14 SEPTEMBER 1962, Page 22

BOOKS

Surge and Thunder

By WILLIAM GOLDING

T OPENED Mr. Fitzgerald's new translation of the jOdyssey* with a foreboding which was not lifted when I saw that he had given each book a catchy little title: 'A Goddess Intervenes,' The Lord of the Western Approaches,' A Gathering of Shades,' The Beggar at the Manor,' and so on This seemed to me to portend a transmu- tation rather than a translation and to some extent I was right. But Mr. Fitzgerald has laboured the Biblical stint of seven years over his book. This devotion brings its reward and his verses have economy, speed and excitement.

'Dear friends, no need for stealth: here's a young weaver

Singing a pretty song to set the air

A-tingle on these lawns and paven courts.

Goddess she is, or lady. Shall we greet her?'

So, reassured, they all cried out together, And she came swiftly to the shining doors

To call them in.

There is a splendid rowdiness about some of the speeches: Old Silverbow

Apollo, if he shot clean through Tclemakhos In hall today, what luck!

A poet himself, unlike Sir Thomas Browne,

Mr. Fitzgerald may be excused for thinking he knows exactly what songs the Sirens sang, even though Homer was not so fully acquainted with them: This way, Oh turn your bows, Akhaia's glory,

As all the world allows—

Moor and be merry.

Sweet coupled airs we sing.

No lonely seafarer Holds clear of entering Our green mirror.

The green mirror is forgivable in return for 'Sweet coupled airs we sing,' as a paraphrase LIRI vwcreprp oeaKovSis. Then again, the natural descriptions are vivid.

—nearby A cave of dusky light is hidden For those immortal girls, the Naiades.

Within are wine-bowls hollowed in the rock And amphorai; bees bring their honey here; And there are looms of stone, great looms, whereon The weaving nymphs make tissues, richly dyed As the deep sea is; and clear springs in the cavern Flow forever.

In brief, then, all is eminently readable, en- joyable, highly legible in this sumptuous pro- duction, and might be thought to do everything we ask for.

But what do we ask for? According to the publishers, we modern readers demand 'living diction, clarity and swiftness,' and certainly in this Odyssey we get all three. Nevertheless, with Greek slipping more and more out of the edu- * THE ODYSSEY. By Homer. Translated by Robert Fitzgerald. (Heinemann, 35s.)

cation of anyone but the specialist, it may be worth asking how near Homer such a version

takes us. For the publishers' claim is based on a false assumption: that there is an ignorant public who, when they find the Odyssey on the railway station, between 'Bombshell for a Blonde' and 'Death Takes a Tycoon,' may happen to choose the first of the three without any know- ledge that it is more than just another book. But people are not as ignorant as that The appeal of a translated Odyssey will always be to people who want information as much as, if not more than, entertainment, and who know that they are reading a book as remarkable in its way as the Bible.

Homer made concessions to his audience, and Mr. Fitzgerald makes them to his readers, but they are never the same ones. He condenses in the interests of speed, he is colloquial in the interests of living diction, he changes his trans- lation of stock phrases or lines in the interests

of variety. A simple example is the '0 moi ego' which Odysseus uses in moments of stress. This

is a phrase, colourless as 'Aye me': but Mr.

Fitzgerald makes of it in one place, 'Who in thunder?', and in another, '0 damned con-

fusion!' These are liberal beginnings to speeches where the eloquence is never pejorative. Trans- mutation, paraphrase, is one thing, translation is another. The present version may be a more

fascinating one than, say, Caulfield's hexameters —and how bad some of those were!—but it is

less like Homer. The colourless epithets and

stock phrases, the repetitions, are Homer whether we like it or not; and an attempt to get round them, however much it may startle the ground- lings, is nothing more than a falsification of the original.

But, of course, Mr. Fitzgerald has taken on a job which has become more difficult even in the last generation. Every age, they say, gets the translation of Homer that it deserves. It is a wry comment on our own age that we have been presdnted with evidence which underlines the impossibility of any accurate translation whatso- ever. A translation is a book, and Homer is the most unliterary of authors. The work of Aristarchus, of Bentley, of Wolf, of a thousand others, is insignificant beside Milman Parry's demonstration, during the Thirties of this cen- tury, that Homeric poetry exemplifies nothing but oral composition. To the veriest amateur of the language, this was a revelation. All the epithets, phrases, repetitions, even the contra- dictions, fell into place. They were not evidences of incompetence, or carelessness, or even naivety. They were the oral technique, where the needs and assumptions were entirely different from our own.

An oral poet had as his stock-in-trade a store of this formal language, suited to every emer- gency, and he never combined them twice in

THE SPECTATOR, SEPTEMBER 14, 1962 the same way. His recitals were as freely im- provised as Hindu music, within the limits of a given mode. With our books we have the power to look before and after; his audience did not pine for what was not. Nor did these poets learn whole poems by heart. Why should they? They had access to the formal language; and the stories existed as a sort of Platonic idea from which each man made the copy he thought best.

It seems likely, then, that the poems were taken down from Homer's own lips—a piece of prehistoric and most fortunate fieldwork. What we have amounts to recordings of two separate series of Homeric recitals. His versions of the stories must have been like stormwaves—endlesslY varied and endlessly the same. Surely we can see, then, that a third hero of the epics is the epic language itself. Destroy the formality of that, and while you may have a good story left, what you have is not Homer. The identical phrases must be turned into identical words whether they seem naive or not. This is where the trans- lator must rely on the intelligence and good will of his reader.

The dull truth is that the only way to get alongside Homer is to learn Homeric Greek, It is a short task for the adult, an exhilarating and absorbing one. For by an odd coincidence, those concessions which the oral poet must make , to his audience—use of stock phrases, repeated lines for repeated actions, direct and simple thought—are precisely those which help the learner. He soon learns to rejoice in the return of rosy-fingered Dawn; rests like a listener rather than a reader, when Zeus the cloud-gatherer answering, addresses grey-eyed (or possibly owl- eyed) Athene. Occasionally, with his (Jail)/ Por- tion of the text stretching before him, he may falter, only to come on a number of familiar lines strung together which help him to make out the distance. I seem to remember that the last ten lines of book nine—condensed by Mr. Fitzgerald to seven—came to me in this manner as a sheer gift. There were grains of sand on the page, I remember, and by my ear, the bristles of marron grass shuddered and stirred their small funnels in the dry, white sand. With that sea beating on that beach, it was not difficult to lie back, repeat the ancient words and hear the familiar surge and thunder. We have lost the art of the oral and kePt only the colloquial. How different they are, can illustrate from my solitary contact vvith something like the epic world. In 1940, owing to circumstances over which I had little or no control, I spent some time in the company of a three-badge AB of His Majesty's Navy. On one glum occasion he confided his intentions to tile. O moi ego him, he said, as he poured the wa, ,ter out of his seaboots, when he got out of this O moi egoing ship he would take an 0 inoi eV; ing anchor over his 0 moi egoing shoulder art° 0 moi egoing-well walk inland until he met some O moi egocr who asked him what he was doinq with an 0 moi egoing pick-axe. There he wn'lla - build an 0 moi egoing pub and 0 moi egoing well live there for the rest of his 0 alai egoin! life. Those who know their Homer Will b_ familiar with some of the thought. I remembe! reflecting, as I wrung out my vest, that to tills level our oral resources had come. The cancel', as Matthew Arnold would have agreed. simple and direct, but neither rapid nor h°° (LT nearer the original.

match a in expression. We have nothing to diction which is at once oral and formal. No. No translation. Or if you must, so as dull and dutiful as Bohn. It will bring y methW_