Homer's Shining Raiment:

...He may very well be right...

...Some passages are not so much translated as paraphrased...

...Fitzgerald translates weakly "wanton that I was," although he is free enough with "bastard," "whore," "harlot" and "trull" where they are not in the text, and he sprinkles speeches liberally with such flavoring as "damned" and "damn it...

...His translation has an archaic effect on the page because he keeps the Greek spelling instead of the more familiar Latin spelling, even with well-known names ("Phoinikians"), and renders the Greek chi by means of "kh" ("Akhilleus...

...Fitzgerald quickly tires, and plays such variations on it as "her eyes shone like the sea" or "cast a grey glance...

...His theory of Homeric translation is, apparently, that it is more important to transmit the poem's power and eloquence than its stylization, that something comparable to the resonance of the Greek is of more value than pedantic fidelity to each word...

...Fitzgerald's "to learn what race of men this land sustained" loses it all...

...Fitzgerald is equally resourceful with other Homeric conventions...

...Occasionally the blank verse misses fire, and we get clumsy and inadequate lines like Odysseus' revelation to Telemachus: I am that father whom your boyhood lacked and suffered pain for lack of...

...Then the lord returns to his own bed and deals out wretched doom on both alike...

...Like Chapman, Fitzgerald is particularly effective on low life and verbal abuse, yet equally effective at moments of high emotion...

...With one of the most common epithets for Odysseus, polymetis, "of many wiles" or "of many schemes," Fitzgerald is remarkably acrobatic...

...No one will ever say of his translation what Richard Bentley said of Pope's: "It is a pretty poem, Mr...

...One of the most formal geometric patternings in the Odyssey is the device that the scholars call "ring-composition," the framing of a scene in the same words...

...Still others are peculiarly American: Sisyphus is "roustabout" to a boulder, Argos pasture land is "bluegrass," a Phoenician adventurer is "a plausible rat," Eumaeus greets Telemachus with "You made it back...

...I am he...

...Fitzgerald's language is sometimes weaker than seems necessary, and sometimes stronger...

...but Homer called it "bright" or "shining," because in fairyland even the dirty laundry glistens...

...The constant pepnymenos, "wise," for Telemachus displeases Fitzgerald, and he either omits it entirely or renders it "clear-headed," "prudently," "perceptive" or "with his clear candor...

...Some of his words are comparably archaic: "nape cord," "corse," "bension," "steading" (that classic of LangButchery), even "doorhook" for "key...

...Pope, but you must not call it Homer...

...When Helen says that the Trojan War was caused by "dog-faced me" (kynopidos), it should be rendered "bitch that I was" (the Greeks shared the canine insult with us...

...He sometimes makes the long formal similes more naturalistic by breaking them into short ejaculations, such as (for the suitors): Fawns in a lions lair...

...Odysseus tells Penelope, after their reunion, "I'm off up country...

...At other times he makes a simile seem playful and improvised by beginning it "Think of," or boldly turns it into a metaphor...

...Sometimes the language has a fine sprightliness...

...He has found a surprisingly good equivalent for the Greek hexameters in a very loose blank verse, with lines as long as eight feet...

...Where Homer has a slave say that the suitors have "loosened my knees" with toil, Fitzgerald says, in our idiom, "They've made me work my heart out...

...When he goes into random couplets in the Lay of Demodocus he is less successful, and the short-line quatrains that Hermes and the Sirens sing lean toward musical comedy...

...The embarrassing term for the mother of the cowardly beggar Irus, potnia, "Lady," he softens to "gentle...

...and the suitors tell Telemachus that his guests are "what the cat dragged in...

...Telemachus pictures his father dead: a man whose bones are rotting somewhere now, white in the rain on dark earth where they lie, or tumbling in the groundswell of the sea...

...Homer (if we may so designate the authors of the Odyssey) never tires of calling' Athena glaukopis (originally "owl-eyed" or "owlfaced," but generally translated "grey-eyed" or "flashingeyed...

...The absurd description of the treacherous murderer Aegisthus as amymonos, "faultless," he simply omits...

...Inevitably, in Fitzgerald's thousands of lines, there are inconsistencies of tone...

...For the epithets that make no sense in the poem, Fitzgerald has a variety of solutions...

...When Nausicaa loads her dirty laundry onto the cart, Fitzgerald calls it "soiled apparel," because it is...

...Melantho tells Odysseus: "You must be crazy, punch drunk, you old goat...

...One of the characteristics of the Odyssey that he did not wish to convey is its patterned geometric style, the constant repetition of fixed phraseology...

...If the answer is an English poem of vigor and beauty, aptly conveying the vigor and beauty of the original, then Robert Fitzgerald's version (Doubleday, 475 pp., $4.95) is all that we could ask...

