Pod Insights Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas 297 | Emily Wilson on Homer, Poetry, and Translation About this episode Not too long ago, Brad Pitt and Eric Bana starred in a (loose) adaptation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troy_(film) of Homer's epic poem The Iliad; next month, Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche will headline a film https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Return_(2024_film) based on The Odyssey. Given that the originals were written (or at least written down) in the 8th century BCE, that is some impressive staying power. But they were also written in a very different time than ours, with different cultural context and narrative expectations. We talk about the issues of translation in general, and these Greek classics in particular, with Emily Wilson, whose recent translations of The Iliad https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-iliad-homer/17147944?ean=9781324001805 and The Odyssey https://www.amazon.com/Odyssey-Homer/dp/0393089053 have garnered worldwide acclaim.
Support Mindscape on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/seanmcarroll.
Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024/11/25/297-emily-wilson-on-homer-poetry-and-translation/
Emily Wilson received her Ph. D. in classical and comparative literature from Yale. She is currently Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Among her awards are the Charles Berheimer Prize from the American Comparative Literature Association, a Rome Prize fellowship from the American Academy in Rome, and Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships.
Web site https://www.emilyrcwilson.com/ UPenn web page https://www.classics.upenn.edu/people/emily-wilson Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Wilson_(classicist) Amazon.com author page https://www.amazon.com/stores/Emily-R.-Wilson/author/B001H6S1IE YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@emilyrcwilson1796 Substack https://substack.com/@emilyrcwilson BlueSky https://bsky.app/profile/emilyrcwilson.bsky.social
Transcript 13,862 words · 7 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:30 Sean Carroll? Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. Tell me about a complicated man. Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy, and where he went and who he met, the pain he suffered in the storms at sea, and how he worked to save his life and bring his men back home. He failed to keep them safe. Poor fools. They ate the sun god's cattle, and the god kept them from home. Now goddess, child of Zeus, tell the old story for our modern times. Find the beginning. Some of you may recognize these lines as the opening of The Odyssey by Homer. The Odyssey, well, translated in English, of course, Homer was writing in Homeric Greek
2:15 Sean Carroll? over 2,500 years ago. Homer is known for two poems, The Odyssey and The Iliad, both of which have come to play absolutely central roles in the Western canon, the beginning in many ways of Western literature. And, you know, these days, of course, we're very interested in expanding the canon beyond Western literature to other literatures as well. That's very, very valuable, all in favor of it, but it doesn't mean we throw out the existing canon. We can welcome new things with open arms, but The Iliad and The Odyssey are going to be with us and be centrally informative to how we think about literature for a very long time. They're both very different poems, they're about different things.
2:57 Sean Carroll? They're both about incidents from the Trojan War, or incident is probably too minor, but episodes from the Trojan War, but in very different modes and with very different atmospheres about them. The Iliad, both poems have many characters, but The Iliad centers on Achilles and his wrath. It's right up there in the beginning of the poem, "The Wrath of Achilles" is the thing that we're going to be thinking about here. The Odyssey also has many characters, but centers on Odysseus, and we're told right at the beginning, he is complicated. He is a trickster, he is clever, he is willing to take on many disguises to get what he wants. It's a contrast.
3:36 Sean Carroll? The Iliad is based in one place, The Odyssey is, as the word now means in English, a journey that goes over very large distances. And given how formative and important these poems are, the idea of translating them into English is a very important one, because most of us don't read Homeric Greek. Kudos to those out there in the audience who do, but I don't. So, how do you go about this project of translating these ancient poems into English? Many people have done it, but you're instantly faced with so many choices when you translate a work like this. For one thing... The world was different in Homeric Greece. The ideas about how nature worked, the ideas about how people dealt with each other,
4:21 Sean Carroll? were different. But also, as you notice while reading or listening to the poems, there are so many similarities. You know, we still have a lot in common with our ancient Greek predecessors. But also, it's a poem, right? Poems have meters, or at least they have organization. They have some structure there that prose doesn't have. How do you translate both the meanings of the words, the connotations, as well as the denotations, and the metrical spirit of the poem into English? That's one of the reasons why so many people have tackled the problem. One of the most recent and influential is today's guest, Emily Wilson, who has translated both the Iliad and the Odyssey in a way that she aims to make the poems give us the same
5:07 Sean Carroll? feeling now that they might have given the audience in ancient Greece. That is to say, not something that is manifestly archaic in form, because it wouldn't have seemed archaic to the ancient Greeks, right? Something that is a stirring story that gets you, that is not colloquial and chatty and sort of cliched, but is modern, contemporary, how you think people might reasonably talk with their vocabulary. And in a way that lends itself to being read out loud. When Homer, who may or may not have existed as a single person, but as a concept of Homer when he was writing these poems, they were translated by an oral tradition, right? People spoke them out loud in ceremonies, and only later were they written down.
5:52 Sean Carroll? So capturing that spirit is an important part of the translator's interest. So, it's a great conversation because we're talking about Homer, we're talking about ancient Greece, we're also talking about poetry and translation, and we're talking about the Iliad and the Odyssey, these two wonderful stories that still have a lot to teach us. The classics, they're classic for a reason, so let's go.
6:31 Sean Carroll? Emily Wilson, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.
6:33 Speaker 03 It's lovely to be here.
6:34 Sean Carroll? I want to start with, maybe you get this all the time, I don't know, which is your favorite, the Iliad or the Odyssey?
6:41 Speaker 03 I do get it all the time, and it's hard to say. I mean, whichever I'm working on is my favorite. If I'm teaching the Iliad, then that's definitely my favorite. I think in my heart of hearts, maybe the Iliad is my even more favorite. But I love both of them very, very much.
6:58 Sean Carroll? It's kind of amazing to me because they are so different. And let's, for the audience, just talk about the idea that these are written by a person named Homer, which is probably not true. No modern scholar really believes that it was just one person who sat down and wrote them. How did these two poems come to be?
7:16 Speaker 03 Yes, I mean, there are modern scholars who think it was a single person who composed them, but they weren't an author in the sense that Jane Austen was an author, because they weren't making up characters and stories from scratch. There was an oral tradition in the Greek-speaking world for several centuries. So the Greek-speaking world had no literacy after the fall of Mycenaean civilization. So these stories about a great city called Troy and a great expedition of Greek warriors coming from all over the Greek-speaking world to fight in the mythical Trojan War, these heroes called Odysseus and Achilles and Hector, and memorializing them through a particular poetic technique using a meter called dactylic hexameter.
8:00 Speaker 03 All of that was traditional and something that illiterate bard singers had been doing for generations before whoever it was, whether that's a single person or several people, got together to use the new technology of writing, which came about in the mid-8th century BCE. The Greek-speaking world borrowed from the Phoenicians. A set of ways of writing down their language in the mid 8th century BCE. So sometime after that, probably in the 7th century, either one or more people composed these monumental written poems out of this long oral tradition.
8:41 Sean Carroll? And just to put it in absolute context here. So the poems are written down hundreds of years before Plato and Aristotle, who are hundreds of years before, you know, Jesus and the beginning of the Roman Empire.
8:55 Speaker 03 Exactly. So mid 7th century ish is the rough date of the Homeric poems. Plato was from the 4th century. And of course, Jesus is, as we know from our calendar, the year dot kind of thing. Yes. So Jesus was a contemporary of people like Seneca, Roman Empire.
9:13 Sean Carroll? And so the idea is, so actually.
9:15 Speaker 03 Wait, wait, wait. Let me take that back. He wasn't a contemporary of Seneca. Jesus was a contemporary, you know, people like the Roman emperors, the beginning of the Roman Empire.
9:24 Sean Carroll? Augustus, et cetera. Right.
9:26 Speaker 03 Augustus, exactly.
9:27 Sean Carroll? So, uh, so we, I didn't realize there were still, you know, people who held out for the idea that Homer was one person who did compose in the sense of, you know, put together these poems in the way that they're currently written. Or was it was the idea that Homer was just the last person to have these poems before they were written down? Like he dictated them and then he gets his name on them?
