Present-Day Versions of Homer's Complicated Iliad

Homer, Homer, everywhere! First up is the lighter side, a Q&A with actors Denis O’Hare and Stephen Spinella. The two theater vets have joined forces to deliver their co-adapted (with director Lisa Peterson), one-man monologue An Iliad on separate nights at New York Theatre Workshop. A bit from Time Out New York:

The Iliad is more than 15,000 lines long. How do you cram such a huge piece onstage?

Denis O’Hare: We’ve sort of carved out our version. We’ve decided to focus on war and its meaning, and the waste of war and the human propensity for violence.

Stephen Spinella: It’s an immense narrative, filled with so many stories that it feels like the other texts that have lasted that long, like the Old Testament. You can imbue them with or extract from them what will satisfy you in whatever age you’re in.

What were the first choices you made in adapting the play from Robert Fagles’s translation?

Lisa Peterson: It seemed obvious to build it around two warriors who finally collide: Achilles and Hector. So the first cut that I did was to take everything else out. But there’s this connecting material that you have to have. The first cut had no gods in it—but without the gods you don’t have the mystery and the scope, and you lose a lot of the humor.

Spinella: That cosmology is also a narrative device that allows you to add story constantly, embedding story into story into story about how things happened—things that today might just be attributed to serendipity or happenstance.

O’Hare: Patroclus’ helmet falls off. Why? It could have been the wind. It could have been a tree branch. But in The Iliad, it’s done by a god.

Is the storyteller in this piece meant to be Homer?

Peterson: Our idea of Homer is as a collective consciousness. I believe that The Iliad was composed by many people learning and telling the story. So this is our attempt to imagine what it would be like to hear one of these bards, one of the Homers.

Spinella: But it’s profoundly fractured by his constant personal response to the story and his history of telling it. You’re always aware of his act of telling the story, and that meta-story becomes the real story of the evening.

Peterson: The character is a being who believes that he’s the author of the poem. He describes it like he was there. He can’t seem to disappear; he keeps coming to on some stage somewhere. And he’s sort of called out by a society that needs to think about war. He can’t die and go away. He seems to be immortal.

O’Hare: About a third of [the text] is Fagles’s verse, some of which we chopped and edited; a third is transcriptions of improvs that [Lisa and I] did together; and a third is original writing to get us from one place to the next.

Read the rest here.

And for the reverent among you, here are more details about that company of authors. Just up at The London Review of Books, a review of Stephen Mitchell's new translation of The Iliad, written by Edward Luttwak, who writes of his non-trouble finding a copy of the book at an airport recently:

But there were ten: one succinct W.H.D. Rouse prose translation and one Robert Graves, in prose and song, both in paperback; two blank verse Robert Fagles in solid covers; one rhythmic Richmond Lattimore with a lengthy new introduction;[*] and three hardback copies of the new Stephen Mitchell translation, with refulgent golden shields on the cover and several endorsements on the back...

Interestingly, Luttwak questions the prevalence of both The Iliad and The Odyssey (a good bit: "Some of course—nasty fellows—would widen the explanation by seeing Americans as a whole as war-lovers, hence war-book addicts, hence Iliad buyers"); and goes on to note such oddities like the Chinese translator who worked from an English text:

The only Chinese Homer used to be Donghua Fu’s 1929 version of the Odyssey (Ao-de-sai) published in Changsha in 1929, but that renegade engineer and pioneering Chinese grammarian translated an English text. To translate Homer once is inevitable treason, but twice? Things are far better now that the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences supports the study of ancient Greek and Latin at its Institute of Foreign Literature.

He also explains why Homer was not translated into Arabic until 1904, and then by "the Maronite Catholic al-Boustani, even though [Homer's] writings were ubiquitous in the Greek-speaking lands that came under Arab rule in the seventh century":

‘Homer is all mythology,’ [Egyptian translator and professor of Classics at Cairo University] Ahmed Etman says, ‘his numerous divinities alone would have been all too obviously incompatible with the Muslim creed. Early Arab authors were too concerned with religion to consider promoting such mythology, however familiar they might have been with Homer and however much they might have admired him.’

The Japanese history:

Indeed, Japanese familiarity with Homer can be excessive: I once saw a manga in which the central focus of the Trojan War was a voluptuous nymphomaniac Helen, while the central object of the great quarrel was a sadistically ravaged Briseïs, even though in the Iliad Agamemnon swears ‘by the greatest of oaths’ that he never went into her bed or slept with her (no Clintonesque reservations here, please), while Achilles calls Briseïs his darling wife, adding: ‘I loved her with all my heart though I had captured her with my spear.’ This sort of soft porn abuse would not be allowed if Homer Inc had the revocation powers that McDonald’s Corporation exercises from Oak Brook, Illinois over its franchisees in 119 countries – nor would the new Stephen Mitchell translation be allowed.

This leads to the review of the new Stephen Mitchell translation, at last. It's pretty unfavorable, and supported by a detailed and rigorous knowledge, if you can't tell already, of the text's history. Just a snippet:

His text is bereft of the formulaic epithets and set phrases that characterise Homer, which were not only indispensable memory aids for improvisational oral re-compositions by unlettered performers, as Parry and Lord famously demonstrated (a function now admittedly obsolete), but which can serve as ironical foils. Alongside dispensable ‘flashing-helmet’ Hectors, ‘bronze-clad’ Trojans and ‘single-hoofed’ horses, there is ‘fleet-footed Achilles’, even as he sits sulking in his tent; ‘fleet-footed glorious Achilles’, even as he refuses to fight while his fellows are being massacred by Hector; ‘wide-ruling’ Agamemnon, as he is being humiliated by the powerless seer Calchas; and ‘most glorious son of Atreus’, even while he is being reviled as dog-faced and the most covetous of men.

Such and more warrants keeping what Mitchell has chosen to leave out, for its ironical undertone is by far the most subtle of all the virtues of the many-virtued Iliad.

...

Mitchell’s excisions of detail are too frequent, but his much greater offence is an outright mutilation: he omits the entirety of Book 10, a ‘baroque and nasty episode’ which, he writes, ‘has been recognised as an interpolation since ancient times, and by modern scholars almost unanimously: it has major inconsistencies with the rest of the Iliad, its style is different, and it can be excised without leaving a trace.’ Each contention has some merit, yet the exclusion of Book 10 still amounts to an extreme case of chutzbris – chutzpah for effrontery, hubris for arrogance. Mostly, the omission is a very major loss for the reader.

I begin with the arrogance...

It's an astonishing review--epic, if you will. Read on here, scholars. Or decide for yourselves.