbial tone in lines 318-20 to elevate his personal complaint to a level of moral principal. What Achilles means becomes clear when the lines are translated EXACTLY AS WRITTEN. But for every published translator, their laxity in choosing the right and defining words leads them to SUPPLANT Homer’s words with ones that reflect their modern biases, and thereby confuse what Achilles means. Their choice of words reminds me of a line from George Bernard Shaw:
“your pious English habit of regarding the world as a moral gymnasium, built expressly to strengthen your character in, leads you to think about your own confounded principles when you should be thinking about other people’s necessities.”
In lines 318-21, Homer uses plain, factual words: stay, battle, bad, good, unworked, and worked. But, as will be seen below, all the translators of the modern English-speaking world replace the words of Achilles with moralistic terms. Those who are bad are cowards, while the good are the brave. Those who stay or are unworked are slackers. The pronoun any in 321 instead of referring to honor, what Achilles values most, is changed to a modern value: profit. Every translator rejects the literal meaning of the common Homeric nouns kakos and esthlos in 319. These words mean exactly “bad” and “good” in the same general sense as the English equivalents. To corroborate my claim that kakos means bad, not coward, notice that not one translator interpreted the adverbial form, kakoos, in line 324 as cowardly.
But look at the simile in lines 323-24. Achilles, back to the 3rd person, compares himself to a mother bird who by necessity forages food for her young. These young STAY in the nest, while she struggles to find food. She is MUCH WORKED, while they are UNWORKED, because she is GOOD at flying and they are BAD. Are the chicks cowards and slackers? Does the mother suffer hardship for profit? The complaints of Achilles in 318-20 set up his simile in 323-24. The simile clarifies his complaints. The chicks are protected from doom by the GOOD-flying and MUCH-WORKED mother, as Achaeans have been by Achilles.
To go with their moralizing word choice, most translators turn lines 318-20 into proverbial sayings to agree with their misguided modern opinion that likes to believe Achilles becomes disillusioned and questions the ethics of his times. I think it is the modern translators who question with modern principles the ethical necessities of the Bronze Age in the Bronze Age. Lines 318-20 should not be true and if true are immoral. Especially for Achilles, fate is not equal and honor is not the same if he stays or battles. He will not die the same if he is unworked or much worked. His goddess mother has told him that staying will reward him with long life, but no renown, while battling will lead to a short life, but eternal renown, so that he will live forever in the memory of his people.
Achilles in lines 318-20 is not finding fault with nameless unrewarded others, he is using irony to point out that he very much has battled, and has been good at it, and has been much worked, for which he deserves gratitude and honors. He is not finding futility in his heroic code, he is accusing Agamemnon of violating it. He is not disillusioned with the promise of honor. He is furious about being dishonored by their king, and as a man may value the institution of marriage, but not be able to take back his cheating wife, no matter her pleas, because a bitterness around his heart will not let him, so Achilles cannot bring himself to find Agamemnon worthy of being followed.
Below is how ten published translators read the passage:
Richmond Lattimore (1951)
318 Fate is the same for the man who holds back, the same if he fights hard.
319 We are held in a single honor the brave with the weakling.
320 A man dies still if he has done nothing, as one who has done much.
321 Nothing is won for me, now that my heart has gone through its afflictions
322 in forever setting my life on the hazard of battle.
323 For as to her unwinged young ones the mother bird brings back
324 morsels, wherever she can find them, but as for herself it is suffering,
325 such was I, as I lay through all the many nights unsleeping,
326 such as I wore through the bloody days of the fighting,
327 striving with warriors for the sake of these men’s women.
This is not one of Lattimore’s better passages. Achilles comes off as rambling and hard to follow. His statement in lines 318 to 321 has no coherent chain of thought. “Fate” in 318 (a mistranslation) is unrelated to “honor” in 319 and “nothing” (a mistranslation) in 321 is unrelated to either one. For Homer, these three words refer to each other. Lattimore should have chosen “portion” in 318 and “not any” in 321, both of which would relate to “honor”. Lattimore then mistranslates the meaning of 320 and turns it into a proverb by supplanting Homer’s words (the same) with his own (“still if”). Thus he has Achilles spouting a modern platitude: no matter what one does, their fate is to die. Instead, Homer has the hero Achilles ask: should the portion be equal for one who stays and one who battles, and should the unworked die the same as the much worked? The answer is no! One who battles should get a worthy portion. The much worked should be honored after death and live forever in the memory of his people.
Lattimore strangely chose the non-word “unwinged” in line 323. The Greek word, aptesi, literally means “unfeathered,” the “a” being a negative prefix. Homer uses the verb form of ptesi to describe flight, but because “feathered words” and “to feather” do not convey that act in English, the word is usually translated as “winged,” such as in “winged words,” (spoken words that fly through air) and “to wing” (to fly). But here it refers to feathers, so unfledged, unfeathered or flightless must be used. The chicks have wings, but no flight feathers.
This passage is an example of Lattimore producing English that is ungraceful and unclear, for which he is often faulted. The speech is hard to follow and its meaning confused, because of infidelity to the Greek and a lack of priority in choosing the right and defining words.
Robert Fitzgerald, a professional writer, not a scholar, submitted in 1972 what he called a verse translation, but is more of a stacked prose translation in verse, and announced he intended to free himself from Homer’s words and lines, a practice of most stacked prosed translators, such as Mitchell, Fagles and Lombardo. In 1972, Lattimore’s version was very much in vogue and highly praised for fidelity. To break into the market, a scholar named D. S. Carne-Ross, who wrote the introduction to Fitzgerald’s Odyssey, published an article that challenged the fabled Lattimore fidelity by comparing it to the Greek. He showed that Lattimore is not truly faithful and that his awkward wording is not the price of fidelity, but is only awkward. Carne-Ross did not examine Fitzgerald’s translation and conceded that it was not close to the Greek, yet asserted that since Lattimore is also unfaithful, one might as well try the more enjoyable read. This comment by Carne-Ross reminds me of the joke about searching for something left in one room in another room, because of better lighting.
Robert Fitzgerald (1974)
The portion’s equal
whether a man hangs back or fights his best;
The same respect, or lack of it, is given
brave men and coward. One who’s active dies
like the do-nothing. What least thing have I
to show for it, for harsh days undergone
and my life gambled, all these years of war?
A bird will give her fledgling every scrap
she comes by, and go hungry, foraging.
That is the case with me.
Many a sleepless night I’ve spent afield
and many a day in bloodshed, hand to hand
in battle for the wives of other men.
Fitzgerald did not intend to produce a literal translation, but in this passage he faithfully conveys the complaint of Achilles about not receiving any portion or respect. He also follows convention with moralistic words such as brave and coward to assert the idea that Achilles is disillusioned.
Fitzgerald was one of the first translators to attempt the stacked prose format and gave himself the arduous task of writing the whole epic in iambic pentameter, because there was in those days this ideal that any line that looked like a verse needed some sort of poetic structure. His translation is clearly in stacked prose with an iambic cadence. Iambic pentameter does not turn a line into a verse. Verses should hold a complete thought and end at a natural pause, such as in these examples:
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones. – Julius Caesar by Wm. Shakespeare
Across the clouds I see my shadow fly
Out of the corner of my watering eye.