9:51 Speaker 03 Yes. The capital H, capital Q Homeric question is a whole cluster of questions about that kind of thing. About was it one individual? Was it two individuals, one for the Odyssey, one for the Iliad? And how exactly was the transition from oral tradition to monumental written poem done? Was it through somebody dictated? That's actually quite a popular scholarly theory that there was a bard who sang the poems to a scribe who wrote it down. Or else maybe there was an oral poet who became literate. I would want to just flag that what existed before these written poems wasn't the same as these poems, because these are far too long for a single occasion
10:35 Speaker 03 performance, right? I mean, I know that you were saying you've listened to the audiobook. The audiobooks of these poems are over 20 hours long.
10:42 Sean Carroll? Yes.
10:42 Speaker 03 It's much too long for after dinner, we're having a cup of wine and listening to the poet sing one or two heroic tales. I mean, it seems to me that the existence of the new technology of writing inspired one or more people to realize they could do something different with the oral tradition from what had been done before. And the complexity of narrative composition, circles of patterns within patterns within patterns, presumably that style of oral storytelling where you echo one scene with another scene already was part of the tradition, but to do it on this level of complexity and several hours later, here's a story that echoes the one that you might have heard
11:25 Speaker 03 many hours before, you need writing in order to make that replicable. You can't just do it and then repeat it the exact same way the next day.
11:34 Sean Carroll? Can we even talk about something like the intention of the author if this is a bunch of stories that came together in different ways?
11:42 Speaker 03 We can talk about what exactly is going on in the texts we have. I mean, the intention of the author, given that we can't bring them back through necromancy and many time machines, and even if we could, I mean, people talk about whether we can, there's a separation between the intentionality of the living poet and the living novelist and what their text says, right? So it's not that it's a problem unique to Homer.
12:09 Sean Carroll? Fair enough. And I guess if we put ourselves back in the world of when Homer was around, what was a typical performance like? Was it a theater that you went to to hear something long? Or was it literally like, you know, this is what we did after dinner, someone was tasked with the idea of treating us with a few stanzas?
12:32 Speaker 03 Yes, so I mean, again, this is a much debated scholarly question and the question is is different depending on which period we're talking about. But all over the, I mean, throughout antiquity, the Homeric poems were experienced in oral performance and oral performances, probably including all of the above. We know that rhapsodes, so a rhapsode is somebody who performs traditional oral poetry, not making it up on the spot, but presumably using a script to memorize and then perform some famous bit or some highlights out of the Homeric poems for a particular performance. And that included performances at religious and civic festivals.
13:13 Speaker 03 We know that from a pretty early date, the Homeric poems were used in poetry competitions. So here's one rhapsode doing his showpiece celebrity performance, doing all the voices. And then here's another one, and now the judges are gonna decide who gets the crown, who did the best Homer performance this year. And then also presumably in more private, like drinking party kinds of contexts.
13:38 Speaker 03 And all of the above, I think, is what I would say about what the contexts were in which people heard these poems.
13:44 Sean Carroll? So would the typical Greek person on the street be more or less familiar with the content of the poems?
13:51 Speaker 03 Absolutely, yes. I think we can very, very definitely say everyone knew these stories, yes.
13:57 Sean Carroll? Wow.
13:57 Speaker 03 I mean, we know that these stories, of course, you know, we get these stories represented on Greek fuses from all over the Greek speaking world. People knew these characters and these stories, yes.
14:08 Sean Carroll? And was it, were they, were they at the time just considered, in particular the Iliad and the Odyssey, just part of a whole bunch of stories that were common? Or was it already clear, like, this is the best we got?
14:20 Speaker 03 It was, I mean, again, it's the question of when exactly that happened is much debated, but yes. So we're told that at the time of Pisistratus, who was a tyrant in Athens in the sixth century, that Pisistratus instituted that at his civic festivals, it would be the Homeric poems as opposed to other parts of the epic or Cyclical heroic tradition that would be used in in the festival competition for in the festival poetry competition. So that suggests an understanding of some, again, we can debate, was that the Iliad and the Odyssey exactly as we have them? Or was there, were those poems revised, edited in some way or other over the next couple of centuries?
15:05 Speaker 03 But but there was a sense certainly from a pretty early stage that the Homeric poems are different. And by the time we get to Plato and Aristotle, there's a really clear sense that that Homer is special. And so, for instance, in Aristotle's Poetics, he discusses the the best kinds of plot and insists that the Homeric poems are different from the broader cyclic tradition of dactylic hexameter heroic poetry. And partly because their plots are better. The, for instance, the Odyssey doesn't tell you every single myth about Odysseus. There were tons of myths about Odysseus. The poet of the Odyssey is smart enough to leave most of them out. Same way with the Iliad, it leaves most of the stories out.
15:49 Speaker 03 So in order to have a really tight beginning, middle and end and a focused narrative, the Homeric poems, despite their monumental length, are very, very selective about which stories they tell about the whole myth. And they do it in this sophisticated way where it's not, let's begin at the beginning and continue till the bitter end. It's let's do stories within stories and moving back and forth.
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17:11 Sean Carroll? I think actually that's super noticeable to just me. I love listening to the audiobooks of these things. I think that's the way they were meant to be. And they're good stories. They grab you. You want to hear what happens next. There's Odysseus arriving on Ithaca and he's kind of lingering. You're like, come on, Odysseus, I want to see what happens.
17:30 Speaker 03 Yes, exactly. There's some suspense because you kind of know he's going to come out of his disguise at some point. But it leaves you hanging until Book 22. It's a very long wait where you're rooting for something to happen. And then it all happens.
17:44 Sean Carroll? Which I think isn't always characteristic of storytelling of that time, right? Like, they hadn't quite figured out those Hollywood techniques for grabbing your attention.
17:55 Speaker 03 You know, I think we project back onto antiquity an idea of surely because they were ancient, they must have been primitive and unsophisticated in their narrative techniques. And I really don't think that's necessarily true. I mean, the cyclic poems that we have evidence of, we only have them in fragmentary form, were composed later than the Iliad and the Odyssey. So I don't think there's actually evidence to say at the earliest periods, Greek storytelling or Greek poetic technique was less sophisticated than it became later. I think we actually have evidence of the opposite.
18:28 Sean Carroll? Yeah, okay.
18:29 Speaker 03 And of course, the whole spectrum of different things. Because some people are better at telling stories than others. And some people are better poets than others. And that's always been the case.
18:37 Sean Carroll? Well, it's still true today. I remember I used to live in LA for a long time. A lot of my friends were screenwriters. And one of them said, you know, people wonder why Hollywood movies are so popular compared to like art films or European movies or whatever. And he says, because we follow Aristotle. We do the storytelling techniques that have been known for a long time.
18:58 Speaker 03 Mm-hmm, yeah.
18:59 Sean Carroll? And also, that oral thing does affect the words, right? I mean, you'll know better than me, so help us out here. But the style of the poems themselves are written to help people remember them and have the interesting part of the sentence be at the beginning of it, for example.
19:21 Speaker 03 Absolutely, yes. So we could talk about multiple different areas with that, both in terms of the ability of Greek to put the important word at the beginning. So maybe we could just do a sort of case study as the beginning of the Iliad, which begins with the theme of the poem, which is menes, wrath. So
19:43 Speaker 03 Sorry, I didn't mean to do the whole thing. But that's called the proem. And the Iliad and the Odyssey each do this thing of beginning with the word that's the topic of the poem. So the Odyssey begins, andra moi enepa. Not to do the whole thing of that, but andra, meaning man.
20:27 Speaker 03 And with the Iliad, it's menes, meaning divine wrath. So the wrath of Achilles is quasi-divine. I feel like I didn't actually answer your question, though, which was about oral technique. So that, what I just said, can apply to Greek that's composed not orally as well, right? It's a highly inflected language, so it's possible to put the object at the beginning of the sentence. Homeric Greek is a mix of different dialects composed out of traditions from all over the Greek-speaking world. So it's this very artificial poetic language. It has a meter, as I hope you could hear when I was just saying a few lines. It has a rhythm to it.
