Waiting for the Barbarians (16 page)

All of which is to say that when Achilles returns to battle—returns to deal out death—he is armed with a vision of life, at once expansive and movingly intimate, enormously rich but necessarily confined within a boundary that shapes it and gives it coherence. You could say that Western civilization has likewise armed itself, over the bloodstained centuries and millennia, with the
Iliad
—another richly detailed work of art that provides an image of every possible extreme of human experience, a reminder of who we are and who we sometimes strive to be.

It’s because the
Iliad
is both so vast and so fundamental that the nature of its text, what stays in and what comes out, is so important.

Most ancient Greeks believed that there was a poet called Homer who wrote down his poems; a notable exception was Josephus, the Jewish historian, who argued that the early Greeks were illiterate (unlike, needless to say, the early Hebrews). The historian Herodotus thought that Homer must have lived around four hundred years before his own time, which is to say around 800 BC. In about 150 BC, a scholar called Aristarchus, the head of the library at Alexandria and the greatest ancient expert on Homer’s texts, surmised that the poet had lived about a century and a half after the Trojan War itself—that is, around 1050 BC. It was generally thought that Homer wrote both the
Iliad
(a product of his passionate youth) and the
Odyssey
(the fruit of his wise and humorous old age), but some ancient scholars, called the Separatists, thought the poems were written by two different people. (The history of Homeric scholarship is filled
with factions whose names make them sound like the parties in a religious war or the participants at a Freud conference: Separatists and Unitarians, Oralists and Analysts.) No fewer than seven cities in ancient times claimed Homer as a son—the ancient version of “George Washington Slept Here.”

The modern history of the controversy begins late in the eighteenth century, when a French scholar discovered a manuscript of the
Iliad
from the tenth century AD that came complete with transcriptions of the marginal notes of ancient commentators (Aristarchus’ included). The notes made it clear that those earlier commentators had access to different and sometimes competing versions of the poems. This discovery soon led a German scholar named Friedrich August Wolf to argue that the texts of the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
that we possess had not been fixed in writing until relatively late. Homer, he argued, couldn’t write but had composed a series of ballads (or “lays”) that were short enough to be memorized and that were transmitted orally for generations, perhaps by guilds of professional reciters; these were finally assembled, by someone who knew how to write, into the immensely long poems we have today.

Wolf’s theory was immediately taken up and expanded by scholars known as Analysts, who combed through the two epics, confidently identifying traces of many poems by many poets. One advantage of this approach was that it explained the many inconsistencies and oddities of the texts, some historical (the poems refer to elements of both Bronze and Iron Age technology) and some linguistic. A notorious example of the latter is the “Embassy” in Book 9, in which the three Greeks supplicate Achilles to return to battle. The problem is that verbs and pronouns used in the scene are of a special type called the “dual,” which can be employed only for pairs of things (eyes, legs, oxen, etc.). The presence of the dual was clearly a remnant of an earlier version of the scene, in which only two Greeks
were sent to Achilles’ tent. The grammatically impossible dual stayed in the text, uncorrected, because there was, really, no author—no one poet overseeing the whole affair. There it remains, like a fossilized inclusion in a slab of polished stone.

The Analysts held sway throughout the nineteenth century. But early in the twentieth an American scholar named Milman Parry had a game-changing insight into one of the most striking features of the Homeric epics: the repeated use of rigidly formulaic epithets—“swift-footed Achilles,” say, or “rosy-fingered Dawn.” Like everyone else who’d read the poems in Greek, Parry knew that these epithets always fill the same position in whichever line they appear—that they were ready-made metrical placeholders. But, unlike everyone else, Parry had studied the techniques of living epic poets. (He observed and recorded Yugoslav bards in the 1930s.) What he suddenly grasped was that, while the epithets can seem wearyingly repetitive and add nothing substantive to the action of the poems, they do serve the needs of a poet who’s composing
while
he recites. If you’re improvising and know in advance how a line of verse is going to end—“swift-footed Achilles,” say—you can devote your attention to the middle, the part you’re actually inventing. (Think about rap, with its insistent, carrying beat and its predictable, if often approximate, end rhymes.)

The “oral theory” about the use of formulas (which could be linked together to create clusters of lines or entire prefabricated scenes) suggested not only how poems of such length were created but also how they might have been transmitted over centuries without being written down. And it also explained away the inconsistencies and repetitions that had troubled the Analysts: each successive bard used whatever traditional material suited him, even as he added and shaped and refined.

This is the orthodoxy that M. L. West has challenged, using the old techniques of the Analysts to demonstrate that hundreds of lines of the
canonical text weren’t original. But original to what? For the oralists, “original” is a red herring. West’s controversial thesis is that there was in fact a Homer (although West calls him “P,” for poet) and that this poet actually wrote down a “primal text” of the
Iliad
, revising it over many years. This apparently regressive heresy, set forth in articles, books, and a two-volume edition of the Greek text, has led to bitter exchanges in the pages of scholarly journals, filled with abstruse proofs that, to the uninitiated, might seem like the dialogue in a
Star Trek
episode (“Movable
nu
was already being used in this early period for the sake of preventing hiatus caused by the loss of digamma”).

However academic the debate may appear, a lot depends on who’s right. For one thing, an
Iliad
without the
Doloneia
is a very different poem from an
Iliad
with one. But what’s really at stake is how we think about the whole of the classical tradition. Say West is right, and the
Doloneia
is a later interpolation by another poet: the fact is that Book 10 has been part of the
Iliad
since antiquity, commented on and interpreted for two and a half millennia, and even furnishing the material for a Greek tragedy (the
Rhesus
, attributed to Euripides). In one obvious sense, the
Iliad
is simply the poem that we have possessed all this while.

An imperfect but perhaps helpful analogy is Wikipedia. For the oralists, the text of the
Iliad
is like a wiki: it’s the thing as a whole that matters, not only the kernel of text that someone first put up but also the additions, corrections, and deletions made by others over time. You could say that, for these people, “Homer” is the process itself. For West, it’s the original kernel that counts—a text that he thinks he has been able to identify because, like someone turning on the edit function in Wikipedia, he can go in and view the accretions, where they are and who made them, and when.

West’s proposed emendations to the texts are couched in the meticulous language of classical scholarship, and take the form of suggestions and proposals; perhaps because Mitchell is not a classicist, he is emboldened to cast West’s vision in stone. His new translation not only deletes passages that West merely brackets or questions but omits even some passages that West thinks were “expansions” by P himself. For this reason, his
Iliad
is slimmer and leaner than anything we have seen before (and, in the end, destined to be a specialty act).

Most of the time, the elisions are small, and they do eliminate some hiccups. For instance, West brackets a line in Book 13 in which Hector springs down from his chariot, on the not unreasonable grounds that Hector hasn’t been riding in a chariot. Sometimes they are larger and will alter your sense of a passage. Here, too, it’s not necessarily for the worse. Toward the end of that beautifully intimate moment between Hector and Andromache in Book 6, the wife makes her famous appeal for caution on the part of her husband, whom she memorably describes as being “everything” to her—“my father, my mother, my brother”: in the standard text, this poignant address is followed by seven lines in which this Trojan matron suddenly gives her husband advice on the deployment of his troops. Aristarchus thought there was something fishy about these verses, although West suggests that they were an expansion by P: Mitchell omits them.

Mitchell’s stripping away takes other, subtler forms. In a translator’s note, he cites the now canonical judgment of the Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold, who, in an 1861 essay called “On Translating Homer,” enumerated what he saw as the four cardinal qualities of Homeric verse: rapidity, plainness of syntax and diction, plainness of thought, and nobility. Homer’s Greek is capacious enough that he can achieve all four, but English translators have generally had to choose one or two at the expense of the others. (The sole exception is probably Alexander Pope, whose
Iliad
, set in rhyming couplets and
published between 1715 and 1720, is among the greatest translations of any work in any language.) Richmond Lattimore’s craggy 1951 translation, which imitates Homer’s expansive six-beat line and sticks faithfully to his archaisms (“Odysseus … laid a harsh word upon him”), has nobility but not rapidity; classicists tend to favor it. The Fagles has a gratifying plainness—my students have always preferred it—but doesn’t get the grandeur. Other interpreters go their own way. The stark
War Music
of Christopher Logue is more an adaptation than a translation; Stanley Lombardo’s 1997 version goes for a tight-lipped, soldierly toughness—a post-Vietnam
Iliad
.

Mitchell certainly gets the rapidity: this
Iliad
is by far the most swift-footed in recent memory, the iambic line driving forward in a way that gives force to the English and nicely suggests the galloping dactyls (long-short-short) of Homer’s lines. This is especially useful in those many passages in which characters speak with heated emotion—“with wingèd words,” to use the famous formulaic epithet. (An astonishing 45 percent of the poem is direct speech.) In Book 1, for instance, Achilles, at the climax of his argument with Agamemnon, rounds on his commander in chief and insults him openly. Here is Lattimore:

Mitchell’s rendering, in a lurching trochaic rhythm, is far more vivid:

Among other things, Mitchell doesn’t make the mistake of weakening
the first line by carrying it over to the next—an enjambment that isn’t in the Greek.

But too often Mitchell’s insistence on speed forces him to sacrifice nobility. Precisely because Homer’s Greek is an old inheritance—an amalgam of many styles and periods and dialects going back many centuries (no one ever spoke the Greek you read in Homer)—it has a distinctively archaic quality that, paradoxically, never gets in the way of speed. It likely sounded to Greek ears the way the King James Bible does to ours: old-fashioned but so much a part of the language that it never registers as stuffy. Not the least of the tools in Homer’s belt are those famous epithets, but for Mitchell, these can obscure what he calls the “meaning”: “ ‘Flashing-helmeted Hector,’ ” he writes, “means no more than ‘Hector.’ ” But “meaning” isn’t the point. Part of the way in which the epic legitimatizes its ability to talk about so many levels of existence and so many kinds of experience is its style: an ancient authority inheres in that old-time diction, the plushly padded epithets and stately rhythms.

All this, along with many other subtle effects, is gone from Mitchell’s
Iliad
, which, in its eagerness to reproduce what Homer says, strips away how he says it. (Mitchell’s translation, which he has said took him only two years, is marked by a certain hastiness: he misses many opportunities to render Homer’s rich linguistic effects.) It’s as if the translator, like the scholar who inspired him, were trying to get at some purer
Iliad
. In this, both men are indulging in a very old habit. In an article called “Homer: The History of an Idea,” the American classicist James I. Porter suggests that the very idea that there is a Homer whom we can somehow get back to, if only we work diligently enough, is a cultural fantasy of purity that dates back to ancient times: Homer, he writes, “is, and probably always was … an idea of something that remains permanently lost to culture.” But the
Iliad
isn’t pure, at least not in that superficial way; its richness, even
its stiffness, is part of what makes it large, makes it commanding, makes it great.