Why Homer Matters (41 page)

“as the wings”:
Seferis, “Memory II,” line 10, p. 188.

1: MEETING HOMER

Robert Fagles:
Homer,
The Odyssey
, trans. Robert Fagles, introduction and notes by Bernard Knox (New York: Penguin, 1996).

“Who would want”: Odyssey
V.100–101.

what he thinks:
Ibid., X.472–74.

“sea-blue”:
Ibid., VIII.84.

“the man of twists”:
Ibid., I.1.

“starred with flowers”:
Ibid., XII.173. The Greek adjective
anthemoenta
means strictly no more than “flowery,” and it is Robert Fagles who has poeticized this phrase. But if Homer is, in the end, neither a pair of poems, nor the single author of them, but a living tradition, then that kind of enrichment of the inherited text seems entirely legitimate.

“We know all”:
Ibid., XII.189–91, Fagles XII.205–7.

That is what:
Carol Dougherty, in
The Raft of Odysseus: The Ethnographic Imagination of Homer's
Odyssey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 71–73, has a wonderful discussion of Odysseus's “metapoetic ship” as a vehicle for the heroic life.

Matthew Arnold's famous lectures:
Matthew Arnold,
On Translating Homer: Three Lectures Given at Oxford
(London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, 1861), available online at
http://www.victorianprose.org/
.

2: GRASPING HOMER

“Beauty is always”:
The following scenes are based on but expanded and adapted from
The Goncourt Journals by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
, ed. and trans. Robert Baldick (1962; reprint, New York:
New York Review of Books
, 2007), 83–85, 118–19.

“I can't remember”:
The point that Renan failed to remember may have been that the word usually translated as “unharvestable” was said by the second-century
AD
Graeco-Roman grammarian Herodian, in a marginal comment on Homer's text, to mean “never worn out,” or “unresting,” and so in several nineteenth-century translations the phrase became “the restless sea.” Most modern translations prefer “barren” or “unharvestable,” perhaps on the grounds that Homer doesn't do cliché.

Almost at the beginning: Odyssey
II.337–70.

“far from battle”:
It can also mean “fighting at a distance,” like an archer, and so it was an appropriate name because archery was one of Odysseus's skills and he might have wanted to pass it on to his son.

“Ah dear child”: Odyssey
II.363–70 (with parallel translation by A. T. Murphy, revised by G. E. Dimock [Cambridge, Mass.: Loeb / Harvard University Press, 1999]).

“Each time I”:
Kenneth Rexroth,
Classics Revisited
(New York: New Directions, 1968), 7.

“a jumbled heap”:
John Keats, sonnet, “O Solitude,” lines 2–3.

“the barbarous age”:
Quoted in Andrew Motion,
Keats
(London: Faber, 1997), 10.

Edmund Spenser's
Faerie Queene
:
Spenser,
Faerie Queene
, book 2, canto 12, line 204; Motion,
Keats
, 52.

“The tide!”:
Motion,
Keats
, 93.

“both a lovely”:
Ibid., 63.

“a parallel universe”:
Ibid., 41.

“The conscious swains”:
Pope's translation of the
Iliad
, VIII.559.

the 1780s:
This point is brutally addressed by Matthew Arnold in
On Translating Homer: Three Lectures Given at Oxford
(London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, 1861), available online at
http://www.victorianprose.org/
.

“No man of true”: The Iliad of Homer, Translated by Alexander Pope, Esq
(London: W. Baynes and Son, 1824), 4. For an illuminating modern discussion of translation as a kind of alchemical process, see Matthew Reynolds,
The Poetry of Translation: From Chaucer and Petrarch to Homer and Logue
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

“What he writes”: The Iliad of Homer, Translated by Alexander Pope, Esq
, 4.

“In
Homer
”:
Ibid.

“
Virgil
bestows”:
Ibid., 12.

“unaffected and equal”:
Ibid., 18.

“In vain his youth”: Iliad
XX.537–46.