21:07 Speaker 03 It was designed to be sort of chanted rather than just sort of spoken as if it's a novel. Prose is a later invention in the history of literature. And also it has these formulaic phrases, as you were hinting at. So for instance, Achilles is usually swift-footed Achilles or Achilles, son of Pelias, or both, depending on which position in the line he is, so that it makes it easier to fit the meter. And it also means that if you're composing orally, you don't have to stop and think about, so what adjective shall I use for Achilles this time? Because you've only got two choices. It's going to be Achilles, son of Pelias, or it's going to be swift-footed Achilles, depending on which you need to pull up a half line. And similarly about almost every object in the Homeric universe.
21:52 Speaker 03 So sponges are porous and ships are well-balanced, or they have rowing benches on them.
22:00 Speaker 03 And so on. And then even on the slightly larger level of types of scenes, there were also just things that you can plug in whenever you do a banqueting scene or a animals getting sacrificed scene, or guy on the battlefield going to slaughter a lot of people kind of scene, or an arming scene, or a stranger shows up at the gates and there's going to be hospitality scene if it's the Odyssey. Like those kinds of things always have a pretty much preset set of components, narratively. And then the poet can decide in each occasion, which of the elements am I going to put in here? And how can I make it fun for the audience by using the conventions, but also every time messing with them in some way? So no two hospitality scenes are exactly the same.
22:45 Speaker 03 In the case of the Iliad, all those battlefield sequences, you don't have the same part of the body pierced twice in a row, right? You have somebody is going to be stabbed through the lungs. Next time you're going to have someone have their tongue sliced off. Next time we're going to have to go through the ears. You know, you have to have variety within tradition.
23:06 Sean Carroll? Well, I think, and you also answered something that I've been wondering about for decades in my life about, as you mentioned, poetry seems to have come before prose in the history of narrative. And that just always seemed weird to me because poetry sounds like it's an extra layer of constraint over prose. But if you think that it's because we started this as part of an oral tradition rather than a written one, then maybe it makes much more sense. It's easier to remember poetry.
23:33 Speaker 03 It's easier to remember. And also, if we think of literature as marked language, and if you're hearing everything out loud, what's marked about how are we talking right now? It's not marked. And so it takes extra levels of sort of thinking through what language is and extra layers of technology to figure out how can we make prose something ornate and marked in the way that poetry has always been. Because there were markers of poetry that had to do with meter, with sound, with the speakability and performability of it.
24:06 Sean Carroll? Do you find yourself talking in iambic pentameter just by accident sometimes?
24:10 Speaker 03 I sometimes do, yes. I'm not going to do it right now. I'm not going to show off like that.
24:15 Sean Carroll? Not intentionally. Okay, very good. Okay, so at this point, I guess we should tell some of the audience, if they're not super familiar, what happens in the plot of these stories. I think that many events in the stories are individually familiar, but the Iliad and the Odyssey just amaze me because they're so different from each other and so compelling in their own ways. So explain to us what the focus is.
24:38 Speaker 03 Yeah, they're both so different from each other and so complementary. I mean, I think they really invite reading together because they're both long poems about the Trojan War. The Iliad is set during the Trojan War, but as we've already hinted, it's a weird poem about the Trojan War because it doesn't tell you what happened at the beginning, how did this war get started. We're assumed to already know that, of course, the mythical Trojan War began when Paris, Prince of Troy abducted Helen from her Spartan Greek husband, Menelaus.
25:17 Speaker 03 And took her with him back to Troy. And then the Greeks got together, Menelaus and his brother Agamemnon, got a whole bunch of Greek warriors together to make war on the rich city of Troy, which is in what's now Turkey, and sail there, besiege the city for ten years, eventually sack it, using the wooden horse, do all kinds of terrible things in the course of sacking the city, enslaving the women. Then they sail home and the gods, because they've done terrible things in the course of the sack of the city, curse the journeys home. So the Iliad and the Odyssey sort of take that whole body of myth and find what I think already at the time in the seventh century was an original and weird take on it.
26:02 Speaker 03 The Iliad focuses not on the sort of famous bits of the beginning of the war or the fall of the city, but on a time, like a month and a half, that isn't either the beginning or the end. It's the start of the tenth year of the war. And it focuses on a quarrel between two Greek warriors, Achilles and Agamemnon, in the course of which Achilles gets furious with Agamemnon for taking from him the woman that he's been trying to enslave. So Achilles, who's the son of a sea goddess and thinks he should get the maximum amount of honour out of any of the warriors, because he's the best at running and throwing spears, feels he's been dissed in public among his fellow warriors.
26:48 Speaker 03 So he asks his sea goddess mother, Thetis, to help him get his honour back. And Thetis, with the help of Zeus, ensures that while Achilles is sitting sulking in his tent, refusing to fight, the Greeks will suffer an enormous massacre at the hands of the Trojans. So the Trojan warrior Hector is on the rise for the first two thirds of the Iliad, killing the Greeks. And it's only when Achilles realizes very, very much too late that his prayer to have the Greeks be massacred, he wasn't thinking the Greeks would include anyone he actually cares about. But it turns out. He does care about just one Greek, which is his dearest companion, Patroclus,
27:31 Speaker 03 who begs to go out wearing Achilles' armour as sort of his second self to try to fight Hector off from the ships. And of course, we can sort of see it coming, but it's still heartbreaking when it happens. Hector kills Patroclus. And then, inspired by that grief and by a transformed version of his original rage, Achilles returns to the battlefield to fight Hector and to try to keep on destroying as many Trojans as possible until he himself dies. And the poem sort of ends not with Achilles' death, but with a transformation of his rage into something else, into a
28:10 Speaker 03 recognition of his own mortality and of the temporary value that human institutions of grief can provide. So, and he has a meeting with Hector's father, Priam, who comes to beg for his son's body back from the person who killed him. And Achilles gives Hector back. So Hector, who's been leaving home throughout the poem, has a kind of homecoming journey at the end of the Iliad, even though he's, of course, dead when he comes home. And so the Odyssey sort of complements this story about a warrior who's separated from his people, but then eventually finds a way back to community with a focus on Odysseus,
28:52 Speaker 03 who also, like Achilles, has issues with honour. And I said a couple of minutes ago that there were all these myths about the homecoming journeys of the Greeks from the mythical city of Troy. The Odyssey takes the longest possible homecoming journey, which is the homecoming journey of Odysseus, which lasts for 10 years, because he spends seven years shackled up with one goddess, another year shackled up with another. And then, in the course of his journeys by sea, Poseidon curses his journey because Odysseus has blinded Poseidon's son, the Cyclops Polyphemus.
29:31 Speaker 03 So half the poem is Odysseus trying to get back to Ithaca. And then the second half of the poem, Odysseus is back on Ithaca. But the poem is showing us that a homecoming journey is a lot more than a geographical thing. It's also about reestablishing relationships with every member of Odysseus's household and being recognized in all these different ways. So it's a whole sequence of different recognitions with Odysseus as, in a way, different selves. And the question of what does it mean to come home? What is an identity? What is a person? And how are we different in different communities is at stake in the Odyssey. Whereas in the Iliad, I guess, there's sort of these big themes about grief and rage
30:14 Speaker 03 and isolation and community.
30:18 Sean Carroll? There is a movie coming out, I don't know if you're familiar with it, about the last part of the Odyssey with Ralph Fiennes in it.
30:26 Speaker 03 I saw an announcement about that. I mean, I don't think it's available yet.
30:29 Sean Carroll? I don't think it's quite out yet.
30:30 Speaker 03 Yes, yes, I'm excited to see that, yes.
30:33 Sean Carroll? Yeah, it's one of those, you know, cautiously optimistic kind of things. They could, it could be terrible.
