The Translator

Rodney Merrill

I began translating the poem in 1975-1976, after leaving my academic job at the University of California, Berkeley. During that winter and spring I lived in a Volkswagen bus next to a duck pond in the campground of Lisbon, Portugal, named from the Latin Olisipo or Ulyssipo, and said to have been founded by Odysseus--presumably on the voyage which the soothsayer Teiresias tells him he is to take later in life. What more natural, in a setting, both physical and psychological, somewhat like that of Thoreau at Walden, than to embark on my own literary adventure, with Odysseus himself as its subject? But the project originated much earlier, when I fell in love with the music of Homeric epic, reading it both at Stanford, where I began my study of ancient Greek with Profs. Ted Doyle and Curtis Bennett, and during some months as a student in Paris. Or even earlier, when I found translations of the two epics in the public library of my home town, Idaho Falls, Idaho. But I also prepared myself for the voyage as a student of History and Literature at Harvard College, as a Fulbright scholar in Bristol, England, as a graduate student in English and Comparative Literature at Stanford, and as a teacher of medieval literature at Berkeley. Both study and teaching increased my understanding and love of formal verse in English, ranging from Chaucer and the Gawain poet in the middle ages, through the Renaissance epics of Spenser and Milton and the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, to such modern poets as W. B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens.

From all these experiences I became convinced that the strengths of English formal verse could extend to the great ancient meter of the Homeric epic, the dactylic hexameter, despite the low reputation it has had among critics in the twentieth century and up to the present. So when I found myself in Lisbon with nothing to distract me and nobody to tell me I should be doing something more useful, I started experimenting with this translation. I liked doing it, and I liked what I produced. About twenty-five years later I completed it and found to my delight that the University of Michigan Press was willing to publish it. Prof. Thomas R. Walsh made an indispensable scholarly contribution by collaborating with me on a comprehensive introduction to the epic--the historical and cultural setting, the transmission from the original singers to a settled text, the relationship between oral presentation and narrative, and the major themes. Bruce Burton provided the three maps, reproduced on this website, which help to locate the epic in the ancient world. Over the years other colleagues and friends gave me helpful suggestions as to points of translation and presentation. And I could never have accomplished the translation without the age-long work of commentators, lexicographers, and translators, from whose learning and engagement with the epics I have drawn much sustenance.

Among the most important scholarly contributions were those which made me understand that, beyond the sheer joy of creating hexameter music, there were other excellent reasons for attempting such a version. Milman Parry and his successors in the field of oral-formulaic poetry had demonstrated the central importance of the strict yet flexible Homeric medium in the composition of these oral poems. These scholars showed beyond any doubt that the formulae and other repeated elements so central to the epic song originated in the powerful and musical meter which was to become, following Homer's example, the standard verse-form for an enormous body of poetry in Greek and Latin. The repetitions themselves have at least as much value for their sound, their music, as for their meaning. Any translation which seeks to convey that music must use a strong and regular meter. It is true that there are many excellent translations of the two great epics, some of them classics of our language. There are even a few hexameter renderings. Very few of them even try to make the repeated elements as central to the experience in English as they are in Greek, and many of them dispense with the fixed epithets and other formulae altogether; some of them even see literary virtue in their variations of the formulae. My aim is quite simply to get as close as an English translation allows to the oral experience of the epic, and I have tried to reproduce as many formulaic and other repetitions as possible. I hope the outcome of my work can give readers, reciters, and listeners something approaching the pleasure it gave me to do it.