“English Translators of Homer” by Simeon Underwood
July 12, 2025
I must caveat the rest of my remarks by saying I believe the book I was looking for would be titled “English Translations of Homer” rather than “English Translators of Homer.” This book is a history of the translators, the choices they made in translation, and how they were influenced by previous translations and by the style and culture of their times. Whereas, what I was looking for would spend more time comparing the texts. That said, I think the author made a mistake by not illustrating more of his points with quotations from the texts. It gets frustrating to be told about Pope’s style, or Rieu’s choice of prose over verse, and go for pages without an example passage. I actually checked a version of Rieu out of the library while reading this book, so I could see what the author was talking about. Of course, that would be a longer book, but at 68 pages, this provides excessively short coverage of a large topic. At twice the length, it would still be a mere outline.
With those remarks aside, this is a good book. It really clarified how to think about the various translations and what I am looking for when I read them. Underwood starts by saying every act of translation is a balance between preserving the source text and producing a readable and enjoyable target text. This is particularly challenging in the case of poetry, where the choice and organization of the words is as or more important than their meaning. In fact, it is easy to imagine that in some cases this task may be impossible: hypothetically, there may not exist the words in English to translate a Haiku while maintaining the 5-7-5 form.
A particular challenge with Homer is that these texts are fundamental historic documents: not meaning they are histories, but rather that the texts appear at the very beginning of Western history. It is very reasonable to want to read them as close to the original Greek as possible to understand not only the events they describe (whatever their historical authenticity) but also the evolution of language and poetry, and to glimpse the mind and times of the author(s).
On the other hand, Iliad and Odyssey are both enjoyable and interesting as stories, and it is reasonable to want to produce a text that emphasizes that. And here comes yet another challenge beyond even translating contemporary poetry. Is the text supposed to capture the experience of a reader (or listener) from ancient times by, for example, using ancient idioms and similes, or create an analogous mood in the modern reader by updating those constructs?
For example, in Book 5, the hero Diomedes wounds Aphrodite. The love goddess retreats to Olympus, where she complains to Zeus. Lattimore’s translation goes:
“Tydeus’ son Diomedes, the too high-hearted, stabbed me as I was carrying my own beloved son out of the fighting, Aineias, who beyond all else in the world is dear to me; so now this is no horrible war of Achaians and Trojans, but the Danaäns are beginning to fight even with the immortals.”
Christopher Logue’s highly stylized and modernized version reads:
Love: ‘Father, see this.’ (Her wrist.) ‘Human strikes god! Communism! The end of everything!’
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