30:38 Speaker 03 Yes, it could be great. Ralph Fiennes, great, yes, Ralph Fiennes.
30:40 Sean Carroll? But yeah, so this is, has anyone suggested that this difference between the two poems is part of the reason why we suspect Homer is not just one person? Because they're so different. I mean, the Iliad, even though they are complementary, just like you said, and maybe it does make sense to read them together, or listen to them together. But the Iliad is very warlike, very masculine. Achilles is exactly sort of the action hero stereotype, but kind of mopey about it. And simple, I think, is fair to say, whereas the Odyssey-
31:19 Speaker 03 I think Achilles is very sophisticated. He's the, you know, he plays the liar. He's singing the stories of heroes. His language is full of metaphors. So, you know, he's a poet as well as a fighter. I think he's complex, but in a different way from Odysseus, yeah.
31:33 Sean Carroll? Completely bare. I guess what I was thinking about is just, he is mopey. You know, he does-
31:39 Speaker 03 Yes, well, when we first meet Odysseus, what is he doing?
31:42 Sean Carroll? Well, yeah, that's true. He's also kind of-
31:44 Speaker 03 He's sitting beside the sea and crying.
31:47 Sean Carroll? For seven years, he was, yeah. Just, you know. Fair enough, okay, okay, that's a very good point. But the lessons, maybe? I don't know, is Homer trying to give us lessons in these stories, do you think?
31:59 Speaker 03 So maybe going back to the first question about the complementarity. Scholars talk about something called Monroe's Law, which is that the stories don't repeat. And people often argue that maybe that means that either they are by the same person or that at the very least whoever composed the Odyssey knew the Iliad. Right. So that it's composed with an knowledge that, you dear audience, I don't want to bore you. I want to give you something different. And if you've already heard everything from the Iliad, I want to show you something else.
32:39 Speaker 03 So lessons, I mean, in antiquity, knowing the Homeric poems was an essential part of what was called paideia, of cultural education, both on the level of children sort of learning about narrative from the Homeric poems, orators learning about rhetoric from the Homeric poems, generals learning about military technique by arguing about, did Nestor do the right thing there? Or how does a council meeting operate? In all of those ways, the Homeric poems were essential sort of cultural texts.
33:12 Speaker 03 But of course, the Homeric poems don't include anything like the Ten Commandments, say. They don't have lessons that are sort of directly given as if from a divine authority figure that you can sort of write down and say, oh, yes, that shows that I must, you know, do this. Insofar as there are lessons, they're spoken by particular characters on particular occasions. And of course, one can always debate whether or not that lesson is the right lesson.
33:40 Speaker 03 And the Greek speakers in antiquity certainly did debate those things. I mean, you probably know, many of these listeners probably know that in Plato's Republic, the semi-ideal Republic envisioned by Plato's Socrates.
33:56 Speaker 03 Includes casting out Homer and the tragic poets from this semi-ideal republic, because these poems teach you the wrong lessons. They teach you to sympathize with infuriated or grief-stricken heroes, like heroes in an ancient sense, not necessarily heroes in a modern sense, larger-than-life characters who are doing terrible things and making terrible choices. And the poems aren't necessarily inviting you to do anything other than feel for them and to have a lot of feelings, which if you're Plato in that text, you don't necessarily think those feelings are a good idea for the balance of the civic quality.
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35:06 Sean Carroll? Well, that's a feature of good art, right? I mean, it's portraying complicated people and the lessons, if they're there. So, I mean, you gave the answer that I was hoping that you would give from my perspective, which is that one can get lessons, but it's not because the work of art itself is saying, here's the lesson, you better learn it.
35:26 Speaker 03 Absolutely not. And of course, the lesson is partly about you must go through this journey and you must go through this journey collectively with other people and then you must argue about it and figure out what it means together. And it may mean different things depending on what's the community that's telling this story together and how does this conversation go. And it might mean that it means something different for you than it does for me. And then we have a language to talk to each other about really difficult things through these poems.
35:53 Sean Carroll? And it's interesting that so many of the specific issues about honor, duty, whatever, are still absolutely human and familiar to us, even though the world of over 2,500 years ago, 3,000 years ago, is so very different in many ways.
36:11 Speaker 03 Yes, I mean, people still have societies. People still care about other people and also... Very often feel furious with other people. We still have mortality, we still have grief, we still have loss, we still have, how do we deal with people who aren't like us? And how do we, if we lose something or someone, what do we do? Is there any kind of compensation for loss that is okay? And if there isn't, then what do we do? Do we just go around and kill everyone else because we're so furious? None of those questions have gone away, even though the terms in which these poems set them up are of course completely different from modern terms.
36:49 Sean Carroll? Well, one thing you just can't miss when you're listening to the stories is how present the gods are. That's very different, right? I mean, it's not a superhero story, it's almost naturalistic, but the gods are there pushing people around. Is this, is this how Greeks of that time would have thought of the world? Or is that like, oh no, this is a story, so I get it?
37:11 Speaker 03 It's, it's, it's both, right? I mean, there were of course cults and worship and, you know, these gods are not just literary fictions. And I think we may be tempted to think of the gods in the Homeric poems as this is just made up for the sake of the story in the same way that kryptonite is just there for the sake of the story and nobody has a religious festival in which we talk about kryptonite. We know about that only from comic books and the movies. Whereas in the case of Athena or Hera, there are real temples, there are real, there's real religious practice, there's real sacrifices, and there are real particular parts of the Greek-speaking world where this city has a temple, this island is particularly sacred to this or that goddess.
37:53 Speaker 03 So that also gives particular passages in the Homeric poems a different resonance for some audiences versus others. But at the same time, the question of exactly how literal should we be about the gods are exactly as they are represented in the poems? Of course, one can debate that. And the question also of, in different periods of Greek history, there were developing views about the gods. And I also think it's a mistake to, I mean, we, another common mistake is to think because there are gods who are supremely powerful and yet not omnipotent, does that take away from human agency? The poems are very clear
38:35 Speaker 03 that it doesn't, right? They're very clear that at the same time as the gods who are far more visible and tangible to humans than they tend to be in real life. I mean, I personally never seem to have direct encounters with Athena, even if I can sort of sense her somewhere around the corner, I never actually get to look into her bright eyes. But in the poems, people do have those experiences. And yet, that doesn't mean that they're not still making choices. I mean, if you think about the first encounter between Achilles and Athena in the Iliad, Achilles is tempted to kill Agamemnon because he's so angry with him. And at the moment that he's about to draw his sword to kill him, Athena grabs him by the hair and
39:19 Speaker 03 speaks to him and says, we've just, we've come, I've come down because Hera's worried about this. We don't want you killing each other. Think a moment. And so he thinks about it. And then he doesn't do it. But it's not that he hasn't thought about it. He does think about it. And his decision making is there. And he's also persuaded by the goddess. So it's not that he's a puppet of the goddess. And I think that's really important to bear in mind, that when the gods intervene, they very often do it in the same way that humans intervene with each other. They do it by persuasion, rather than by force.
39:55 Sean Carroll? And the gods are often, I mean, they're obviously super powerful, but they're, like you said, not omnipotent. In fact, there was, there's even a couple of examples, was it Diophanes who, you know, fought a couple gods and did okay?
40:06 Speaker 03 Diomedes. Diomedes. Diomedes in Book Five of the Iliad is a great hero, who in some ways sort of parallels Achilles in his quasi divine capacities to take on gods and be as close as a mortal warrior can be to a god. And yet he's not, he's not immortal. He manages to, to, to fight against the, the gods, the two gods who are the least honored by the other gods, who are the closest to being sort of divine representations of elements of human impulse that we may, we may not like about ourselves, which is lust and aggression. So it's Ares, god of war, and Aphrodite, god of, god of lust.