...Penelope cries "until she had tasted her salt grief again...

...There are innumerable felicities...

...Witness his treatment of the conventional epithets...

...Like Chapman, Fitzgerald adds many lines largely improvised or entirely his own...

...When Menelaus is called boen agathos, "good at the war-cry," while getting out of Helen's bed, Fitzgerald gives up and translates it "clarion in battle...

...The beautiful image of Odysseus, cast ashore on Phaeacia, as a "seed" of fire (developing out of earlier similes of thistledown and chaff) is lost when Fitzgerald freely translates "spark...

...How brilliant, and how nervy, to call shooting an arrow through the axes "the needle shot," or to translate the curious pun predicting that Irus, the beggar who challenges the disguised Odysseus, will be no-Irus, as "By god, old Iros now retiros...

...He adds words to suggest extraneous meanings, or to interpret where Homer does not (remarks are introduced with "jesting" or "gruffly...

...When Odysseus checks his bow to see if worms have weakened it in the years of disuse, Fitzgerald ingeniously makes them "termites...

...In other words, Fitzgerald's Odyssey buys its poetic effectiveness at a certain cost...

...Instead of saying endlessly that Odysseus is polytlas, "much-enduring," Fitzgerald specifies: "who had borne the barren sea" or "who had borne the long war...

...Fitzgerald's version is a superb poem to read, but it runs where we must sometimes trot...

...Thus the episode of the hiding of the arms begins and ends (in A. T. Murray's close translation): "So goodly Odysseus was left behind in the hall, planning with Athene's aid the slaying of the wooers...

...At other times the language is entirely inadequate, as when Penelope says of the likelihood of her marrying the supposed beggar, "How very, very improbable it seems,' or the bed is described as "Their secret...

...Finally, Fitzgerald omits a few things we can hardly do without...

...This standard Homeric periphrasis for the human condition has a terrible irony here, since the Lestrygonians are cannibals...

...Fitzgerald's translation appears with no introduction, so that his theory has to be induced from his practice...

...Others are British-slangy: The Cyclops registers "fuddle" and calls Odysseus "twiggy...

...How exciting it is to read "Now who in thunder...

...Impatient of any exact repetition, Fitzgerald weakens this effect, beginning with Odysseus "studying the ground for slaughter," and ending "Odysseus waited with his mind on slaughter...

...When Odysseus and his men come to the land of the Lestrygonians, he sends scouts to learn (in Murray's translation) "who the men were, who here ate bread upon the earth...

...Odysseus tells Irus: "Old as I am, I might just crack a rib or split a lip for you...

...Antinous hits the disguised Odysseus with a stool and the other suitors say "A poor show, that...

...Fitzgerald does everything with it from "Are you mad...

...and Andrew Lang's "honeyhearted" wine for meliphrona, "sweet to the heart...

...through "Little devil," to "Captain, shake off this trance...

...Fitzgerald keeps the two phrases that were once brilliant imaginative strokes and are now the cliches of Homeric translation: Philip Worsley's "winedark" sea for oinopa, "wine-faced...

...At its best, Fitzgerald's Odyssey is as free and as splendid as George Chapman's in 1615...

...At some point we must face the question of fidelity to the text...

...Fitzgerald's blank verse is extremely good...

...or "Athena came as a god comes, numinous, to the rites," for "Athena came to accept the sacrifice...

...It seems surprising that Fitzgerald does not go all the way with M. I. Finley and render "cattle-raiding" as "rustling...

...He translates it "the strategist," "the great tactician," "the man of all occasions," "that resourceful man," "the master of improvisation," "that sly and guileful man," "brought his ranging mind to bear," "who had it all timed in his head," "the master of many crafts," "the great master of invention," "the master improviser," "the master of "subtle ways and straight," "the man skilled in all ways of contending" and even "the wiliest fighter of the islands...

...The ancient Greeks habitually drank their wine in highballs, two parts of water to one of wine, and it must have been rather like Manischewitz...

...An ancient Greek form of address, Daimoni, originally meant "Daemon-possessed," but by Plato's time it had become a purely conventional "Good sir...

...but he does not change "it lies upon the gods' great knees" to "it lies in the lap of the gods," equally our idiom...

...In the Odyssey it still has enough of the old magic to be used only when the person addressed is doing something peculiar...

...When Odysseus explains that the wine Maron gave him was so excellent that it could be diluted with 20 parts of water, Fitzgerald, who cannot bear the thought, changes it to "brandy...

...This is unquestionably Homer, if not all of Homer...

...As if a doe put down her litter of sucklings there, while she guested a glen or cropped some grassy hollow...

...for "Ah me, who...