THE PENGUIN HOMER

...Sometimes, as in Hij» School Star, it requires the most cartful reading...

...It is as a worthy substitute, then, and gratefully, that I esteem this book...

...1947...

...The indirection characteristic of much ia Farrei appears again in such general!, cations as: "He . . . worried about him...

...Nor was I attacked by any of the malignant diseases that so often make the body waste away and die...

...The measure of Farrell at his worst is, simply, Farrell at his best...

...she describes her own death...

...No, it was my heartache for you, my glorious Odysseus, and for your wise and gentle ways, that brought my life and all its sweetness to an end...

...Thrice, in my eagerness to clasp her to me, 1 started forward with my hands outstretched...

...and an understanding of these may help us to understand a little more about Farrell...

...Thrice, like a shadow or a dream, she slipped through my arms...

...Yet what a ghost...

...Of Childhood and Youth Reviewed by JOHN PORTER SHORT STORIES...

...but I missed you so much, and your clever wit and your gay merry ways, and life was sween no longer, and so I died...

...the black hand of death": "the darkness of dekth"—Rouse is more sensitive, there U more in him of the lacrymae rerum which I think I perceive in the originaL Again: in the Eleventh Book Odysseus has been talking with the ghost of his mother, Anticlera...

...In The Fate of a Hero, a study of r. man whose strength, courage and honesty are repudiated by the society that eats its young, Farrell's prose is the more than adequate instrument of his observations and irony, and the same is true in part or all of The Buddies, Wedding Bells Will Ring So Merrily, Thi^Benefits of American Life, the pathetic A Jazz-Age Clerk, For White Men Only, and Farrell's long examination of a young American Fascist, Tommy Gallagher's Crusade...

...The glory is departed," and the only possible remedy is the study ef Greek...

...When I heard this, I longed to throw ny arms round her neck...

...For !t1s significant Uist Farrell's merely careless passages when translated into French take on all the verve of that language, while other passages are as awkward in that language as in jurs, and the awkwardness is a failure of conduction...

...Penguin Books has performed for us: for approximately one sixteenth of the price we are asked to pay in order to share the charms ef Lydla Amber with the Reito: atlon Berbers and the Castlllan Mohawks of Kennebuak and Hollywood, we may acquire and lose ourselves iae romance thai the pasaaga or two and a half millennia has scarcely dimmed...

...self" and: "He pondered the irreducible mystery of life...

...now that he had seen...

...One of mine is the Argos-eplsodo la XVII, where Odysseus Is recognised * by his feeble old dog, who immediately dies...

...Secondly, the mythological effects...

...As for Argus": "But Argus...

...it was no disease that made me pine away...

...The losses are obvious...

...Not Homer, but Homer's ghost...

...both are honest and unpretentious and faithful...

...If Farrell writes well, both when psychological insight is not in point and when it is achieved, it is, precisely, when insight eludes him that one finds in his writing traces of the obstacles encountered- in its creation...

...Rleu's work _ which is excellent — but simply because I shall be using Rouse, in the remarks which follow, as a kind of touchstone...

...Both are excellent, and it happens that in detail Rieu is more literal here than Rouse...

...Black death" says the Greek...

...And yet, with the intrigues of Cesar Borgia thrown in for good measure, all that Maugham succeeds in creating in Then and New is a somewhat bloated and dull OHenry story...

...hand," with itc adventitious suggestion of Sicilian blackmail, is a rather awkward addition by Rieu...

...True, we do not know what Homer—what any ancient spoken Greek —sounded like...

...What was at least living tradition is now worse than dead...

...Rieu: "It was not that the keen-eyed Archeress sought me out in our home and killed me with her gentle darts...

...Herb one must group all those devices ands...

...In the more subjective stories, Farrell has something superior to copy-desk virtues...

...By /onset T. Farrell...

...But the fact of his survival proves his esseijtial popularity...

...but it is sound, and, above all, it is alive...

...The formative years of Machiavelli's life present an enviable opportunity for any writer assembling a volume of historical fiction...

...These may or may not have seemed quaint to the Homeric audience, though it is my belief that they did...

...WHILE Farrell's prose is usually dismissed, in a piece, as crude and awkward, it struck me, in reading this collection of short stories about childhood and youth, that it contains significant variations...

...Riefl's is simply good prose...

...and in the "Three times . . » three times...

...Where Timothy Kenny in Autumn Afternoon ". . . imagined that the Park was Purgatory and that the wind was the Voice of God, speaking in Wrath and Justice," and in other instances, the results of Farrell's insights emerge through a kind of eloquence...

...Rouse: "And this is how I sickened and died...

...213 page: 25 cents...

...These, I think, are some of the impediments in Farrell's efforts to "grain and recreate a sense of the common continuity of everyday experience...

...Homer, his Butcher and Lang...

...The second is clearly better...

...I do not mean that he was not strange: all great art is strange, and Homer (I am too ignorant to venture more than an opinion), with his extraordinary mixture of dialects, his rare words, and his curious incantatory locutions, must have sounded more than strange...

...This is no longer in print, so far as 1 can determine...

...Alas, poor Machiavelli) and he thought he knew Piero so well...

...By Lomerset Maugham...

...It should be distributed by the car-load to school children: after a page or two, they will not have* to be forced to read It And I should be less than generous to conclude without remarking'upon tho'signal service that...