40:46 Speaker 03 And Diomedes fights against both of them, and Aphrodite goes whining back to her mother when she gets a little raise on her wrist. And it's, and it's sort of funny, but it's also sort of fascinating in, in the way that it showcases, what does it mean to be so close to being divine and yet we're not?
41:06 Sean Carroll? And, and e- even more than the personalities and the interventions of the gods, it's, it's kind of an enchanted world. You, you say at one point, I think in the intro to the Iliad, I think it was, that you, you were careful in the translation not to treat a dead body as a body. It was still considered to be a person. You were dead, but you were still that person.
41:28 Speaker 03 Exactly. I think that's really important. I mean, this sort of gets back to the question of just how the themes are so recognizable and so human, and yet the, the imaginary world isn't quite the same as ours. And we, we tend to think of the dead as a different category from the living. Whereas in the Homeric poems, they're not. They, the dead want the same things. They want honor. And the dead Patroclus or the dead Hector is still the dead Hector, is not corpse of. So when, when the Greeks are battling over the body, what we might call the body of Patroclus, they're battling, in the language the poem uses, over Patroclus. And similarly, Priam takes his son Hector back to his family.
42:10 Speaker 03 It's not a corpse who was once his son, it's his son.
42:14 Sean Carroll? And I don't know the theology well enough. My impression from the Odyssey is that most of these dead heroes are to be found in Hades after they're dead. Is it, is there a heaven and hell thing, or does everyone go to hell?
42:29 Speaker 03 It's a, um, so it's, it's an afterlife thing, but it's also a complex kind of afterlife thing. Because the The mind-body dualism that we're used to, in the sort of post-Platonic mind-body dualism that we're used to, has an idea that the self is the immaterial, solely thing, soul-like thing. So in Greek, that's the psukai, from which we get the psyche, right, as in psychology. In the world of the Homeric poems, as in this, just as you can tell just from the first few lines of the Iliad, that I think I only said in Greek, but maybe people weren't following it.
43:09 Speaker 03 So in the first few lines of the Iliad, we get the line that,
43:14 Speaker 03 as a result of the wrath of Achilles, I'm just gonna read you that line in my translation for a second, so you can see what I mean.
43:30 Speaker 03 So the wrath of Achilles caused the Greeks a measurable pain, and sent so many noble souls of heroes to Hades, and made men the spoils of dogs, a banquet for the birds. So the souls, the psukai, are sent to Hades. The men are eaten by the dogs.
43:49 Sean Carroll? Got it.
43:49 Speaker 03 There's a distinction between the people themselves, those are the ones lying on the battlefield, being eaten by animals, it's horrific. And then there's this fluttering gray thing that exists and will continue to exist in Hades. And if the man himself gets a proper honorable burial, as Patroclus begs Achilles to give him, when he appears to him in that sort of quasi-dream vision late on in the Iliad, then they get to have the honorable time in the afterlife. But it's dependent on the burial of the man himself, which is the physical man. So that question of what is the relationship between the physical self and the psukai
44:32 Speaker 03 is somewhat different from how we conceptualize it, because it's not so clear where is the real you, right?
44:38 Sean Carroll? Yeah, no, that's very, very helpful, because I did not get, I would not get that just from getting the poem. But yes, that does make perfect sense.
44:43 Speaker 03 Yes. As you say, so the Book XI of the Odyssey focuses on Odysseus encountering the...
44:51 Speaker 03 The souls, the psukai of his dead companions. And we get, so we get something also in that about this question because Achilles gets, Achilles, Odysseus' old frenemy, leads him. And they have this discussion about whether Achilles is, is happy because he, you know, he got to, he got to live and die by honor. And Achilles famously says that he would rather live and be the hired man of someone poor on earth than be the king of all the numberless dead. There's something pale and lesser about being a psukai in the underworld. Though of course Achilles is also happy to hear about the honor of his son, you know,
45:32 Speaker 03 Ptolemy, who turned out to be an even more brutal killer than Achilles. And so that makes Achilles glad and he's able to, to, to stride happily across the Elysian fields. So going back to your question about heaven and hell, there were different areas within the, within Hades, it seems, right? There were, there were rivers in the underworld which segregate the different parts. There's the Elysian fields where the heroes who've achieved honor and have honorific burial can, can live forever being heroes.
46:01 Sean Carroll? I like the idea that the afterlife is somehow lesser. I mean, it never made sense to me in Christian theology that heaven was so great and yet we don't want to die. But this version makes perfect sense, right? Like, you know, the life that we have right now is the important part.
46:16 Speaker 03 Yes, yes, it is.
46:18 Sean Carroll? So we didn't, I guess, one thing I wanted to get, because it's, it's so interesting to me, for those who are not in, uh, familiar with the Odyssey, is the character of Odysseus. Cause you know, one of the most fascinating characters in literature ever, but certainly in ancient literature. And, um, they, you know, that, I, partly because the poetry needs to emphasize the same thing over and over again, but man, we are told a lot about how clever he is.
46:46 Speaker 03 Yes, we are. And he's clever in a particular way about problem solving, right? And about encountering weird situations and being able to solve his way out of them.
46:58 Speaker 03 And I'm not sure exactly where you want to go with this, but we're told both about, both about cleverness and about multiplicity is really important, I think.
47:06 Sean Carroll? Yeah, I guess, I mean, what is, what is, if you needed to tell someone who hadn't read the poem, uh, who is this Odysseus person? How would you describe him?
47:15 Speaker 03 So are we talking to somebody who has read the Iliad and hasn't read the Odyssey? Or somebody?
47:20 Sean Carroll? Nothing at all, they've read nothing.
47:22 Speaker 03 Whoever these people are, in any case. So he's, he's a storyteller and he's making up stories about himself and with himself all the time. He, in contrast, I said already that Achilles is usually described as swift-footed and/or son of Pelias. In the case of Odysseus, he has many, many, many formulaic epithets. So most characters only have one or two. Achilles is swift, he goes directly to the point, he goes fast to what he wants to say, he's going fast on the road to death. Odysseus is not going fast anywhere, he's going roundabout and he's gonna be in disguise as many different things, or maybe the many different things are what it is to be Odysseus.
48:07 Speaker 03 And also, in contrast to every other Homeric character, maybe especially Achilles, Odysseus appears in disguise and not with his own name, and he's willing to do that. And so that's also the key to his survival, is about this ability to be, to be in hiding and to be, to say his name is nobody and to appear as a beggar, rather than be sort of constantly saying as every character and every hero in the Iliad wants to be saying their name all the time, and have everyone be saying their name all the time for the rest of human history, and to build monuments that say their name. Whereas Odysseus is willing to have his name not be said in order to survive and eventually get his name said.
48:48 Speaker 03 He has, so one of his most important characteristics, as well as the cleverness, is the patience.
48:53 Sean Carroll? Yeah, no, that's a very good point. The name thing, like we said before, it doesn't go away. It makes me think of The Wire and all the characters on the streets in The Wire who up into Marlowe at the end, he's like, you know, "Say my name, this is the most important single thing in the world."
49:11 Speaker 03 Same name. Yep, R E S P U C T, we all want it.
49:13 Sean Carroll? Exactly, and you describe very accurately Odysseus as complicated, but you got flack for that.
49:21 Speaker 03 Oh my gosh, I mean, in a way, I see that as a success because it got people talking about translation, and I think people sometimes read the Iliad and the Odyssey, or read texts in translation in general, without thinking about the fact that this is not actually the poem that was originally composed, and the translator made some choices. And so I wanted to make a marked choice that would generate a conversation, partly because I already said that the Odysseus has many different formulaic epithets. He is polymetis, he's very wily, he's polymechanos, he's very problem-solvey, he's polytlast, he's very patient. He's also, and this is a very unusual epithet for Odysseus, in that first line of the Odyssey, he's
50:06 Speaker 03 polytropos, he's very twisty, or very circling, or there are many turns to him, or many disguises. And it seems to me that the choice of that word in that line is an invitation to think about the poem as well as the protagonist. So I wanted a word that's a single word, that's going to fit into iambic pentameter, that's ideally the same length as the original, which is four syllables, and that will speak to what is the poem, and who is its protagonist, not going to tell you everything about that, but you're going to have some questions, and you're going to remember this word. And so I felt complicated was actually my only possible thing I could do with it.
