“I enjoy Homer in his own language. I thank on my knees, him who directed my early education, for having put into my possession this rich source of delight, and I would not exchange it for anything which I could then have acquired, and have not since acquired.”
—Thomas Jefferson
It is an extraordinary phenomenon of Western literary history that European literature originates with two epics that continue to excite admiration after nearly three millennia. Those who must content themselves with reading the epics in translation, of course, cannot hope to share fully the unfailing delight experienced by such a fluent master of ancient Greek as Thomas Jefferson and may be tempted to dismiss as hyperbolic his pronouncement: “Homer the first of poets, as he must ever remain.”
Like the plays of Shakespeare and other monuments of Western literature, Homer’s Iliad is a work of inexhaustible richness and complexity in which every verse impels the action, deepens the characterizations and contributes to the psychological opulence within a tapestry of recurring images and themes in a masterly interweaving of past, present and future within a skillfully evolved architecture.
In the last centuries poets in every generation have sought to recapture the wonderment of the epics by producing new translations. In On First Looking into Homer’s Iliad, the author of the highly praised The Education of Julius Caesar invites readers to explore book by book and often line by line the complex artistry of the epic portrayal of men at war. He is confident that after such an investigation readers will be receptive to Jefferson’s enthusiastic judgment.
In his famous “Upon First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” sonnet John Keats expressed his wonderment:
Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific--and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
Keats’ older contemporary Thomas Jefferson, a man of wide acquaintance with, and perceptive insights into, both ancient and modern literatures described the enrichment Homer brought to his life:
I enjoy Homer in his own language.... I thank on my knees, him who directed my early education, for having put into my possession this rich source of delight, and I would not exchange it for anything which I could then have acquired, and have not since acquired.
It is an extraordinary phenomenon of cultural history that European literature originates with its greatest epics, works that hold company with the literary masterpieces of subsequent millennia. In the sixteenth century Shakespeare’s contemporary, the learned French essayist Michel de Montaigne declared of Homer:
It was against the order of nature that he created the most excellent production that can be. For things at birth are ordinarily imperfect; they gain in size and strength as they grow. He made the infancy of poetry and of several other sciences mature, perfect and accomplished. For this reason he may be called the first and last of poets, according to that beautiful testimony that antiquity has left to us about him, that having had no one he could imitate before him, he has had no one after him who could imitate him.
In recent centuries poets in every generation have sought to recapture the wonderment of the Homeric epics by producing new translations. In his translation of the Iliad (and of the Odyssey as well) Robert Fagles sought to fulfill this service for the final decade of the twentieth century, and his translation is employed in this study.
As with other supreme works of art--the late Beethoven quartets, for example, or portraits by Titian – appreciation of the Homeric epics requires a special effort. Following a plot line may suffice with ephemeral contemporary bestsellers but not with the Iliad, where every verse impels the action, deepens the characterizations and contributes to the psychological opulence within a tapestry of recurring images and themes. Close reading is required as well to apprehend the masterly interweaving of past, present and future within the epic’s architecture.
Those who must content themselves with reading the epics in translation cannot hope to share fully the unfailing delight experienced by such a master of ancient Greek as Thomas Jefferson and may therefore dismiss as hyperbolic his pronouncement (in agreement with Montaigne’s): “Homer the first of poets, as he must ever remain.” Jefferson, of course, enjoyed the rhythm, melody and other qualities of the original text irreproducible in translation. For all that limitation, analysis of Fagels’ version of Book I of the Iliad will, I think, render readers receptive to Jefferson’s judgment:
