translating the abyss: on robert fitzgerald's "odyssey"

Trustees of Boston University

Translating the Abyss: On Robert Fitzgerald's "Odyssey"Author(s): Robert BaggSource: Arion, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Spring, 1969), pp. 51-65Published by: Trustees of Boston UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20163181 .

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TRANSLATING THE ABYSS: ON ROBERT FITZGERALD'S ODYSSEY

Robert Bagg

1 1ENRY JAMES ONCE SAD), PERHAPS

marveHng at the Gordian technology of his own novels, that

to be an American was a complex fate. James meant many

things by that, but surely one was that Americans had a

simultaneous hunger for their own future and for Europe's past. That fateful hunger seems to have matured at last in

the present generation of American translators, who by pro fession live in both worlds and have turned translation into an art form in the ascendency, exuberant to the point of

hubris. Even the man whose work I wish to explore and

praise, Robert Fitzgerald, sometimes surprises me by the

size of his claims, though he asserts them with quiet force.

Fitzgerald smiles at hubris by his rendering of these lines at

the start of his Odyssey:

Of these adventures, Muse, daughter of Zeus, tell us in our time, lift the great song again.1

and he barely touches it with the last lines of his long, absorb

ing postscript:

The faithful woman and the versatile brave man, the

wakeful intelligence open to inspiration or grace?these are still exemplary for our kind, as they always were and

always will be. Nor do I suppose that the pleasure of

hearing a story in words has quite gone out. The Odyssey at aH events was made for your pleasure in Homer's

words and in mine.2

The hint here that the translator has become, must become,

1 The Odyssey, tr. Robert Fitzgerald (New York 1963), p.l. 2 Ibid, p.506.



52 TRANSLATING THE ABYSS

his poet?even if that means Homer?an idea which at first

sounds obvious or grotesque, now seems to me distinctly true, and I will try to explain why.

Even in a time of much good translation, Fitzgerald's

Odyssey has attracted intense appreciation and scrutiny, as

though he had done more than merely follow superbly the

best modern practice, and revealed something lasting, dis

covered some secret about the nature of translation. To judge whether this may be so, it is necessary to look at the reasons

why contemporary translation has acquired such self

confidence.

We hear plenty of praise for works like Lattimore's Trojan Women, his Pindar, and even his relentless Iliad, Arrow

smith's Euripides and Petronius, Lowell's Imitations, Logue's Patrokleia, and occasionaUy a decorous insult or two. What

we do not hear often is the once traditional lament of the

disconsolate translator: that his job is hopeless and that any

appearance of success is a fraud. What left translators in

previous generations morose, particularly when faced with a

great Greek or Latin original, was an experience in a de

parted culture, a palimpsest of conventions, religious beHefs,

sleights of thought and speech which had no remote equiva lents in the modern language all too naively eager to welcome a resurrected masterpiece. This sense of what we have lost

has been exactly summarized by Nietzsche:

We no longer wholly understand how ancient man ex

perienced the most familiar and ordinary events?the

day for instance, and his waking up. Because the an

cients believed in dreams, waking existence had a differ

ent lustre . . . our "death" is an utterly different death.

All events had a different sheen because a god shone in

them; the same was true of aU decisions and glimpses into the distant future, because ancient man had oracles

and hidden signs and prophecy. "Truth" was thought of

differently, when the lunatic could be considered its

mouthpiece?something that makes us shudder or laugh.

Injustice had a different emotional effect since people feared not merely social punishment and disgrace but



Robert Bagg 53

divine retribution as well.3

Caught in the frustrations of such truths, Victorian translators

felt as the linguist Werner Winter does even now, like stone

workers assigned the job of copying exactly a marble athlete,

possessing talent and tools enough, but unfortunately not

allowed to use marble.4 The result has been translation com

mitted by men convinced they could not succeed, and who often seized what they thought was the life line of literal

accuracy, that straw whose seizure proved they were drown

ing. But their despair was serious and we should ask why the translator's predicament no longer seems so desperate.