51:43 Sean Carroll? Well, it does, I love the fact that, you know, translations are translations and they're works of art for their own sake and those are different. And so I thought this might be fun, or this might end up being very embarrassing. But I thought that to compare different ways of translating, that I would read the opening of the Iliad in two different relatively modern translations, and then you would read yours. Does that sound like fun?
52:06 Speaker 03 Sure. We can do that, yes.
52:08 Sean Carroll? Okay, so here I have Latimer, Richmond Latimer, this is a famous one. "Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus's son Achilles and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaeans, hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades, strong souls of heroes; but gave their bodies to be the delicate feasting of dogs, of all birds; and the will of Zeus was accomplished since that time when first there stood, in division of conflict, Atreus's son, the lord of men, and brilliant Achilles."
52:40 Sean Carroll? And then, we have Robert Fagels, who accompanied me, not him personally, but his translations, on a cross-country trip when I was listening to, I think it was Ian McKellen who narrated this. "Rage, goddess, sing the rage of Peleus's son Achilles, murderous, doomed, that caused the Achaeans countless losses, hurling down to the house of death so many sturdy souls; great fighters' souls, but made their bodies carrion, feasts for the dogs and birds; and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end. Begin, muse, when the first two broke and clashed, Agamemnon, lord of men, and brilliant Achilles." And it's interesting, because they're like, they're clearly the same
53:22 Sean Carroll? stuff, the same substance, and I have preferences for, you know, different lines and different ones of them, even though I've never read the original Greek. But why don't you read your version?
53:32 Speaker 03 Sure. "Goddess, singer of the cataclysmic wrath of great Achilles, son of Peleus, which caused the Greeks so measurable pain, and sent so many noble souls of heroes to Hades, and made men the spoils of dogs, a banquet for the birds; and so the plan of Zeus unfolded, starting with the conflict between great Agamemnon, lord of men, and glorious Achilles."
54:01 Sean Carroll? Yeah, you're better at it than I am. I think that you have a future.
54:03 Speaker 03 I like covering it up.
54:05 Sean Carroll? You have practice. So, talk about the differences. First, I guess, have you in the process of being a translator for these things? Is it your duty to either read other translations, or do you think it's better to try to avoid them?
54:21 Speaker 03 It's my duty to look at them and know them when I'm doing the book proposal, when I'm figuring out, is there any point in spending six years of my life doing this? Because I have to know, and I have to persuade the publisher and the second and third readers that they send it to, that I'm not doing the exact same thing that Robert Fagels or Richmond Latimer did. Because otherwise, what's the point in doing that?
54:45 Sean Carroll? What's the point?
54:46 Speaker 03 But also that I'm going to be doing something responsible with the original that is going to be truthful about some elements of the original that might be inaudible or illegible if you only read this or that existing one. So I need to know about them from that perspective. And of course, in the course of my, however long I've been at this, like 30 years of teaching these poems in translation, as well as in the originals, of course, I've used several of these in the classroom.
55:13 Sean Carroll? Yeah.
55:14 Speaker 03 And I've seen what seems to work, what doesn't seem to work. But then, once I've done the book proposal and done my little sample bit of translation, I then put them away for the next five years. Because if I'm stuck on something, and if I'm thinking, how could I make this line work, here's this phrase, which is so beautiful and easy in the original, and yet I can't seem to make it come clear in English, if I then look and see, so what did Stanley Lombardo do with this? Maybe I like what he did, and in that case, I've ruled out something that otherwise I might have thought of by myself and felt all right about. So, no, I don't look at them while I'm working on it. With the exception that with the Iliad in particular...
55:54 Speaker 03 I spent a lot of time agonizing about what the less common names and where the most natural place to put the stress would be for an English speaker. So I did a little bit of dipping into not the 20th century free verse ones, because those are no use for this, but the 18th century ones like Pope and Cooper, because of course they're metrical verse, so I can tell, you know, where are they putting the stresses. But of course, that was also useless, because they do things like diomed, and nobody's going to say diomed for diomedes nowadays.
56:27 Sean Carroll? Okay.
56:28 Speaker 03 So it was completely useless, but I did waste some time doing that, and it's always fun to read some poems, so.
56:33 Sean Carroll? That's fair enough, but I guess this is, you know, an extra burden for the translator of a poem. There are meter questions, things like that. I know that you made a leap from dactylic hexameter to iambic pentameter. Why don't we tell the audience what those two things are and why you made that switch?
56:52 Speaker 03 Yes, I mean, in a way, I didn't make a switch such, because most English translators haven't used dactylic hexameter. The only one I know of that's done that consistently is the kind of under-known, but I think it's actually kind of interesting, Rodney Merrill translations. So dactylic hexameter, as the hex suggests, is six, and as the dactylic suggests, is finger. So dactylus in Greek is a finger. Most people who are lucky enough to have fingers have a long first joint and then two shorter joints on a finger. So that's what a dactyl is, is a long and then two shorts. La la la, menina.
57:32 Speaker 03 So it's that rhythm, so it's like a musical bar, and it's six la la la, with the exception of the final one has to be la la la la la. So the fifth has to be a dactyl, and the final beat is a sponde, la la, two longs. So you know where the end of the line is, if you're just listening.
57:55 Sean Carroll? Good.
57:55 Speaker 03 Right. So that's what a dictatorial cemetery is. Ancient Greek and Latin are both quantitative meters. I mean, this is too much in the inside of baseball.
58:06 Sean Carroll? It's not, it's not.
58:08 Speaker 03 As was the musical bar, it's about the length of the syllables rather than about the stress. So there is an interplay between stress and quantity in the music of Ancient Greek and Latin poetry, which is different from the primarily stressed way that metrical poetry tends to work in the angaphone tradition. So I felt that I wanted to move away from the common norms of 20th, 21st century ways of translating ancient metrical poetry, which is to more or less ignore meter. So both the Fagles and the Latimer don't have a regular meter. They're arguably composed sort of for the ear, and they work okay as
58:52 Speaker 03 audio, but at least the Fagles, McKellen, it's fun. It's fun to listen to.
58:55 Sean Carroll? Yeah.
58:56 Speaker 03 But it's not regular meter, right?
58:57 Sean Carroll? Yeah.
58:58 Speaker 03 So I wanted to honor the fact that the Homeric poems do use regular meter and that they do that partly because of what we talked about at the start of this conversation, because these poems are the heirs of a long tradition of poetic storytelling. And so I felt the only way to do that in English is to use the traditional meter for dramatic and narrative verse in English. So that even if you're not thinking about meter, you can hear this has the same kind of beats as Shakespeare or Milton.
59:29 Sean Carroll? Right.
59:29 Speaker 03 Even if I'm not using the same lexicon as Shakespeare, I'm still using that rhythm. And so I'm wanting to cue the reader into there's something traditional about this. It's not like a novel. It's not prose.
59:40 Sean Carroll? But how much of that choice is this is what Shakespeare or Milton did? This is what we're sort of implicitly used to, iambic pentameter, da da, da da, da da. Or how much of it is the words in English kind of naturally adapt to that?
59:54 Speaker 03 It's, I mean, it's hard to say, right? I mean, I think that an iambic rhythm is definitely much easier in English than a dactylic rhythm and or an anapistic, anapiste rhythm come to that, because just having that words with two short or light beats in a row like that that frequently, or else two, two very heavy stress beats in a row, it's hard to do with the English language. I mean, if you read any of the Rodney Merrill translations, even if you just sort of dip into them, you can see that he's sort of forced into things like he has to call Agamemnon scion of Atrius, because if son of Atrius doesn't fit, right?