There’s no sensation to compare with this,
Suspended animation, a state of bliss. – Learning to Fly by Pink Floyd
Fitzgerald’s lines are not verse, because these do not form units of composition, but instead are broken without concern for sentence structure. His translation is clearly stacked prose with an iambic cadence and a 10-syllable line length, a format with the fluency of verse and flexibility of prose. The stacked lines are independent of Homer’s words and verse structure and simply go on line by line in consistent, fluent lines of 10 syllables. Where gaps appear, these Fitzgerald filled with filler words and phrases (which I have put in italics). The Fitzgerald IIiad with this innovative format became popular and remains so today.
Robert Fagles (1990)
One and the same lot for the man who hangs back
and the man who battles hard. The same honor waits
for the coward and the brave. They both go down to Death,
the fighter who shirks, the one who works to exhaustion.
And what’s laid up for me, what pittance? Nothing –
and after suffering hardship, year in year out,
staking my life on the mortal risks of war.
Like a mother bird hurrying morsels back
to her unfledged young – whatever she can catch –
but it’s all starvation wages for herself.
So for me.
Many a sleepless night I’ve bivouacked in harness,
day after bloody day I’ve hacked my passage through,
fighting other soldiers to win their wives as prizes.
Fagles does all the conventional mistranslations by using the modern idea of “lot”, by having Achilles speaking in proverbial clichés and by using the modern moralistic terms of coward and brave. He then goes on to further disrupt the coherence of Achilles’ speech by using modern clichés and bombastic language (delineated with italics). His choice of “staking,” which applies to wagers, and “hacking” for men who fight with spears, pales beside “starvation wages” applied to a bird. The bewildering “bivouacked in harness” jolts the reader’s attention from what Achilles is saying to what the translator could possibly be thinking. He translates “men” in the last line as “soldiers,” another deliberate anachronism.
Stanley Lombardo (1997)
It doesn’t matter if you stay in camp or fight –
In the end, everybody comes out the same.
Coward and hero get the same reward:
You die whether you slack off or work.
And what do I have for all my suffering,
Constantly putting my life on the line?
Like a bird who feeds her chicks
Whatever she finds, and goes without herself,
That’s what I’ve been like, lying awake
Through sleepless nights in battle for days
Soaked in blood, fighting men for their wives.
In an effort to not be snobbish, Lombardo deliberately lowers the intellectual level with clichés until the dialogue has been made unsnobbish enough to suit a bitter whining drunk at the corner bar. He uses coward for bad and hero for good, and has Achilles speaking in a proverbial manner.
William Wyatt, who was a professor at Brown University, revised a prose version of the Iliad that A. T. Murray originally produced for the Loeb Classical Library series in 1924. Harvard University Press puts out this series of classics with the original Greek or Latin text on the left page and a faithful translation on the right page. A prose translation puts the text into a format like a novel. The translators may focus on a priority of being faithful to the meaning of Homer’s words without any concern about sentence structure, line length, meter or word order. But a lack of restrictions can tempt prose translators to be verbose. I have stacked Wyatt’s prose into lines without changing the word order in any way to show how close he stays to the original lines and to show how the authors in this article proclaiming their translations to be “in verse” are really using stacked prose. (This is in no way a criticism.) The popularity of stacked prose (which is advertised as verse for marketing reasons) proves the comment made by T. S. Eliot about Homeric translations: “Nobody will care about meter as long as the lines flow.”
William F. Wyatt, Loeb Library (1999)
A like portion has he who stays back, and he who wars his best,
and in one honor are held both the coward and the brave;
death comes alike to the idle man and to him who works much.
Nor has it brought me any profit that I suffered woes at heart,
constantly staking my life to fight.
Just as a bird brings to her unfledged chicks
any morsel she may find, but with herself it goes ill,
so was I used to watch through many a sleepless night,
and bloody days I passed in battle,
fighting with warriors for their woman’s sake.
In a translation that is intended to be literal, Wyatt correctly chose portion and honor in the first two lines, but mistranslated good and bad as “the coward” and “the brave,” while correctly translating kokoos in line 324 as “ill,” meaning bad. He mistranslated the meaning of line 320 by changing the subject and verb from “he dies” to “death comes,” thus turning it into a proverb. He mistranslated the pronoun in 321, which refers to honor or portion, by changing it to an unrelated item: “profit”. Both of these mistranslations support the idea that Achilles is disillusioned by the ethics of his times. Wyatt also chose “staking,” a modern cliché derived from betting, instead of risking, and used the word “warriors” instead of men, the literal and much more poignant word.
Stephen Mitchell (2011)
We all get just the same portion, whether we hang back
or fight on with all our strength in the front lines of battle;
cowards and brave men are treated with equal respect.
I have had not the slightest profit from all the pain
I have suffered in battle, constantly risking my life.
Like a mother bird that brings to her unfledged nestlings
any morsels she finds, and herself goes hungry,
I have spent many sleepless nights, and my days have been bloody
battling men who fought for the sake of their sweethearts.
Mitchell, following his priorities, does his thing by rewording what Achilles says in 318-320 and dropping the digression about ultimate reward without any loss of meaning. Mitchell then merges lines 325-326 so that the ten-line passage ends up as nine lines in a style that is rapid, plain and direct in thought and expression, and with a fidelity to Homer that is similar to the translations which aim to keep close to the original Greek. He sticks to convention, however, by choosing “cowards and brave men” instead of bad and good. Where he goes wrong, however, is changing the subject of the first line from portion to the plural pronoun we. There is no we. Achilles is complaining that he got no portion of the loot and no respect. Everyone else in the room still has their fair portion, including Patroclos. By mistranslating the pronoun in 321 as “profit,” rather than having it correctly refer back to “respect,” Mitchell misses what is bothering Achilles. With the phrasing “we all get just the same portion,” Mitchell goes along with the conventional idea that Achilles is disillusioned with the fairness of life in general, an idea which can only be supported by mistranslating what Homer actually said.
Anthony Verity, a British scholar, produced a line-by-line prose translation published by the Oxford University Press in 2011. Verity states that his aim is to keep closely to the Greek, respecting Homer’s line numeration and using a straightforward English vocabulary. To this end, he gives a paraphrased rendition in prose of each line, very much like Lattimore’s, line by line choosing his own words and arranging his words in his own order, but his diction tends to be more modern in tone than Lattimore’s.
Anthony Verity (2011)
318 The man who just stands there and the man who fights bravely
319 get the same share; coward and brave are equally honoured;
320 a man dies just the same, whether he has done much or nothing,
321 I have endured pain in my heart, always risking my life in battle,
322 but I get no more share than others, not even a little.
323 Like a bird which brings all the morsels she can find
324 to her unfledged young, and suffers herself because of it,
325 so I too have passed many nights without sleeping, and
326 have come through days that were bloodstained with fighting,
327 struggling against men, fighting for the sake of their wives.
