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- The Guardian,
- Saturday February 3 2001
The Odyssey
trs George Chapman, ed and int Allardyce Nicoll, preface by Gary Wills
Princeton, £12.50
Buy it at a discount at BOL
Of course, you already have several translations of the Odyssey . Why another one? Because this one's famous: it's the one Keats wrote about. "Oft of one wide expanse had I been told / That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne; / Yet did I never breathe its pure serene / Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold." You begin to understand that Keats is making a comment more pertinent to his own poetic development than usefully appreciative of Chapman - although there is, now I think about it, something Chapmanesque about Keats's own poetry.
"Frequently we stumble on passages so obscure that we become utterly lost," runs Professor Allardyce's introduction. "His sentences drift on to almost irritating length; he repeats and repeats once more the trick of telling his story by means of phrase multiplied on phrase . . ." Originally published in 1956, this is as good an example of the old-fashioned anti-introduction as you could hope to find. Gary Wills's new preface wafts about half-heartedly; it makes a useful point or two, but looks slapdash. Had you or I presented it as an undergraduate essay, we would have been sent off with a flea in our ear and a stern warning to work harder next time.
So you may wonder why you should have this translation. That's easy: it's poetry, and matters of mere comprehension or strict literalism need not detain us. You may well have the Penguin E V Rieu prose translation: use it as a crib. But it is dry in its serviceability, which perhaps fits the austere era in which it was produced (1946). Each age approaches Homer, and particularly the Odyssey , with a kind of astonishment, even gratitude, that the earliest (or second-earliest) narrative text in the history of the world should be so mature, should bespeak such a recognisable range of emotional response. (Whereas, for the sake of comparison, just about everything written before Chaucer in English or Old English, and even chunks of the Iliad , elicits the aggrieved observation "Christ, this is primitive".) So every version of the poem is a snapshot of the fully engaged poetic sensibility of the day.
Chapman was Shakespeare's contemporary: he might not have been as good - who was? - but he was playing in the same ballpark. At times, noticing the epic sustainability of his verse, you get the feeling that he occupies a point on an imaginary line between Shakespeare and Milton; it's from the most vibrant literary heritage this country, and perhaps the world, ever produced. Here is Alcinous, king of the fun-loving Phaeacians, in Rieu's version: "To any man with the slightest claim to common sense, a stranger and a suppliant is as good as a brother." And here's Chapman: "A Guest, and suppliant, too, we should esteeme / Deare as our brother; / one that doth but dreame / He hath a soule, or touch but at a mind / Deathlesse and manly, should stand so enclin'd."
Chapman has attracted the epithet "gnarled", but there is real beauty in those lines. And sometimes it is important to go for the twisty, gnarled version. You may wonder why you should read this when you haven't even got round to looking at anything on the latest Booker or Whitbread shortlists; look on it as practising for a game of pool in the pub by playing on a full-size snooker table. There is also the chance - not to be passed up lightly - that you might end up feeling like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into view.