What has restored his gusto and prestige? Greece with her

gods and her tricky syntax has sailed no nearer the American

mainland. All the difficulties remain. The crucial change of

attitude, apparent from the modern translator's defense of his work and the work itself, is this: we have redefined the essential poem, not as a structure of words which beckon like so many sirens to their English mates to join them and so

perish, but rather we define the poem as a reaHty in large part preverbal and preconscious, a reality the modern sensi

bility grasps by the deepest reading he can manage of his text. (It's clear that psychoanalysis, Jungian models of the

mind, and much recent literary analysis have encouraged the translator in this. )

This new location of the true poem as prior even to its own words frees a translator from a false reaHsm, but it also obH

gates him. Here is how Jean Paris puts this obligation:

The translator must retrace the initial intuition, the root of the work; he must devote his whole intelHgence and

sensitivity to the research of what may have been, for the poet, a mere iHumination, a gift from the gods. Then,

having worked out the core of the poem, having rebuilt the spiritual process according to its numerous elements,

3 From Die Fr?hliche Wissenschaft, 152. Translated by William Arrowsmith in Arion 2 ( Winter 1963 ) 13-14.

4 William Arrowsmith and Roger Shattuck, eds., The Craft and Context of Translation (New York 1964) p.93.




he has, finally, to go to more trouble than the artist him

self; he must pass from this construction to the concrete, written expression, and with no freedom whatsoever,

try desperately to adjust every word, every line, every

single cadence to the transcendental model.5

In these terms, the poet leads a sinfully untroubled life com

pared to his translator, who must be simultaneously a tran

scendentaHst and a desperate stenographer.

I now wish to produce an occasion on which a translator

manages to discover and re-enact the mysterious root of a

poem. All my convictions about translation can be iUustrated

by Robert Fitzgerald as he remakes the Odyssey. First a

short passage from Book 11: Odysseus in Hades. He is about

to speak to the dead spirit of his mother, Antikleia, after once

forcing her away from his supply of speech-stimulating blood while he heard out the prophet Tiresias. I precede Fitzgerald's work with a fairly literal version by one of his current (1967) rivals, Albert Cook. Antikleia finishes:

But longing for you and your counsels, noble Odysseus, And your kindliness, reft my honey-sweet spirit away." So she spoke. And pondering in my mind, I wished

To take hold of the soul of my mother who had died.

Three times I tried and my spirit bade me to grasp her.

And three times like a shadow or a dream she flew

Out of my hands. Sharp grief grew ever greater in my heart.

So I spoke out to her and uttered winged words :

"Mother, why do you not wait as I strive to grasp you, So that even in the place of Hades we might throw our dear

hands

Round each other and take pleasure in cold lamentation? Or is this some phantom that noble Persephone Sends me, so that I may grieve and lament still more?"

[11.202-14]

What this scene possesses, and which Cook's version does not fully give us, is the Greek sense of the impassable differ ence between the Hving and the dead, made even more keen

by the animal thirst of the Hving to touch, to feel the non

5 Ibid. p.86.



Robert Bagg 55

existent presence, the very flesh of the one dead. To ac

complish this basic intent Homer's language gave him several

advantages. He had Hades, a place where such pains of long

ing could be acted out. Since the dead mother Antikleia was

not merely a memory or a dream as she would be to us, but a speaking character, a ghost, we may watch her approach

forlornly close to the comforting flesh that we and Odysseus

long for. Besides a place where everybody believed the dead

collected, Homer could count on the ghost to exist for his

time with a shifty, semi-palpability. More useful yet, Odys seus' heart, his "phr?n," was not the sentimental abstract

locus of emotion, as for us, but an organ like the skin or the

genitals from which one received physical sensation. To

succeed, then, with this elusive passage, to get it across, Fitz

gerald must increase Odysseus' sense of his own physicaHty,

translating the misleadingly abstract Greek into things which

have a sensuous life for a modern man. For instance, he adds a slight suggestion of protoplasm to Antikleia's ghost, in the

lines I now quote:

only my loneHness for you, Odysseus, for your kind heart and counsel, gentle Odysseus, took my own life away."