While keeping Homer’s line number, Verity takes liberties in rearranging words and lines. He did well to choose “share” and convert the pronoun in line 321, (which for him is 322) to “share,” so that there is not any confusion. “Honour” is not misspelled, by the way. Verity is English. They invented the language and are allowed to spell the words any way they like. However, he follows other translators with the mistranslation of coward and brave in place of bad and good. After reordering lines 321-22 and adding extra words (in italics), Verity still mistranslates and has Achilles complaining that he gets NO MORE THAN OTHERS. In fact, he gets NOT ANY, while others got their fair share. That is why he is upset. This mistranslation is another attempt to convey the mistaken idea that Achilles is disillusioned with the values of his society, an idea that can only be conveyed with a mistranslation.
Barry Powell, a scholar at the University of Wisconsin, produced a translation of the Iliad in 2013, also published by the Oxford University Press. Powell states that he tries to put into English in a lean direct manner what the Greek really says, avoiding modern sensibilities and sticking to the Homer style of repetition and epithets. To that end, he presents a stacked prose translation with an interesting style. He starts off a book or a section with a translation of Homer’s first line that runs for a line and a half of his own. He then starts Homer’s next line in the middle of his own and ends it in the middle of his next one. This goes on line after line. The first half of Homer’s lines, more are less, tend to be the second half of Powell’s lines and the second half of Homer’s lines, the first half of Powell’s. His language is modern in tone, but faithful to Homer to a similar degree as Lattimore’s line-by-line prose and Wyatt’s prose.
Barry Powell (2013)
The same lot comes to him who holds back as to him
who fights eagerly. In like honor are the shirker
and the brave. Death is the same reward for the man
who does much and for him who does nothing. It is
of no advantage to me that I have suffered pains
in my heart, ever risking my life in these contendings.
Like a bird who brings tidbits to her chicks, whatever
she can find, but goes herself without, so have I spent
many sleepless nights and bloody days passed
fighting with men on account of their wives.
The stacked prose lines of Powell match up with the original lines of Homer, but the mistranslation “lot” in 318 has nothing to do with “honor” in 319, and the mistranslation “advantage” in 321 has nothing to do with either. Powell mistranslated Homer’s phrase “he dies the same,” in 320 with his own phrase “death is the same reward,” thus changing the subject of the statement from “he” to “death,” and thereby turning the complaint into a proverb that usurps the sense of the three-line passage. But Powell is wrong! Death is not the reward. Long life is the reward for staying, eternal renown and a worthy portion of the loot is the reward for battling. Homer has Achilles complain that his reward was unjustly taken.
Peter Green, a professor of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin, has produced a line-by-line prose translation of the Iliad, published in 2015 by the University of Texas Press, with the explicit aim of emulating Lattimore’s version. Green calls the Lattimore translation “deservedly famous and ground-breaking,” because of its “determination to get as close as possible, in every respect – metre, rhythm, formulaic phrases, style, and vocabulary – to the original Homeric Greek,” in order to “give a totally Greekless readership the closest possible idea of what Homer had been about, metrically, linguistically, and in literary terms.” Green declares his own version to have the same objectives with the added one of being “naturally declaimable,” meaning easily recited. His stated priorities are: a line-by-line adherence to the original with declaimable lines of 5 or 6 stresses.
Green’s stated priorities sound a bit odd considering that Lattimore is (as has already been shown) nowhere near to getting as close as possible to the original Homeric Greek. The perceived awkward language of Lattimore has led translators after Lattimore to focus on appearing more “readable” or “accessible” to modern readers. Green’s aim of being “declaimable” seems to target this goal.
Peter Green (2015)
318 Equal the lot of the skulker and the bravest fighter;
319 courage and cowardice rank the same in honor;
320 death comes alike to the idler and to the hardest worker.
321 No profit to me that I suffered agonies at heart,
322 constantly risking my life in warfare. Just as a bird
323 brings back to her unfledged chicks whatever morsel
324 she can find, yet herself will suffer a heap of troubles,
325 so I have kept vigil many a sleepless night,
326 and spent bloodstained days engaged in battle, fighting
327 warriors for their women. Twelve cities of men
Green more than the others supplants Homer’s words with his own modern judgmental terms. In line 318, Homer’s participles staying and battling are mistranslated as the judgmental nouns “skulker” and “bravest fighter”. Homer’s adjectives good and bad at the end of 319 are moved to the front and mistranslated as the subjects “courage and cowardice”. “Death” becomes the subject of 320 and the adjectives unworked and worked are mistranslated to the judgmental nouns “idler” and “hardest worker”. Homer’s pronoun any in 321, which refers back to both portion and honor in lines 318-19, Green must mistranslate with “profit,” because he uses the mistranslation “lot” in 318 instead of portion. “Profit” cannot refer back to either “lot” or “honor”. Green has made Achilles suddenly in 321 start a new topic of complaint that is unrelated to previous lines. Strangely, in his introduction, Green explains moira as meaning “portion”.
Caroline Alexander is a classics PhD and a successful commercial writer in the history genre. She came out with a line-by-line prose translation of the Iliad in 2015, which aims to emulate and improve on the Lattimore version. She states that she has: “tried to carve the English as close to the bone of the Greek as possible and to follow unforced rhythms of nature speech.” She translates line-by-line, like Lattimore, and rearranges, like Lattimore, Homer’s poetic syntax and formulaic structure to the conventional prosaic order of subject, verb, object. But she has freed herself from Lattimore’s self-imposed restraints on line length and number of stresses. Her lines are therefore often shorter, some very short, but some are long, such as line 320 in the passage below. Here Homer’s elegant verse with parallel words (unworked, much worked), which Alexander could have finished with “done much,” runs on for 25 syllables in what can only be assumed to be a personal artistic whim. In her translation, Alexander shows an aversion to repeated words and phrases, a notable feature of Homer’s artistry for anyone able to read the Greek. She shares this aversion with most other English translators. There seems to be a prevailing notion that repetition is redundant and dull.
In the passage below, Alexander conforms to the standard mistranslations: fate for portion, coward and warrior for bad and good, and profit instead of portion. She also conforms to the mistaken interpretation that Achilles becomes disillusioned with the values of his society. But she must be applauded for translating line 320 faithfully. She only changes the subject from singular to plural and makes the line unusually long. There seems to be an unwritten rule that no one is allowed to translate this verse as written in Homer’s text. Mitchell simply deletes it.
Caroline Alexander (2015)
318 the fate is the same if a man hangs back, and if he battles greatly,
319 in equal honor are both coward and warrior;
320 and they die alike, both the man who has done nothing and he who has
. accomplished many things.
321 Nor is there any profit for me, because I have endured affliction at heart,
322 ever staking my life to do combat.
323 As a bird to her unfledged young brings
324 in her mouth whatever she catches, but for herself it goes badly,
325 so I too have passed many sleepless nights,
326 and come through many blood-soaked days of fighting,
327 doing battle with men who fight for their own wives.”
There is a lesson in Bronze Age morality here. Two other embassies had already occurred in the Iliad by this point. Odysseus and Menelaos had come to Troy to ask for the return of Helen. The recompense offered was continued peaceful relations with the Argives. The Trojans refused, making them accomplices to the crime of Paris and earning them as well the vengeance of Menelaos backed up by the wrath of Hera and Athene. Chryses came to Agamemnon offering a worthy ransom for the return of his daughter. But Agamemnon refused, earning him the vengeance of Chryses backed up by the wrath of Apollo.
