Lombardo’s Poetic Translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey

Lombardo’s much praised renderings of Homer’s epics will be discussed in the following post.  Here I will just suggest, this is the version of Homer one should study and hear read out loud.

First a few facts are in order: 1) there really was a Trojan war between the Greeks and those who lived in Troy. It lasted about 10 years, with the Greeks in the end winning the war, which likely took place in the 12th or 11th century B.C.  2) according to legend what prompted the war was the stealing of the Greek beauty Helen by Paris, one of the sons of Priam. 3) the Odyssey and the Iliad were not composed until about the 8th century B.C. and without question during that interim period between the events and the actual writing down of these epic poems, there had been oral tellings and retellings of these stories.  3) Homer seems to have lived in the 9th or 8th century B.C. and according to one tradition he was a blind poet, who told and retold these stories orally in the form of epic poetry.  He lived in Ionia, a region on the west coast of Turkiye which covers about a hundred miles from Miletus in the south to Phocaea on the gulf of Smyrna in the north.  According to one tradition Homer came from Smyrna, or one of the adjacent islands.  4) Despite the considerable length of the Iliad (over 490 pages in poetic form) it does not include the whole story of the Trojan war, but ends with the recovery of the body of the slain Hector and his funeral.  There is thus no story at all of the Trojan horse or the end of the war in the Iliad, and it is only mentioned very briefly in Book 4 of the Odyssey, as follows,  after the story had been told of Odysseus sneaking into Troy as a disguised beggar and doing reconnaissance, returns to the camp of the Greeks, and what ensues is why he is called crafty in the Iliad (in which he plays a minor role compared to Agamemnon and Achilles and others):

“Yellow-haired Menelaus continued: ‘Wife, indeed you have told it all as it was. I have known before now the thoughts and judgements of many heroes, as I wandered the wide earth, but I have never seen so great hearted a man as enduring Odysseus. That episode too, of the Wooden Horse, how the great man planned it, carried it through, that carved horse holding the Argive leaders, bringing the Trojans death and ruin! Then, summoned it may be by some god who thought to hand victory to the Trojans, you arrived, with godlike Deiphobus on your heels. You circled our hollow hiding-place, striking the surface, calling out the names of the Danaan captains, in the very voices of each of the Argives’ wives. Diomedes, Tydeus’ son, and I, and Odysseus were there among them, hearing you call, and Diomedes and I were ready to answer within, and leap out, but Odysseus restrained us, despite our eagerness. The rest of the Achaeans kept silent too, though Anticlus wanted to call out, and reply, till Odysseus clapped his strong hands over his mouth, saving all the Achaeans, and he grasped him so till Pallas Athene led you away.’ ”

Yep that’s all there is but the Roman poet Virgil picks up and expands the story a good bit in his famous work the Aeneid, the main thrust of which is actually to highlight another minor figure in Homer’s epics— namely Aeneas, a Trojan whom Virgil in about 19 B.C. wants to credit with being the forbear of the Romans, claiming the Trojan ancestry for them.

One of the problems faced by any filmmaker is that Homer’s epics are fully of the descriptions, actions and speeches of variou Greek gods as well as the human, some of whom are demi-gods, the product of divine and human unions.  In the movie “Troy” (2004-starring Brad Pitt)  the gods are simply left out of the story, even though they play such a major, even controlling role in the story.  It remains to be seen how Nolan will handle this problem… next week when the movie hits the theaters.