1:00:35 Speaker 03 You can't get that into a dactylic line unless you think you have your stress of, which of course you wouldn't. So it's got to be scion of Atrius. But I don't want to be having to say scion of Atrius every other line, because the original doesn't sound sort of weird in that particular way, right? And they using completely unlikely combinations of words. It sounds actually traditional as opposed to this sort of made made up. I mean, of course, it's an artificial poetic language, but it's a traditional artificial language.
1:01:05 Sean Carroll? And this is very important, how it sounds, because I think that I remember reading that one of your ideas in doing the translation was you wanted the impression that the modern reader gets from it to be kind of analogous to the impression that the Greek listener would have had back in the day. And many translations sound, you know, either floral or archaic or overly ponderous.
1:01:30 Speaker 03 Yes, I mean, it made me very happy to hear that you're listening to the audiobooks because just the the fact of listenability and read aloud ability, performability is really important to me. And also just the fact that we haven't really talked about the fact that there were there were multiple different voices, different speakers. And before I, before I took on the process of doing the Homeric translations, I'd worked a lot on tragedy. I've written quite a lot about tragedy. I'd done some Seneca tragedy translations, and I've done some Euripides and Sophocles as well. I wanted to bring out the proto-dramatic qualities of the Homeric poems, as well as the the fact that they're metrical and that they have this extraordinary sound. And then I also wanted
1:02:11 Speaker 03 to lean into poetic techniques that the originals do, that English can also do, even beyond the fact that there's meter, there's also a lot of alliteration. So in the, in those first few lines, polas psukas proyapsin. So there's this puh, puh, puh sound. And then there's heroon, heloria. So I wanted to try to echo those things like heroes, Hades, spoil of dogs, banquet for the birds. I want to lean into the possibilities of alliteration in English, which of course is something that is part of the Anglophone tradition as well. Yeah, I didn't exactly answer your question, but those are some of the things I wanted to be thinking about in terms of poetic technique.
1:02:56 Sean Carroll? I would much rather you say interesting things than answer my questions. That's perfectly acceptable. That's a good strategy.
1:03:01 Speaker 03 Okay.
1:03:02 Sean Carroll? How, do you feel constrained sometimes by the fact that it is a poem? I mean, do you, do you respect the line structure of the poem? Do you want to get the same number of lines? I know certainly some people just like add in whole bunches of words because they think it sounds better.
1:03:19 Speaker 03 Yes, or else, I mean, I thought I have the Fagels translation in front of me, but when you read, read the beginning of that, you can sort of see that he, he really does add in a lot of words. And in order to, in order to, sometimes in order to make things clear, like he, he does rage, goddess rage, right? Because of course, as I was saying before, he wants to, the original starts with the object. If you're doing that in English, you can't make clear that rage is the object, not the subject of the sentence.
1:03:47 Sean Carroll? Yeah.
1:03:47 Speaker 03 Unless you repeat it. And he also does, again, I can't do this without having it in front of me, but repeating multiple different possible choices for the destructiveness of the wrath of Achilles, right? He has something like deadly and I can't, I can't, I can't remember what he does. But I don't feel constrained, or at least I find the constraints really interesting and fun to work with. In terms of pacing kinds of questions, I kind of changed my mind between the two poems about that. I felt from the outset that I very much wanted to do what I could to honour the quickness of the Homeric narrative pace and the sense that you get when you're reading the original that you want to hear more, you want to hear more, you want to
1:04:31 Speaker 03 hear more. There's no point at which you're like, this is kind of boring and the repetitions feel like they're bogging you down. And so I felt what I could do with the Odyssey was to confine myself to the same number of lines as the original, just to make sure that I wasn't making a translation that feels saggyer than the original feels. And that was, I think I learned a lot by doing that, and I think it did kind of work, because, not least because the Odyssey has a lot of very polysyllabic words, many of which I felt it was okay to translate a word that's five syllables long by one that's three syllables long. And then I can make the math work, right? If I have "polymercanos
1:05:15 Speaker 03 Odysseus" becoming "crafty Odysseus", then I can still make a hexameter into a pentameter, and I can still keep it line for line. And there was this sort of puzzle-solving element to doing that. When I got to the Iliad, I thought, I'm going to still try and do that, even though with the Odyssey, I would very often feel, I've got a great draft of this book, and then I would go back and realise, okay, I've got to cut a line somewhere. And then I would have to go back and rewrite everything. Of course. Because I can't just cut a whole line, but I've got to rethink, is there a patch where I can make a couple of epithets slightly shorter words? Is there a way that I can, you know, change "much enduring" into "stalwart"? And then I can save a syllable, and so on,
1:05:59 Speaker 03 that kind of thing. But in the case of the Iliad, partly because there were just so many more names in the Iliad, and of course, Agamemnon is a really long name that will take up half a line, and I can't call him, you know, Mr. Ag, just to save some syllables. So I used more lines for the Iliad translation than the original has.
1:06:18 Sean Carroll? Yeah.
1:06:18 Speaker 03 And in fact, if I were to do it again, I would let myself be a little bit more lax about the line count with the Odyssey and maybe one day I'll go back and revise it and let myself have just, you know, maybe five more lines of books. Just a couple more. I don't need a lot. I mean, I like constraints. I think they're really useful and they force you to think about what exactly is really at stake here and not sort of pa- patch in three different things because you haven't made a decision. It means you have to have a clear voice.
1:06:43 Sean Carroll? Yeah. And then there's a, there's a very basic question that I have when it comes to something like ancient Greek, which is, are we sure we know what the words mean? Like, we can't ask a native speaker, right? Is it all from context? How, how, or do we just sort of feel like maybe we don't know and we go with what we know?
1:07:03 Speaker 03 That's a great question. I mean, we're, we're pretty sure about most of the words because of course, most words, a lot of words in ancient Greek coexisted with Latin, right? And so there were translations from one to another. There are commentaries. There's a, there's a huge amount of later ancient Greek. The case of the Homeric poems is different because of course, we have far less Greek of, of the archaic period of the pre, pre fifth century period than we do of, of all of much later periods. And the question of what exactly was the connotation of this or that word in the seventh or sixth century?
1:07:45 Speaker 03 We can ask the linguistics, historical linguistics specialists about what, what did the roots of this word mean in Indo-European and what, what exactly was the etymology? But of course, there are some words in the Homeric poems that even ancient Homeric scholars, we haven't really talked about the fact, the existence of ancient Homeric scholarship, but at the time of the Library of Alexandria in the third and second centuries BCE, which is when the first sort of, first scholarly process of editing the written Homeric texts and figuring out what goes in this line. Here, here we have some variant readings. Do we use, do we think that's, that's the better one from this manuscript or that one? All of that. Those scholars at that time-
1:08:28 Speaker 03 But also very much fixated on the existence of a few words which which occur only once throughout the Homeric corpus, which are called the hapax, like words that which means once. So words that are hapax, you can't you can't get it from where are the other occurrences of this word in Homer, because it doesn't occur elsewhere in Homer. So you're kind of messed up. And there are a few, of course, there are some of those. And of course, there are context clues. But of course, there was also, you know, maybe those context clues aren't telling you the whole story. And then there can be some mystery. I mean, I felt that as a translator, in the case of unusual words or words that occur only once, or words about which there's some debate in antiquity
1:09:08 Speaker 03 among the ancient commentators about that, I'm gonna have to go with go with a good scholarly guess and add an endnote. And I also can sometimes, you know, use an unusual word in English if it's a word that was clearly unusual within the context of the Homeric poems. So for instance, there's a there are usual words for spears and shields, but there's also here's a weird word for a shield, and maybe I can call it a butler, rather than using shield for the for the normal word. Some things like that, I can play around with the possibilities of of English. But it's there's no, you know, simple solution to what to do with that as a translator.
1:09:47 Sean Carroll? Do you have any favorite examples of a word you would love to be able to go back and ask Homer what he was talking about?