Now Agamemnon himself sends an embassy. His offer of apology and gifts as recompense are fulfillment of Zeus’ plan to aid the Trojans until Agamemnon to Achilles makes amends. With Achilles refusing, amends cannot be made. Achilles prevents fulfillment of Zeus’ plan. That puts him on the wrong side of Zeus, not a good place to be, and he will suffer for it.
Agamemnon needed to accept the ransom and release the daughter of Chryses, the Trojans needed to return Helen and Achilles needed to yield his wrath, though all would have lost something they personally desired more. There is a fourth embassy and offer of ransom at the end of the Iliad. This one is accepted and the gods are appeased.
Achilles himself says that his heart tells him to join his friends, but his wrath will not let him. His threat to sail home the next day is a bluff. He was nursing his wrath and holding out for a better offer, one that would humiliate Agamemnon in person. Any who thinks it was right for Achilles to refuse should consider the consequences: the next day for Achilles was the worst day of his life.
Book 1: The Wrath of Achilles (lines 1-5)
The Iliad begins with a prelude of five lines, which announces the subject of the epic with the first word and then summarizes the theme in an invocation to the Goddess of epic song. Every translation gets these opening lines wrong, leading to a loss of meaning and artistry right from the start. Below I provide a literal word-for-word translation of these five lines:
1 Menin aeide, Thea, Peleiadeo Achilleos
. wrath sing, Goddess, of the son of Peleus, of Achilles,
2 oulomenen, e mupi Achaiois alge etheke
. ruinous, it countless upon Achaeans pains put
3 pollas d’ iphthimous psychas Aidi proiapsen
. many and worthy lives to Hades sent forth
4 heroon, autous de eloria teuche kuvessiv
. of heroes, them and spoils made for dogs
5 oionoisi te pasi, Dios d’ eteleieto boule
. birds and all kinds, Zeus’s and fulfilled was plan,
John Prendergast (2023)
1 The wrath sing of, Goddess, of the son of Peleus, Achilles,
2 ruinous, it upon Achaeans countless pains put,
3 and many worthy lives to Hades sent forth
4 of heroes, and made them spoils for dogs
5 and birds, all kinds, and fulfilled was Zeus’s plan.
Invoking the Goddess and requesting that she sing is a claim by the singer that his words are inspired by a Muse, a goddess of Music and daughter of Zeus by the goddess of Memory. Such introductions in such a manner are traditional for this oral art.
My literal translation above preserves the original form of every word and the original order with three slight exceptions in lines 2 and 5. The poetic syntax of Homeric Greek often has adjectives separated from their nouns by an intervening word, as is the case with “countless pains” and “Zeus’ plan”. My method of conforming such three-word groups to English syntax is simply to switch the first and second words. I also flipped the verb “made” with the objects “them spoils” in line 4 to conform with English syntax.
Below I present ten leading published translations of this five-line prelude to show how all ignore the poetic syntax of Homer and reorder the words in the same prosaic way. A mindset for convention also leads to the same mistranslations of five crucial words. Let us begin by specifying these five words:
THE WORDS MOST OFTEN MISTRANSLATED IN THE FIRST FIVE LINES.
Wrath (line 1): The Greek word menin always and only describes a terrible vengeful anger exclusive to gods or to Achilles, who is a demigod, and receives the backing of Zeus, so that the wrath of Achilles becomes the wrath of Zeus. The English word “wrath” is perfect for translation and was the choice of translators since the time of Alexander Pope (1720) until the middle of the 20th Century. Since that time, translators have chosen ordinary words such as “anger” and “rage,” which they interchange with other synonyms for the human emotion of anger. Readers thus cannot recognize the special and awesome nature of menin.
Body and soul (lines 3 and 4): Nearly every translator starting with Alexander Pope in 1720 has chosen to translate the Greek word psyche in line 1:3 as “soul” in accord with their modern theological notions, which causes a problem, because a Homeric psyche is in no way a soul. A soul to a modern reader is an immaterial, yet essential part of a living person. It is in fact the “conscious self”. Nothing immaterial exists for Homer and the psyche does not exist in a living person. It is imagined as the last breath of a person, and is created at the moment of death when the last breath crosses the threshold of teeth and becomes cold. It may appear like the mist that forms in cold temperatures from an exhaled breath. We have already seen the Greek word psyche in line 9:322 of the last passage analyzed, where every translator chose the word “life”. The word occurs 33 times in the Iliad, most often in the context of risking, taking or losing “life”. Think back to line 9:322. The word “soul” cannot be used in place of “life”. Achilles cannot say he was risking his soul. That phrase has a very different meaning from risking his life. The word “soul” is completely out of place in Homeric epic.
The anachronism in 1:3 forces adulteration of 1:4. Homer refers to the dead heroes with the pronoun autous, which means themselves, and can be perfectly translated with the English pronoun “them”. For Homer, a dead person is that person, though dead. For modern readers the soul is the self apart from the body, so the pronoun naming the dead as “them” after the soul has departed does not make sense. Using “soul” in 1:3, forces translators to adulterate Homer’s text in 1:4 with further theological anachronisms about mortal remains.
There is no reason for this problem. To the modern idea that separates the body and soul there is a parallel one which sees death as a loss of life. Today, after major disasters, words are spoken about the tragic loss of life and every effort is made to retrieve the dead so that their families will have “closure”. We embalm our dead and place them in tombs which become a sort of shrine where people go to feel close to their departed loved ones. Modern Western military men are loathe to leave their dead on the battlefield. Soldiers consider this a matter of honor and often put their lives at risk to recover a dead comrade. This is very much in accord with the outlook of the people in Homer’s epics.
Heroes (line 4): The Greek word heros is a special word in the “heroic” verse of Homeric epic and confers a distinctive character. The word in ancient Greek has the same meaning as it does in modern English. The word describes: (1) a man admired for renowned deeds and qualities; (2) A principal character in a story. (3) A man of classical myth who was honored in life and memorialized or even worshiped after death, because of his deeds and character. Too many translators seem to feel that Homer’s heroes are not worthy of the title, even though they were killed in action. Instead, they use words like “warrior” or “fighting men,” making the word and the men appear quite ordinary.
Zeus’ plan (line 5): The Greek word boule in line 1:5 means “plan,” a specific course of action intended to achieve a short-term result. However, nearly every translation starting with Alexander Pope in 1720 confuses what Homer is trying to say in line 5 by mistranslating boule as the “WILL of Zeus” in accord with modern theological notions. Today when people speak of the “will of god” they are expressing a faith that everything happens from the will of a father god in heaven, but mankind cannot expect to know or understand how the many events on earth fulfill his will. This idea of WILL is expressed in the Lord’s Prayer:
Our Father, which art in Heaven, hallowed be they name. Thy kingdom come,
thy WILL be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
This is not what Homer refers to in line 1:5. The plan of Zeus is the motive that drives the plot. It is very knowable and achieved in a few days. The audience wonders at first what the plan is, but that is revealed 500 lines later at the end of the first Book, when Thetis, a sea goddess, the mother of Achilles, comes to Zeus on Olympus to ask that he fulfill a favor for her in return for a favor she had done for him. Earlier in Book One, a wrathful Achilles had pledged to withdraw from the fighting after he was dishonored by Agamemnon, the Achaean king. Thetis laid out a plan to restore her son’s honor. She wanted Zeus to give the Trojan’s strength, until the Achaeans realize they cannot survive without Achilles and are forced to apologize to him and make amends.