I bit my lip, rising perplexed, with longing to embrace her, and tried three times, putting my arms around her, but she went sifting through my hands, impalpable as shadows are, and wavering Hke a dream. Now this embittered aH the pain I bore, and I cried in the darkness :

"O my mother, wiU you not stay, be stiU, here in my arms,

may we not, in this place of Death, as well, hold one another, touch with love, and taste

salt tears' relief, the twinge of welling tears?

Or is this aU hallucination, sent

Against me by the iron Queen, Persephone... [11.202-14]

Homer gave his translator no lip to bite down upon, but has




given him a situation which demands that somehow flesh be

gripped. Lip-biting, of course, belongs to our time's idiom of

gestures, though it belonged also to the Greeks. For instance, in TJie Bakkai, at line 621 the furious Pentheus gives his lips to his teeth. But Fitzgerald seizes the gesture because it

suggests, this nervous grinding of flesh, something of what

pondering in one's "phr?n" meant to a Greek. Out of all the

other clean strokes of translation in the passage I mention

two: the participle "sifting" gives Antikleia's ghost the

weight she needs to graze Odysseus' palms, and the "taste of

tears and twinge of welling grief" replace, or, actually,

physically reactivate the ritual weeping hidden in the

Greek phrase "take pleasure in cold lamentation" Kpvepolo T

TapTr?)fxtu6a y?oio.

The method Fitzgerald uses here, and with consistent

success through the whole epic, is to sail always near the

literal surface of the Greek poem, leaving it to submerge himself toward the preconscious depths only when the

reality he glimpsed beneath was irresistible and indispen sable.

That was a brief passage, and translating a great epic is

more arduous than winning a number of tactical skirmishes.

There remains a strategic problem any translator has in gain

ing the respect of the modern intelligence, and that is our

skeptical appreciation of any hero who delights in his own

ruthlessness. Such an epic accumulation of physical action

may not make much headway in an age when Proust, Henry

James, and WaUace Stevens are serious reading. A translator

might, and with some validity, handle this decadent age of

ours by saying to us : Homer is action, and much more and

it's sublime?I won't flinch from telling it like it was. That

stern task would be a disastrous drain on the audience's

resilience, I think. For this reason: his audience will need

to supply a great deal of mental energy to correct its prevail

ing skeptical response to heroism, to repress its unease with

formulaic repetition and strange opacities of feeling. There's

no doubt that such an exercise is good for us and sometimes

exhilarating. Another way, though, exists, which we have

been watching Fitzgerald open up, and it seems to offer more



Robert Bagg 57

than a purifying of sensibility.

Our age has solved the hero problem by inventing anti

heroes: Herzog, Genet himself, the Glass brothers, Buddy and Seymour, and now Alex Portnoy. How shall we deliver

honest respect to a hero who does not, never had the slight est need to, recognize his own potential absurdity? Fitzgerald

acknowledges the problem with his usual reckless subtlety. He allows his Odysseus and his Homer to speak sometimes

with mild irony about immense happenings, military, divine, emotional. After all, Odysseus is a man who knows all minds

and is never at a loss, even in our screwed-up century. He

will learn how to behave in our presence. So we find Fitzgerald playing

a delicate lightheartedness

through scenes a Victorian would have pondered glumly in

his phr?n. The last few points can be translated into example

by one of the poem's fine climaxes, the moment Odysseus

strings his great bow while disguised as the beggar:

But the man skilled in all ways of contending satisfied by the great bow's look and heft, like a musician, like a harper, when

with quiet hand upon his instrument

he draws between his thumb and forefinger a sweet new string upon a peg: so effortlessly

Odysseus in one motion strung the bow.

Then slid his right hand down the cord and plucked it, so the taut gut vibrating hummed and sang a swallow's note.

In the hushed hall it smote the suitors

and all their faces changed. [21.404-13]

That was done in a minor key. Terror rises, as Archilochus

said, from the unforeseen. Several things, working together,

impress me about this moment. First, the quiet of Fitz

gerald's rendering it: he has chosen to translate the stunned

silence that must have surrounded the suitors as they watched

the beggar set the bowstring with formidable ease. The

calmly climatic line?




so effortlessly

Odysseus in one motion strung the bow

?reveals the speed and sweep of the action itself; the sepa ration of adverb and verb prolongs our sense of completion until the last second. