A Most Unlikely God

THE ODYSSEY (474 pp.) -- Homer, translated by Robert Fitzgerald --Doubleday ($4.95).

On first looking into Fitzgerald's Homer, the modern reader will be less astonished than was Keats when he looked into Chapman's.* Poet Robert Fitzgerald has again put into English the very old story of the most indestructible of Greeks. Odysseus was a very Greek hero, "formidable for guile in peace and war," "the great tactician,'' "skilled in all ways of contending," "all craft and gall," admired as much for his divinely inspired chicanery as for his handiwork with spear, bow or tiller. Although favored by Pallas Athena, he was not a superhuman figure but a very mortal man, in his own words as rendered by Fitzgerald:

. . . a most unlikely god am I, being all of earth and mortal nature.

I should say, rather, I am like those men who suffer the worst trials that you know,

and miseries greater yet . . .

This should reassure the suspicious modern that Homer's epic is not a supernatural swindle but the narrative of a man in trouble--the "first novel," as one translator put it--and that Fitzgerald's English version is in the crisp demotic argot of today. The new translation, however, does not skip or try to improve on the few familiar Homeric cliches: the sea is still "wine-dark" or "fish-cold"; the dawn is still "rosy-fingered."

The Wolf Pack. For those who came in late--a great many people educated at colleges with elective curriculums--The Odyssey is the story of the long voyage home from the Trojan Wars of Odysseus, lord of Ithaca, to be reunited with his wife Penelope and son Telemachus. On the way, he and his men suffered such ordeals as imprisonment by brutish cannibal giants, shipwreck, seduction, famine and feast. Meanwhile, back at the palace, a half-hundred soft civilians squatted on the absent lord's domain, eating and drinking their heads off, seducing the maidservants, insulting the stripling heir, and competing for the honor of consoling the presumed widow. The whole bloody and wonderful business ends when Odysseus, disguised as a beggar, first humiliates the suitors in a contest at archery, then slaughters the whole "wolf pack" of them, hangs the faithless female help, washes off the blood, makes love to Penelope, restores his son to honor and sets his little kingdom to rights.

It is a slashing narrative, in which almost every conceivable human circumstance has been dramatized, but one with obvious hazards for the modern reader. The first is the scale and simplicity of the Homeric world. The whole thing is really a squabble over food, shelter and women, operating within codes of conduct mysterious to members of an industrial society, codes the like of which exist today probably only in the yet un-detribalized parts of Africa. But it is not merely the scale of life--where a man's wealth could be counted on the hoof or his quality measured in whether he carried a sword or a slingshot --but its quality that is baffling to the modern mind. Homeric life was not merely lived but ceremoniously acted out within a complex web of obligations linking gods and men in fatal and final patterns. There is a strong sense of reality in the Homeric world; the poet had a peasant's narrow eye for each man's just portion and place at table. This apparently simple world was ruled by a supernatural order; divine justice, immediate and dramatic, awaited "those who would not think straight nor behave." Odysseus himself never failed to pay his sacrificial obligations to Zeus. The Spartan simplicity of what today might be called the economic base of Greek society was enriched by a complex and rich theological system.

Holy Pallas. Translator Fitzgerald, a Roman Catholic, is highly respectful of the supernatural goings-on in Homer. He considers Pallas--Odysseus' patron and therefore responsible for the workings of the hero's mind--to have her near equivalent in the Holy Ghost of the Christian Trinity. Here, too, may be seen the theological base of the incandescent Greek intelligence: faith and reason live together.

This sense of the philosophical dimension in the violent old fable, together with seven years' hard labor, has served to give real distinction to this translation. Fitzgerald is the latest of a long line of poets and scholars--from Pope and Cowper to T. E. Lawrence and A. T. Murray--who, with varying fortune, have tried to make good English of good Greek, or in his words from the poem, to "tell us in our time, lift the great song again." Each generation must do it in its own idiom. If there is missing "like ocean on the Western beach/The surge and thunder of the Odyssey" (in Translator Andrew Lang's phrase), it is because of the tight course Fitzgerald set himself. His aim was to make an easily spoken-verse story in the idiom of today, which is not notable for grandeur, elegance, or even the ceremonious conversational usages of a generation ago. How can anyone seriously be called Lord Odysseus, when even the perfunctory "Mister" is falling into ironic disrepute?

Genius Versatile. But Fitzgerald's version could well make a radio narrative as was British Poet-Professor C. Day Lewis' Aeneid. Within his chosen limitations, Fitzgerald has succeeded brilliantly. He can be read at a fast clip, with the breath taken at the almost natural intervals of a relaxed but eloquent after-dinner entertainer with an unusually good scriptwriter. Doubleday has backed him up with good type and Picasso-style illustrations by Hans Erni. Fitzgerald did not underestimate the staggering intellectual difficulties of Englishing Homer. Literally, the first line of The Odyssey would read in English:

Man for me insing muse versatile Who was harried very much. Fitzgerald:

Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell

the story Of that man skilled in all ways of

contending . . .

From another age comes Cowper's famed version:

Muse make the man my theme, for

shrewdness famed And genius versatile . . . The poem's climactic, blood-bubbling passage emerges thus with Fitzgerald: From storeroom to the court they

brought Melanthios, chopped with swords to cut his nose

and ears off,

pulled off his genitals to feed the dogs and raging hacked his hands and feet away.

While working on the translation, Fitzgerald lived around the Mediterranean, made a few pious visits to Homer's islands. On one visit to Ithaca, he spent a morning chatting with some old men who had no suspicion of his sinister scholarly mission. One of the oldsters suddenly stared out to sea and said: "They say he still turns up around here, a soldier, a seaman, an old bum or something." Fitzgerald did not crowd his scholar's luck by asking any questions, but accepted gratefully this intimation that Homer's world was not dead--nor his Odysseus--in the hearts of the modern Greek.

*In the celebrated sonnet, Keats said that he

felt Like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He star'd at the Pacific--and all his men Look'd at each other with a wild surmise . . .

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