Zeus pledged to fulfill this plan by nodding his head, a gesture that cannot be taken back or be untrue or unfulfilled. Fulfillment of the plan thus became a cosmic necessity. Measures that must be taken to achieve it drive the plot of the Iliad and bring grief to many on both sides, especially to Achilles himself. The specifics of Zeus’ plan are plotted at the end of Book One and the start of Book Two. These are the important passages:
1:536 So he (Zeus) there sat down on his chair. And not him did Hera
1:537 not recognize, having seen, when with him she plotted plans,
1:538 silver-footed Thetis, daughter of the salt sea’s old man.
1:539 At once with mocking to Zeus, the son of Kronos, she spoke forth:
1:540 “Who indeed then with you, wily-schemer, of gods plotted plans?”
Later, at the start of Book Two, after all had gone to bed for the night:
2:3 But he (Zeus) pondered within his mind that Achilles
2:4 he would honor, and make perish many on the ships of the Achaeans.
2:5 And this within his heart appeared the best plan:
This is the plan that Homer refers to in line 1:5. The word boule, which is translated as “plan,” and put in bold type, occurs three times in the lines above. Note that “plan” is always the last word of the line, as it is in 1:5. Every translator chooses the word “plan” or some other synonym in these lines, because the word “will” would not make any sense. But their readers are forever left with the impression from their mistranslation in line 5 that before the PLAN of Zeus and Thetis, there is also a WILL of Zeus, which Homer never explains.
THE PROSAIC ORDERING OF WORDS
Now let us examine how all the translators ignore Homer’s poetic syntax in the first five lines and reorder the words in the same prosaic way, following a common path, which I call the prosaic route. This course has two primary features:
- Syntax is strictly arranged in this order: SUBJECT, VERB, OBJECT, an order that Homer rarely uses. Homer’s order in Line 1 is: object, verb, subject, possessives of object. Line 2 and 3 have the verbs at the end of the line for emphasis. Line 4 has the verb behind the object. Line 5 has the subject as the last word for emphasis.
- Adjectives and possessives that modify a noun are adjacent to that noun. So Homer’s first and last words in line 1 must be moved together in translation to be “the wrath of Achilles”. Homer’s first word in line 2, which is an adjective for “wrath,” the first word in line 1, must be in translation adjacent to its noun. To accomplish this, “wrath” must be repeated or Homer’s words must be reordered. For emphasis, Homer enjambled this adjective, a poetic term meaning to straddle. Homer’s clause making up line 1 does not end with line 1, but continues on and straddles line 2, so that the adjective of “wrath” becomes the first word. Reordering the words or repeating the word “wrath” in translation to follow the prosaic routine clutters the line and spoils the style. The first word in line 4, “of heroes” is the enjambled possessive for psyches in line 3 and is also not adjacent to its noun. So whatever word the translator uses for psyches must be repeated or Homer’s words reordered.
Such a prosaic ordering of words is what makes translations sound so prosaic, a common complaint from readers. A further issue is the choice of verbs. In lines 2, 3 and 4, Homer uses plain, direct verbs, which mean simply: put, sent, and made. The dignity of Homeric verse and source of its power is being rapid, plain and direct. Notice below how many translators mar this nobility and distract from its effect by substituting extravagant, overdramatic verbs. Five use the same mistranslation in line 4, by stating that souls (lives) are “hurled” to Hades instead of “sent”.
No version of the Iliad in English has ever before tried to present what Homer actually said in these first five lines. In the published translations below, watch for the five mistranslated words and how the strict prosaic routine makes every translation much more like each other than like Homer.
William F. Wyatt, Loeb Library (1999)
The wrath sing, goddess, of the son of Peleus, Achilles,
the accursed wrath which brought countless sorrows upon the Achaeans,
and sent down to Hades many valiant souls
of warriors, and made the men themselves to be the spoils for dogs
and birds of every kind, and thus the will of Zeus was brought to fulfillment.
I have stacked Wyatt’s prose translation into lines again without reordering a single word. Wyatt has translated the opening line exactly literally, which shows how easy that is. Not one other translators below does so. Wyatt uses “wrath” because his translation is a revision of one from 1924 by A. T. Murray, when “wrath” was in vogue. After the first line, however, Wyatt follows the prosaic route, but found a clever solution to the pronoun in line 4 (the men themselves), a solution no other translator below will copy.
Richmond Lattimore (1951)
1 Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilles
2 and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaians,
3 hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong souls
4 of heroes, but gave their bodies to be the delicate feasting
5 of dogs, of all the birds, and the will of Zeus was accomplished.
Lattimore systematically throughout the epic rearranges Homer’s words within each line in an order that follows the prosaic route. Big words are his style and meet his self-imposed syllable quota: devastation, thousandfold, multitudes, delicate feasting, accomplished, a trait for which he has been praised and criticized. Lattimore had no problem calling the heroes “heroes,” but chose the standard mistranslations with “anger” “soul” “body” and “will,”
Robert Fitzgerald (1975)
Anger be now your song, immortal one,
Akhilleus’ anger, doomed and ruinous,
that caused the Akhaians loss on bitter loss
and crowded brave souls into the undergloom,
leaving so many dead men – carrion
for dogs and birds; and the will of Zeus was done.
Fitzgerald announces from the start that he does not intend to translate the Iliad, but rather to rewrite the epic with lines in iambic pentameter using his own words and art. He does, however, choose all five conventional mistranslations and his ordering of words follows the prosaic route.
Robert Fagles (1990)
Rage – Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,
murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,
hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls,
great fighters’ souls, but made their bodies carrion,
feasts for the dogs and birds
and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end.
Compare the lines of Fagles with the prose of Wyatt and it becomes clear that Fagles wrote in prose, which he then stacked. This is not a criticism of Fagles, but of Wyatt, who should also have stacked his prose as well.
Like Homer, Fagles starts the epic with the word “rage,” but unlike Homer this first word is not connected to the rest of the first line. He then repeats “rage” as he follows every feature of the prosaic route and reproduces every conventional mistranslation in the opening five lines.
Stanley Lombardo (1997)
Rage: sing, Goddess, Achilles’ rage,
Black and murderous, that cost the Greeks
Incalculable pain, pitched countless souls
Of heroes into Hades’ dark,
And left their bodies to rot as feasts
For dogs and birds, as Zeus’ will was done.
In a further effort to not be snobbish, Lombardo calls the Achaeans “Greeks” throughout his version of the epic. He has no problem calling the heroes “heroes” but uses the other four standard mistranslations.
Stephen Mitchell (2011)
The rage of Achilles – sing it now, goddess, sing through me
the deadly rage that caused the Achaeans such grief
and hurled down to Hades the souls of so many fighters,
leaving their naked flesh to be eaten by dogs
and carrion birds, as the will of Zeus was accomplished.