...Tha thematic connective of the book is not the relation between Machiavelli's early observations and experiences and the later shrewd and masterful insights of his mature years, but hit early amorous quest for the Holy Grail »• sweaterized by Aurejia of the hesvlnf bosom, wondrous young wife of Bsrtolemeo Martelli, an eminent merchant and confidant of Borgia...

...Three times I tried to embrace the ghost, three times it slipt through my hands like a shadow or a dream...

...Allusions to similarities betwen Then and Now »re hammered into place...

...It is because Farrell so often does resell his objective and because the objectiTt itself is so important that it is essential to understand the failures...

...but Rouse's version is the nearer poetry: "and life was sweet no longer, so I died...

...Most of us, if the classics formed any considerable part of our education, were brought up on that horrible prose—"Oh, that the fellow may get wherewith to profit, withal,'* Rieu quotes with a shudder, "just in such measure as he shall ever prevail to bend the bow...

...As my- mother spoke, there came to me out of the confusion in my heart the one desire, to embrace her spirit, dead though she was...

...and just as one can not imagine that a story composed in the idiom of BAL would survive except in an aura of freakish nostalgia, so the first duty of his translator is to seek out an idiom that will survive at least as long as the temper of our times...

...both are colloquial in tone...

...There are, for example, the innumerable interior monologues written in the future perfect, in implied indirect discourse, ". . . she would die and she would not wake np in any heaven . . ." and aimilar constructions which here relate to feeling as lead to radium...

...It is not brilliant...

...and »th provide the best kind of answer to the steadily growing public demand for contemporary versions of the ancient classics...

...Rieu is less convincing, both as artist and as scholar, but this •is not to say that this translation is undeserving of the wide popularity which it is almost certain to enjoy...

...Alas, Poor Machiavelli "THEN AND NOW...

...but there is a difference between the quaintness jf "old, unhappy, far-off things/And battles long ago" and the outlandishness that time and ignorance have cast upon them...

...The passage concludes with a phrsse recalling the death of heroes in battle, an epic tag which only gains in poignancy from its being applied to a dog: As for Argus, he had no sooner set eyes on Odysseus after those nineteen years then he succumbed to the black hand of death...

...no sooner Bet ayes on...

...that he stammers through his exorcism in a constricted tone of voic* as if he were defying the reader to apprehend him...

...Rouse, to my mind, is very special...

...It should be recommended to anyone who believes that classical antiquity has nothing to' say to A.D...

...It is only on these occasions that he struggles in the peculiar agony of his prose...

...for while insight in fiction is by no means sufficient, its failure rarely goes unattended...

...to discover the excellence of Farrell's constructon under the debris of this prose...

...but we know that the hexameters did not sound like Rouse or Rieu...

...Both translations are in prose...

...As for the rest, Maugham strews the book with epigrammatic gleanings, which skinned and boned, and out of context, often read ludicrously...

...THE best translation of Homer that I ht.ve ever read ia by W. H. D. Rouse, whose Odyssey was brought out here in 1937 by Modern Age books...

...Doubleday & Co...

...We are left, then, with the story—the incomparable plot, the illuminations of Irony and Insight, the roaring fun...

...He was a story-teller—as Rieu puts it, he was the first novelist, and perhaps the greatest of all...

...Finally, the social and moral tone...

...and who can tell to what extent the majestically unreadable Victorian dons are to blame for the low estate of classical studies today...

...Here is Rouse: Rut Argos passed into the darkness of death, now that he had seen his master once more after twenty long years...

...and I mention it with no intent to disparage Mr...

...that, fumbling, with almost total recall, he summons up various human situations bare of the emotions connected with them, and the meaning buried in the detritus of detail...

...But if it Farrell's strjggle for full communication we cannot herald unbroken victories, the very violence of the struggle must command our respect, far more than does the silky grace so much more easily available to writers who are net so seriously engaged...

...This Rieu has done with conspicuous success...

...First, the sonal effects...

...It is not a question of carelessness, which may be the result of FarreD'i prodigious output, or of his occasional choice of the word horaible, sues at) "He throated...

...How, even in these dilute pages, he strides like the shade of his own Achilles "with great strides down the meadow of asphodel, rejoicing...

...At any rate, the present translation serves to re-emphasize a truth which BAL did their unwitting best to obscure thslt Homer, like the Greek tragic poets and the greatest of the lyrists, wrote living speech for living men...

...So do tht many repetitions, the endless parade of simple declarative sentences, th« flat rhythms and the toneless words...

...familiar subtleties of saying and feeling V for which modern English has only the loosest and most general equivalents, yet which in Greek must have been the very animus creator of the poem...

...Sophocles had his Jebb...

...he actually achieves something of the pathos that moved Vergil to imitate tha passage: ter conalut ibi collo dare bmcchia ¦ eireum, ter frustra eomprensa nanus effugit imago, par leuibus uentie uolucrique simillima somno...

...The "surprise'' ending finds young Piero, his apprentice and candle-holder, the benefactor of Aurelia's gifts...

...The Archeress did not shoot me in my own house with those gentle shafts that never miss...

...And at its beBt, Farrell's prose is plain, swift, clear and varied...

...EVERYONE, I suppose, has his own private passages by which he estimates ths degree to which a translator has succeeded...

...Let alone Then and Now, the reader is likely to be unlikely about whether he is Here or There...