Rage On!
I am nearing completion of reading aloud, in its entirety, @smitchellbooks new translation of the Iliad. It’s taken two months.
Why, you may rightly ask, would I do such a thing?
The answer, perhaps unsurprisingly so given its oral origins, is that I have a very attentive audience—my son, who is seven years old. He happens to have Asperger’s syndrome, which means, when he likes something, his attention span is unfaltering. So each night, before bed, I’ve read it aloud to him and the poor boy has fallen asleep to the sounds of my butchering Ancient Greek pronunciations and general butchery the likes of which I would never allow him to watch on TV. (I have censored bits on the fly, I confess.)
Two nights ago he stopped me mid-sentence, which he does a lot.
“Dad. Dad. Can I tell you something? Why don’t they just find another beautiful woman and stop fighting?”
With no answer for that one, we pressed on.
His favourite character is Ajax the tall. He giggles whenever I say the name “Agamemnon” because it is to him an inherently funny sounding word.
Our journey began innocently enough. I bought the book because the new novel I’ve been working on is a modern, very loose recasting of the Paris, Helen and Oenone story. In early drafts of my book, I relied on Ovid’s Heriodes and HD’s Helen in Paris for inspiration. But, when I saw Mitchell’s new Iliad translation in the book shop, my conscience got the better of me. I didn’t really do much more than dip in and out of the Iliad 20 years ago during my undergraduate studies. Somehow it didn’t feel right to not have properly read it.
Later, when Tom saw the shiny cover, he asked me about it. I mentioned that Zeus was in the story (knowing he’s familiar with the god due to the Disney movie, “Hercules”). He asked to read it. So I gave him the book. Now, Tom can read anything at all, and he pushed his way through a few lines, but it was an obvious struggle so he handed it to me—you do it, he said.
The rage of Achilles—
And so we began.
Beyond my audience of one, I’ve read with bemusement a series of slightly strange reviews of this new translation. I say strange, because, evidently, those who work in this space of Ancient Greek are a mighty political bunch. First, they assume everyone knows the book intimately and provide no real overview of the actual story. Next, they are positively churchy in their wish for faithfulness to the original. So, theirmethod is to take certain lines that Mitchell has translated, compare them against other new translations, or else against earlier translations and weigh in on his success. And they horn-toot too, leaving no doubt as to their own ability to read the original text (the text being a subjective matter in of itself). In their opinion, and I grossly generalize with some glee, but I think they find this outsider’s attempt, while a breezier read, as having fallen short on getting in enough of the music of the original. They think he lacks their insider talent I suspect. And perhaps they are right. But who, other than those who can read Ancient Greek, would know? Or, even care?
If reading the entire thing aloud to my son has taught me anything, it’s that literature in translation is not about the original; it’s not about Homer in this case at all. It’s about the reader; it’s about my son and I. It’s about what we need to stay engaged, here and now. Because, while it might well be the case that Pope’s translation is the most beautiful, or Lattimore’s 1951 translation more faithful, neither are going to work for Thomas and I in 2011. Indeed, Pope’s translation would need a further translation, I should think.
Mitchell’s thundering five-beat line, his Anglo-Saxon verbs, his hyper-realist painting of Homer’s gore, all make this the translation for today. And if the literary Historians who get tapped to review this book for the major global magazines don’t always get that, it’s their loss. The two months it took me to read it aloud with my seven year old was time plucked from long ago that, through a translator’s vision and skill, felt psychologically relevant and linguistically alive for both father and son.