Mitchell worried that a modern reader may not grasp why a Goddess is asked to sing, and so he altered the first line slightly to address that concern. Unlike Fitzgerald, Fagles and Lombardo, who also claim to require a good deal of freedom from the words of the Greek, Mitchell translated the five lines with five lines in a style that is rapid, plain and direct in thought and expression, but also faithful to Homer and similar to translations that aim to keep close to the original Greek. He follows convention for word choice and word order.
Anthony Verity (2011)
1 Sing, goddess, the anger* of Achilles, Peleus’ son,
2 the accursed anger that brought the Achaeans countless
3 agonies and hurled many mighty shades of heroes to Hades,*
4 causing them to become the prey of dogs and
5 all kinds of birds; and the plan of Zeus was fulfilled.
Verity breaks away from the herd and confirms my claims. Although starting the first line much like Lattimore, he recognized that “anger” is not the right word, and added a footnote to explain what Homer’s first word really means. Verity knows that using “souls” in line 3 is wrong and uses “shades” instead so that he can correctly translate the pronoun in line 4 as the pronoun: “them”. However, “shades” still refers to some sort of ghost, and he used “life” to translate psyche in line 9:322. He also recognizes that Homer’s heroes as “heroes” and that Zeus’ “plan” was fulfilled, not his “will”. In terms of word order, however, Verity follows every convention of the prosaic route.
Barry Powell (2013)
The rage* sing, O goddess, of Achilles, the son of Peleus,
the destructive anger that brought ten-thousand pains to the
Achaeans and sent many brave souls of fighting men to the house
of Hades and made their bodies the feast for dogs
and all kinds of birds, for such was the will of Zeus.
Powell in the opening line followed Homer by putting “rage” in front and separated from its possessive “of Achilles”. Then, not feeling right about his choice of “rage,” he added a footnote to admit that Homer’s first word really means much more. After the first line, however, Powell followed every conventional mistranslation and every feature of the prosaic route for word order.
Caroline Alexander (2015)
1 Wrath – sing, goddess, of the ruinous wrath of Peleus’ son Achilles,
2 that inflicted woes without number upon the Achaeans,
3 hurled forth to Hades many strong souls of warriors
4 and rendered their bodies prey for the dogs,
5 for all birds, and the will of Zeus was accomplished;
It is good to see “wrath” coming back into vogue. Alexander wants to start the epic with this word, but just sticks it out in front unconnected to the rest of the line. She then must repeat “wrath” as part of the first line. Its adjective, which Homer put enjambled at the start of the second line for emphasis, Alexander buries in the middle of the first line, so that it may be beside its noun. She then chooses all four remaining conventional mistranslations and follows every feature of the prosaic route for word order.
Peter Green (2015)
1 Wrath, goddess, sing of Achilles Peleus’s son’s
2 calamitous wrath, which hit the Achaians with countless ills –
3 many the valiant souls it saw off down to Hades,
4 souls of heroes, their selves* left as carrion for dogs
5 and all the birds of prey, and the plan of Zeus was fulfilled*
Green must be applauded for choosing “wrath” as the most fitting translation of menin, but he then goes on to make the rest of line 1 confusing. After correctly starting with “wrath” to conform with Homer’s first word, he then conforms with the conventional word ordering that other translators follow by putting the verb “sing” behind the subject “Goddess”. He thereby commits a syntax error. By the rules of English grammar, his first line clearly directs the goddess to “sing of Achilles”. “Achilles” should be a possessive of “wrath”. For Green, “Achilles” by mistake becomes the object of “Goddess sing”. “Peleus’s son” is an adjective for “Achilles”. It is in the possessive case, because in an inflective language, an adjective takes the case of its noun. Green, however, mistranslated it as a possessive: “Peleus’s son’s”. Green then also committed a conventional mistranslation by putting a second “wrath” in line 2, so that the adjective “calamitous” would be beside its noun. He thereby commits another syntax error. “Peleus’s son’s” by the rules of English grammar becomes a possessive adjective for the second “wrath” instead of “Achilles”.
Green gets off to a bad start, but this is not typical of the quality in the rest of his translation, which is a competent emulation of and challenge to Lattimore’s translation. Green appears to be torn between faithfully translating Homer’s words or following conventional mistranslations, causing him to go halfway with both. He uses the conventional mistranslation of psyche as “soul,” but did not want to add a word to line 4 that is not in Homer’s text, as convention prescribes. He attempted to come up with a solution like Wyatt’s, but it violates the rules of English grammar and requires that he add a footnote to explain why.
Green must be applauded for translating boule in line 5 as “plan” not “will”. He even adds a footnote to specify for the reader that this is the plan devised by Thetis and Zeus to give advantage to Trojans in the war until Agamemnon makes amends with Achilles.
Emily Wilson (2023)
Goddess, sing the cataclysmic wrath
of great Achilles, son of Peleus,
which caused the Greeks immeasurable pain
and sent so many noble souls of heroes
to Hades, and made men the spoils of dogs,
a banquet for the birds, and so the plan
of Zeus unfolded,
Wilson, a professor of Classics at the University of Pennsylvania, was the first to publish an Iliad translation after I put up this website in 2017. Of the 10 translators reviewed in this article, Verity and Green correctly translated three out of five of the crucial words in the first five lines. The eight others correctly chose only one or none. Wilson correctly translated all five. Furthermore, she has a note in the back of her book explaining the importance of the word “wrath” (menin) and she assures readers that she faithfully translates menin as “wrath” every time it occurs in the epic. She uses “soul” for psyche, but explains in another note that this is not the modern conception, but only a shadow, while the “men” (even when a corpse) were identified in Homer’s time as the person and physical self. She correctly translated “heroes” and Zeus’ “plan” and she has a third note that specifically identifies this as the plan plotted by Zeus and Thetis to aid Achilles.
I am happy to learn that my work has been noticed and that my insights have made an impression.
Book 8: The Second Day of Battle (lines 306-08)
My last example is a three-line simile from Book Eight, which John Farrell, a Professor of American and English Literature at Claremont McKenna College, called “the unexpectedly beautiful death of Priam’s son, Gorgythion,” after having been struck in the chest by the cast of an arrow. In his literary critique published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Oct 30th, 2012, Professor Farrell used this passage to compare the Verity and Lattimore translations from the standpoint of English literature. Below, I use this passage to compare these two translations and six others against the literal Greek:
8:306 mekon d’ os eterose kare balen, e t’ eni kepo
. a poppy and as to one side his head he cast, one (and) in a garden
8:307 karpo brithomene notiesi te eiarinesin
. with seed being heavy showers and of spring,
8:308 os eterose emuse kare peleki barunthen
. so to one side bowed his head in his helmet, having become heavy.
John Prendergast (2023)
306 And, as a poppy, to one side his head he cast, one in a garden
307 with seed being heavy and showers of spring,
308 so to one side bowed his head in its helmet, having become heavy.
This Homeric simile is tricky. It has the usual as-so format, but in two parts. Line 306 contains the first part, both the vehicle (as a poppy) and object (to one side he cast his head). The end of 306 and the whole of 307 contain the second part of the vehicle, which explains that the poppy droops to one side because it is heavy with seed and moisture. The second part of the object in 308 then equates the bowing of the head to a similar condition of having become heavy.