“It is not to be doubted”: The Iliad of Homer, Translated by Alexander Pope, Esq
, 17.

“a treasure of poetical elegances”:
Samuel Johnson, “Life of Pope” (1779), in
The Works of the English Poets, from Chaucer to Cowper
(London: J. Johnson, 1810), vol. 12, p. 112.

“money-mongering”:
Sonnet to Haydon, quoted in Motion,
Keats
, 119.

“the ocean”:
Keats, “Sonnet I. To My Brother George,” Aug. 1816, from Margate.

“the fine rough”:
Motion,
Keats
, 109.

“turning to some”:
Charles Cowden Clarke, “Recollections of Keats” (1861), in
Recollections of Writers
(London: 1878), 120–57.

“There did shine”:
Quoted in Andrew Laing,
The English Poets: Selections with Critical Introductions
, ed. Thomas Humphry Ward (London, 1880), vol. 1, p. 510.

“loose and rambling”: The Iliad of Homer, Translated by Alexander Pope, Esq
, 17.

“now totally neglected”:
Johnson, “Life of Pope,” 112.

“Chapman writes & feels”:
S. T. Coleridge, “Notes on Chapman's Homer,” in
Notes and Lectures Upon Shakespeare and Some of the Old Poets and Dramatists: With Other Literary Remains of S. T. Coleridge
(London: Pickering, 1849), vol. 2, p. 231.

“cool their hooves”:
A phrase later borrowed by Christopher Logue for the moment when the two armies sit down to watch the duel between Paris and Menelaus.

Now dark, now bright, now watch—

As aircrews watch tsunamis send

Ripples across the Iwo Jima Deep,

Or, as a schoolgirl makes her velveteen

Go dark, go bright—

The armies as they strip, and lay their bronze

And let their horses cool their hooves

Along the opposing slopes.

“One scene I could not fail”:
Charles Cowden Clarke, “Recollection of Keats” (1861) in
Recollections of Writers
(London, 1878), 130.

“Just as when”: Odyssey
V.328–30.

“he then bends both knees”:
Ibid., V.453–57.

As a hero:
See J. P. Mallory and D. Q. Adams,
The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World
(Oxford Linguistics) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 136.

“his knees no more”:
Pope,
Odyssey
V.606–10.

“For the heart”:
Ibid., V.454 (Murray/Dimock, parallel text).

“Odysseus bent his knees”:
Homer,
The Odyssey,
trans. E. V. Rieu, revised by D. C. H. Rieu (1946; reprint, London: Penguin, 1991), 83.

“his very heart”:
Richmond Lattimore,
The Iliad of Homer
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), V.454.

“The sea had beaten”:
Homer,
The Odyssey
, trans. Robert Fagles, introduction and notes by Bernard Knox (New York: Viking, 1996), V.502.

“beastly place”:
Quoted in Motion,
Keats
, 74.

“On the first looking”:
This early draft, differing from the published version, is in the Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Keats 2.4 A.MS.

“The troops exulting”:
Pope's
Iliad
VIII.553–65.

“the cockney Homer”:
J. G. Lockhart, “On the Cockney School of Poetry, No. V,”
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine,
Apr. 1819, 97.

“A thing of beauty”:
Keats,
Endymion,
book 1, 1–5.

Andrew Motion:
Motion,
Keats
, 162.

“And such too”:
Keats,
Endymion
, book 1, 20–21.

“That question has no answer”:
Lattimore,
The Iliad of Homer
, foreword, 7.

3: LOVING HOMER

they don't eat bread: Odyssey
IX.191.

Grilled meat:
Ibid., XX.25–28.

no moment was happier:
Ibid., IX.10.

“all professional athletes”:
Plato,
The Republic
, book 3.

fish was:
The classical Greeks were baffled by Homer's dislike of fish; they thought fish the ultimate delicacy and couldn't understand why Homer's heroes ate beef when they were so often sitting next to a prime fishing spot. This contempt for fish was perhaps a steppeland inheritance, from the time when a large herd of meaty animals was one of the identifying marks of a king or hero.