1:09:54 Speaker 03 Um, there are so many. I mean, I was just going back to the beginning of the conversation about was there even a homo and how are we going to interview that person? And yes, or the homo committee, if it was the homo, homo, the homo directorial committee. I mean, even just that, the beginning of the second line, ulomenen, which I translate as cataclysmic, it's a but it's a participle, and it suggests disastrous or damned or
1:10:25 Speaker 03 The commentators from antiquity suggest there's there's an implication of the speaker cursing it, like god damn it.
1:10:34 Sean Carroll? Yeah.
1:10:35 Speaker 03 That that terrible wrath. What exactly was the connotation and is there is there a difference between the colloquial language connotation or the poetic language connotation? What kinds of what's the relationship between I wish this wrath had been destroyed versus this wrath was itself destructive? I think the word probably suggests both. I don't know how to do that in English, but yeah.
1:10:58 Sean Carroll? And do you, when you're thinking about the contemporary reader, do you allow yourself to lapse into overly contemporary language? Or do you try to keep it a little bit more timeless?
1:11:11 Speaker 03 I you really phrase that in a very neutral way, like laps and overly controlled.
1:11:18 Speaker 03 Yes, I mean, the question of how to make sure it's as clear and legible as the original is. The original, even though we've talked about the ways it's traditional, it's metrical, it's clearly marked as poetic. It's got all these poetic markers like meter and alliteration and traditional character stories and so on. And yet it's not syntactically complicated.
1:11:43 Speaker 03 But it's also not slangy. And yet it's also conveying clear actions and clear emotions. If I if I had said that wrath, god damn it, I would think that would be too slangy. And there were there were cases where, you know, for instance, where warriors speak to each other on the battlefield and they use terms of affection. Do I have them say, hey buddy? Some there are translators who do versions of that. I mean, the Stanley Lombardo translations have a ton of sort of late 20th century military slang in them. And I find that a little bit of a turn off. I mean, I think it's not. It's not registering the ways that this language is marked as different from regular speech and that it's
1:12:28 Speaker 03 these characters are having real feelings, but they're not speaking in a completely naturalistic way. So I think there should needs to be some kind of artifice about it, which includes there's not going to be. Sort of blasphemy, obscenity. People invoke the gods, but they don't say, "God damn it", and they don't say, "F it", you know.
1:12:45 Sean Carroll? Yeah.
1:12:46 Speaker 03 The register is different from the register of, say, Athenian comedy or Roman satire. So I thought there were lots of wrestling with what exactly is the right register within English? And then also, what's the right register just emotionally? Would this character say this? And have I made it sound as intense? In terms of these curses or insults have to sound really intense and like they really land. And yet they don't just sound, you know, comically ridiculous. They have to be hyperbolic and yet not totally ridiculous. And even though here's this man wailing with grief and slapping his thighs, which is not how we expect men to behave. And yet you have to believe it while you're in the world of the poem.
1:13:31 Sean Carroll? Well, I did notice that because, you know, in my mind, I know there's a movie coming out. I'm wondering how certain things happen. And, you know, there's a lot of scenes where men are just bawling their eyes out, right?
1:13:42 Speaker 03 Yes.
1:13:42 Sean Carroll? Out of something. And we don't see that in war movies today. And it's just such a shift of expectation that it's hard for you. It's hard for the translator to sort of get across the implications, the connotations that the actual Greek audience must have been getting.
1:14:01 Speaker 03 Right. I mean, also, as we've already said, the actual Greek audience is a lot of different people and varied by time period. And if you're Plato, reading that and thinking, "Oh, no, he shouldn't be bawling his eyes out. He should get a grip", right?
1:14:14 Sean Carroll? Yeah.
1:14:14 Speaker 03 And that's an Ancient Greek response to that.
1:14:16 Sean Carroll? Yeah.
1:14:17 Speaker 03 And yet there's also a way that, within the world of the poems, I don't think we're being invited to think that. I mean, I think we're being invited to see this, to see it as absolutely, if you suffer devastating grief, of course, you're going to be rolling around in the dung and bawling your eyes out. Because that's, that shows how upset you are.
1:14:36 Sean Carroll? Yeah. Do you think that working as a translator has affected your sort of classic scholarship more broadly? Are you better at reading Ancient Greek things now that you've worked hard to translate them into English?
1:14:48 Speaker 03 I'm not sure. I mean, it's hard to say because I've been, and I've been reading these poems since I was a teenager. I started Greek in high school. I've been teaching them for decades.
1:15:01 Speaker 03 I mean, I didn't sort of take, take on these poems sort of without having read them before, you know? So I wasn't starting from scratch and it's sort of hard to go back to what did I think before? But I definitely think that just that process of living this closely with these poems for the last twelve plus years, you know, working on, on them every single day and thinking about the connotations of every single word all the time. And then also the process of talking about them to people like you and sort of realizing what questions do people have and how do I make sure that I'm, you know, being honest and respectful to, to the tradition and to the poems that I, that I still adore and feel, you know, like I want to keep reading them for the rest of my life.
1:15:46 Speaker 03 I think it definitely reinforced for me just how great they are and also the ways that, the, the performability. I think I hadn't, of course, I knew in theory and I did kind of know just how essential it is to think about the Homeric poems as performance texts. But thinking about how to create, how to recreate that in English made that alive for me in a different way. And, and then doing the things like what I just did of reading a little bit of Greek, reading a little bit of my translation, practicing doing that and practicing being a rhapsode, which is, of course, I tried doing different versions of that in sort of pathetic ways in the classroom, but it's fun to get to do that with different audiences. And it makes, it also reinforces to me
1:16:27 Speaker 03 that audiences like this stuff. It's, it's not just people in antiquity who find it interesting and compelling.
1:16:35 Sean Carroll? So, okay, we're at the end of the podcast, so we can, I'll, I'll, I'll close on a completely silly unfair question. You mentioned Jane Austen earlier as an author who we could identify. And one thing about Jane Austen is there are dozens and dozens of sequels to her books written by fans. So if you had to write your Homeric epic, like if you had to write your own sequel to the Iliad and the Odyssey, are there any juicy stories out there you think deserve that treatment?
1:17:06 Speaker 03 Oh, I love this question. So I, right now, I'm doing something which is not, not exactly this project, but it's, I'm doing, in fact, a couple of projects that are a little bit this project. One is a translation of Ovid's Heroides, which in a way is a sort of, one of the many ancient quasi sequels to the Iliad and the Odyssey. It's the verse epistles of mythological women writing back to their terrible boyfriends, saying how terrible they are. The first one is Penelope writing to Odysseus, saying, "What took you so long?" And then the third one is Briseus writing to Achilles. And the ridiculous premise is that she thinks Achilles is her boyfriend, rather than her enslaver and rapist. Which is sort of funny, but it's, it's really dark, as Ovid very often is.
1:17:48 Sean Carroll? Yeah, very dark, good.
1:17:49 Speaker 03 Anyway, so I'm doing a translation of that, and it's really fun to be sort of be thinking about voice in different ways. It's a different poetic form, because it's elegiac couplets rather than hexameters. And then I'm also doing a prose retelling of, of the Trojan War myths that are in the background to the Trojan Wars, so a sort of fiction stitched together. But if I was doing an epic poem version, I don't know. I mean, I, there's a lost tragedy called Palamedes, which is about Palamedes, who supposedly was the inventor of the, mythical inventor of the alphabet, who got tricked by Odysseus and killed. And I, I've often thought, a cube would be an interesting person to do a, either a story or an epic poem about, or rewrite the lost tragedy of Palamedes. It'd be cool.
1:18:33 Sean Carroll? All right. I, I encourage you to do that. That Odysseus, he was very tricksy, wasn't he?
1:18:38 Speaker 03 He was real tricksy, yes. He really was. A very fun character, yes.
1:18:42 Sean Carroll? Emily Wilson, thanks so much for being on the Mindscape Podcast.
1:18:44 Speaker 03 Thank you. Thanks so much.
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