A translator must be careful with this inflective language to identify the subjects of the verbs. In 306, the verb balen (cast, threw, tossed) has a form which translates to past tense, active voice. The spelling of kare (head) lets it be the subject or object, but a head cannot toss, it can only be tossed. Someone tossed the head. “Head” is the object. The subject is Gorgythion, even though he is not named and has no pronoun. In an inflected language, the subject as a pronoun can be understood from the form of the verb alone, the pronoun need not be present, as it must be in English. Poppy cannot be the subject of balen. A simile vehicle is always in the present tense. Also, poppies do not have heads.
In 308, kare (head) is the subject, though spelled the same as in 306, because the participle is nominative in case and thus describes the action of the subject. It is the head that becomes heavy in its helmet and bows, not Gorgythion. The noun “helmet” is prepositional in case. In an inflected language, no preposition need be present.
Below this simile is presented from eight leading translations:
Anthony Verity (2011)
306 As when in a garden a poppy droops its head to one side,
307 heavy with the weight of its seed and with spring showers,
308 so his head, weighed down by his helmet, slumped to one side.
Verity mistook “poppy” for the subject of the verb balen, thus wrongly conveying to the readers that Homer thought of a flower as having a head. The adjective “in a garden,” which Homer has at the end to modify a pronoun, Verity puts in front, where it takes away emphasis from “poppy”. Homer wants a poppy drooping to one side to be the first image in the mind of his audience, not a garden. Verity further interferes with Homer’s design by putting “to one side” at the end. In 308, where Homer again positions “to one side” at the front, Verity again puts it at the end.
Verity uses THE conventional phrasing for the last two words in 308, “weighed down by his helmet,” but goes against Homer and convention by putting this phrase in the middle. As shall be seen, five of the six translators below end line 308 by copying this exact phrase. Verity alone put the phrase in the middle, perhaps to put the verbs of this line in chronological order. There’s more about this later.
Richmond Lattimore (1951)
306 He bent drooping his head to one side, as a garden poppy
307 bends beneath the weight of its yield and the rains of springtime;
308 so his head bent slack to one side beneath the helm’s weight.
Lattimore’s methods of translating are well illustrated in this simile. First in 306, Lattimore reverses Homer’s poetic syntax to take his prosaic route: subject, verb, object, supporting words. “Poppy” moves from the front to the end and “he bent” from back to front. Homer used two different verbs to describe the head motion in 306 and 308, but Lattimore ignored Homer’s words and chose one of his favorites (bent) for both lines.
Lattimore preserves the key parallels in the simile, the present participle in 307 (being heavy) and the aorist participle in 308 (having become heavy), but translates these as parallel prepositional phrases. Aorist participles are an abundant characteristic of Homeric Greek, occurring over 1600 times, but Lattimore and others never translate these verbs as aorist participles. We have seen this before back in the passage from Book Five about Apollo’s speech to the son of Tydeus, where the first line (line 439) has two verbs, one an aorist participle (having called out), but Lattimore translates it as a prepositional phrase. Changing the present participle in 307 to a prepositional phrase apparently had Lattimore thinking “poppy” needed a verb (which it does not), and so he clumsily defies the elegant symmetry of parallels in Homeric similes by crowding in a redundant third “bends”. Again, Lattimore’s awkward wording does not arise from his fidelity, but rather from his infidelity to Homer’s text.
Overusing the word “bend” is a bad habit for Lattimore. He often chose it as a utility word, where it “will do” instead of finding the right and defining word to convey the real meaning and artistry. Homer used balen (cast, throw) and emuse (bow) for describing the motion of the Trojan’s head. I always use the word “cast” for balen, because in English a spear can be thrown, but not an arrow. Gods will also “cast” abstract things such as love or vigor into someone’s heart, as in casting a spell. With all the spears and arrows being cast about in the Iliad, the word shows up a lot. It also has a noun form as in “the cast of an arrow”. In line 8:303, Gorgythion was struck within the chest by the cast of an arrow. Saying that Gorgythion cast his head in 306, relates his reaction to its causal cast in 303. Lattimore’s choice of “bent” loses this artistry.
The word for “bow” occurs in the Iliad only five times and describes a lowering of the head in a gesture of submission or defeat. The horse of Achilles bowed its head out of respect so that its mane touched the ground. An ear of grain bows beneath a wind. Achaeans twice vow that the city of Troy will bow beneath their hands. “Bow” is the exactly fitting word, and again Lattimore’s choice of “bent” loses meaning and artistry. “Bow” is the word of choice in the translations by Wyatt, Powell and Green below.
Lattimore and all other translators fail to translate the aorist participle in 308 and resort to a conventional wording that is on its face a mistranslation. The head does not bow “beneath the helm’s weight” and is not “weighed down by the helmet” That is not what Homer says. The Trojan had no trouble holding up his head until struck by an arrow. The wound caused a loss of strength and of consciousness that forced the head to bow beneath ITS OWN weight. Homer’s aorist participle is passive in voice, because the head is being acted upon. With the passive voice the actor need not be named, and is not named, because the obvious actor, the wound, is understood.
The helmet must be freed from blame and take on its proper role in the line. Homer arranged the words in line 308 in a way common for oral composition, putting the set up words “so to one side bowed his head” in front and saving the payoff word “having become heavy” for the end. A gap was left, which “in its helmet” filled. It is a filler word inserted to complete the line according to formula. The helmet causes nothing and adds no meaning. If the phrase “in the helmet” is left out of line 308 in my translation, there is no loss of meaning at all. If the phrase “by the helmet” or “of the helmet” is left out of any of the other translations, the line is incomplete. This may seem like a small point, but every translator fails to translate aorist participles throughout the epic.
The value of an aorist participle is shown in this example:
. He ran forward and launched his spear.
. He launched his spear and ran forward.
. Having run forward, he launched his spear.
. He launched his spear, having run forward.
The order of verbs makes the first two sentences have two different meanings. But with an aorist participle in the second two sentences the order of verbs makes no difference in meaning. So it is with line 308. The verb positioned second in the line describes an action that occurred first in time. It must be an aorist participle to convey the proper time sequence. The sentences below say the same thing. The second one, Homer’s sentence, uses an aorist participle.
. So his head in its helmet became heavy and to one side bowed.
. So to one side bowed his head in its helmet, having become heavy.
When composing spontaneously, the ability to put verbs on a line in any order is a valuable tool. Homer’s lines are so full of aorist participles as to make these a characteristic feature of his epics. The failure of these to appear in translation is a serious weakness and is one of the reasons that every translator must reorder Homer’s poetic syntax into a prosaic one.
William F. Wyatt (1999)
And his head bowed to one side like a poppy that in a garden
is heavy with its fruit and the rains of spring;
so his head bowed to one side, weighted down by his helmet.
Wyatt’s prose I have stacked to highlight how similar his translation is to the stacked prose of Mitchell and Powell and the line-by-line prose of Lattimore, Verity, Green and Alexander. All six of these translators rearranged Homer’s order of words in accord with their strict prosaic routine: subject, verb, object, supporting words. In lines 306 and 308, each one put “to one side” (the words Homer put in front) in the middle, behind the subject and verb. On even such a minor feature, not one translator could be diverted from their strict prosaic course to follow Homers example. All replace “he cast” in 306 with another word, either bowed, hung or drooped, and all by convention use the same mistranslation for the aorist participle.