Mindjack:
“Mindjacking” is a term invented by the cyberpunk novelist William Gibson.

“I am conscious”:
Plato,
Ion
, 380
BC
, trans. Benjamin Jowett; see also Penelope Murray and T. Dorsch,
Classical Literary Criticism
(London: Penguin, 2000), 1.

“The gift which you possess”:
Plato,
Ion
; see also Murray and Dorsch,
Classical Literary Criticism
, 5.

“There is no invention”:
Plato,
Ion
; see also Murray and Dorsch,
Classical Literary Criticism
, 5.

“1 panegyrick poem”:
See Macaulay's
History
(London: Penguin, 1989), vol. 2, p. 32, describing the Homeric world of the late-seventeenth-century Highlands and islands: “Within the four seas and less than six hundred miles of London were many miniature courts, in each of which a petty prince, attended by guards, by armour bearers, by musicians, by an hereditary orator, by an hereditary poet laureate, kept a rude state, dispensed a rude justice, waged wars, and concluded treaties.” Also see David Stevenson,
Highland Warrior: Alasdair Maccolla and the Civil Wars
(Edinburgh: John Donald, 1980), for the reemergence of a warrior society in the power vacuum created by the failure of the Scottish crown. The warrior world emerges not at a moment in history but at repeated phases of human social and political arrangements, when there is no overarching authority in control.

the people of Pylos: Odyssey
III.5–6.

Odysseus weeps:
Ibid., V.151.

he finds Nausicaa:
Ibid., VI.1ff.

draw up their ships:
Ibid., XI.20.

Odysseus lands:
Ibid., XIII.195ff.

“The way they take”:
Lattimore,
Iliad
IX.182, Fagles IX.217–20; a mixture of the two.

“To wander in anguish”:
Adapted from Fagles,
Iliad
XXIV.14–15.

“on her golden throne”: Odyssey
X.541.

“her veil the colour”: Iliad
XXIII.227.

“that bellows”: Odyssey
II.421.

He spreads his sail:
Ibid., V.268.

“and the wind”:
Ibid., XI.10.

“So these two”:
Lattimore,
Iliad
VIII.1–8.

“Back towards home”:
Ibid., XXIII.229–30.

“the black ship”: Odyssey
XI.1–14.

red-painted bows:
Lattimore,
Iliad
II.637.

“The wind catches”:
T. E. Shaw,
The Odyssey
(1932), quoted in Rodelle Weintraub and Stanley Weintraub, “Chapman's Homer,”
Classical World
67, no. 1 (Sept.–Oct. 1973), 16–24.

“Thus with stretched sail”:
Ezra Pound, “Canto 1,” 9–10.

4: SEEKING HOMER

“germana et sincera”:
Joh. Baptista Caspar d'Ansse de Villoison,
Homeri Ilias ad Veteris Codicis Veneti Fidem Recensita
(Paris, 1788), xxxiv.

“I will send”:
Robert Southey, ed.,
The Works of William Cowper
(London, 1836), vol. 6, p. 266.

Friedrich August Wolf:
Wolf, a highly irritable man, claimed never to have had a dream in his life. See Nicholas Boyle,
Goethe: Revolution and Renunciation, 1790–1803
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 265.

“No such person”:
Thomas De Quincey, “Homer and the Homeridae,”
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine
, Oct. 1841, 411–27.

“sovereign poet”:
Dante,
Inferno
IV.88.

“was dumb to me and I am deaf to it”:
E. H. Wilkins,
Life of Petrarch
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1962), 136.

Medieval
Odysseys
:
For the most illuminating account of the early texts of Homer, see M. L. West, ed. and trans.,
Lives of Homer
, in
Homeric Hymns etc
. (Cambridge, Mass.: Loeb/Harvard University Press, 2003), 296ff.

brought to Italy:
L. Labowsky,
Bessarion's Library and the Biblioteca Marciana—Six Early Inventories
(Rome: Sussidi Eruditi, 1979).