Wyatt does, however, show a fidelity to the parallel style of Homer’s similes. The parallel words Homer put in the simile are: to one side, head, and the two participles of the verb to be heavy, but because line 306 and 308 have different subjects (head is the object in 306 and the subject in 308), these lines have different verbs: cast and bowed. Wyatt did not preserve the participles as parallels (heavy and weighed down), but did make head in 306 the subject and bowed the verb to create a parallel wording with 308. While not technically faithful to Homer’s words, it is in accord with the Homeric style.
Barry Powell (2013)
Like a poppy Gorgythion
bowed his head to one side that in a garden is weighed
down with seed and spring rain – just so he bowed
his head to one side, weighed down by his helmet.
Powell also shows a fidelity to the parallel style of Homer’s similes. He preserves as parallels “to one side” and the participles “weighed down,” but he also followed Wyatt’s example by changing the verb in 306 to “bowed” to create a parallel with 308. But unlike Wyatt, Powell makes Gorgythion the subject in both lines and head the object. Changing the subject in 308 to he from head commits a syntax error. The subject he, instead of head, is now weighed down by his helmet, which does not make sense.
Caroline Alexander (2015)
306 his head hung to one side like a garden poppy
307 made heavy with seed and the showers of spring;
308 so his head drooped, weighed down by his helmet.
Alexander shows an aversion for the parallel style of Homeric similes. She makes head the subject in both 306 and 308, but removes all other similarities from this simile. She discards “to one side” from line 308 and translates the two participles of the same verb in 307 and 308 with different words: “made heavy” and “weighed down”.
Peter Green (2015)
306 His head drooped to one side: as a garden poppy sinks
307 under the load of its seed and the springtime showers,
308 so bowed his head sideways, weighed down by its helmet.
Green also shows an aversion for the parallel style of Homeric similes. He also makes head the subject in both 306 and 308, but discards all of Homer’s word parallels from his translation, thus ridding the simile of its Homeric character.
Stephen Mitchell (2011)
and his head drooped, like a poppy in a spring garden
weighed down with seeds and a heavy rain: so his head
leaned to one side beneath the weight of his helmet.
Mitchell, who insisted from the start that he intended to recreate the epic as a contemporary poem and required a good deal of freedom from the words of the Greek, translated the three lines with three lines in a style that is rapid, plain and direct in thought and expression, and with a fidelity to Homer that is similar to the translations which aim to keep close to the original Greek.
Robert Fagles (1990)
As a garden poppy, burst into red bloom, bends,
drooping its head to one side, weighed down
by its full seed and a sudden spring shower,
so Gorgythion’s head fell limp over one shoulder,
weighted down by his helmet.
Fagles, who also insisted on a good deal of freedom from the words of the Greek, took five lines to ruin yet another simile. But if Fagles’ words (in italics) are weeded out from Homer’s, a prosaic translation is left with all the conventions of the others, while adding the mistranslated notion that poppies have heads.
Conclusion
This appraisal can be used to judge as well any other English version of the Iliad. The ten I chose to include are the bestselling translations since the Lattimore version came out in 1951 and the best among those published recently. Lattimore’s version gets extra attention because it is my personal benchmark, and because its reputation has made it the competition against which later translators positioned their approach.
In the decades before Lattimore, popular translations of the Iliad read like novels, like Wyatt’s version. In fidelity and quality, these translations vary widely, but some, like Wyatt’s, are very faithful. However, converting an epic written in verse to a novel format grew out of vogue after line-by-line and stacked prose formats began to appear.
Between 1951 and 2011, the best-selling versions of the Iliad were in the stacked format by Robert Fitzgerald, Robert Fagles, Stanley Lombardo and Stephen Mitchell, which are not strictly translations, but more accurately called adaptions, works of creative writing based on the Iliad. Fagles and Lombardo are Classics PhDs; Fitzgerald and Mitchell are professional writers. Their works are intended as popular literature and printed by commercial publishers for the enjoyment of readers who do not value faithful translations. The versions by Fitzgerald, Fagles and Lombardo are also used widely as translations in competition with Lattimore’s version in schools, colleges and universities.
Starting in 2011, no less than four serious efforts by Anthony Verity, Barry Powell, Caroline Alexander, and Peter Green, emerged to compete with Lattimore directly in terms of line-by-line, word-for-word fidelity. All are Classics PhDs. All are published by University presses, except for Caroline Alexander, who had a successful career as a commercial author before publishing her Iliad. Over the years, many have praised Lattimore’s line structure, diction and tone; many have found it ponderous. In their approach to appeal to readers, all four new translations take a position against what many consider ponderous by using in their own way and to various degrees shorter lines with a more contemporary language and tone.
All four are worthy challenges and the choice of which is best must remain a matter of taste. However, none go beyond Lattimore in terms of fidelity or set themselves apart. All follow the Lattimore routine. They translate line-by-line, word-for-word in prose, but ignore the poetic syntax of Homer’s formulas and reorder the words in the same prosaic way: subject, verb, object. They put little priority on finding the right and defining words. All repeat the same conventional mistranslations and misguided interpretations. In this regard, they are more like Lattimore and each other than Homer.
My new translation stands apart from the others. It is made for people, like myself, who care to know what Homer actually said in the way he actually said it. I want to preserve Homer’s epic style, not only in the big way, but in the little ways as well. The aim is to be a pleasure to read, while affording a more faithful telling of the tale and a more truthful view of Homer’s pantheon. As demonstrated by my sample passages in this article, the order of words and the form and case of each word are preserved according to Homer’s text within limits allowed by English syntax. The system of word formulas that Homer followed to compose his epic are thereby for the first time apparent in plain English, so the reading experience approaches reading the original Greek off the page.
This article disproves the fallacy that readability must be sacrificed for fidelity. The exact opposite is true. When for each Greek word, the right and defining English word is chosen, and the right words follow the original order and form, when repeated formulas are repeated exactly, things tend to fall into place, bringing out the unique, stylish artistry of oral composition. Lines turn out fluent, the wording lucid, the language elevated, and the tone takes on a resonance of genuine antiquity. Other translators attempt to say in their own words what Homer already said better.
A further benefit in my translation is the Introduction and fifty pages of thorough annotated notes, which focus on Homer’s Olympians and their purpose in the epic. Conventional views are confused. Homer’s epic cannot be fully pleasing unless the reader recognizes the majesty and virtue of Homer’s gods. I have put a second article in this website, which prepares readers to enjoy the Iliad by simply defining the true nature of Homer’s pantheon.
My translation is available in eBook and paperback at Amazon. The titles, Introduction and Notes are in the Times New Roman font. For the text of the Iliad itself, I have chosen Comic Sans, because that font is easier to read and confers the sense of a hand-written tale from ancient times. A legendary epic sanctioned by its antiquity should not read like modern newsprint. Comic Sans as a font is analogous to a swimming suit, which is not suited for serious and profession settings, and most any other, but when used in a setting for which it was designed, it is better suited.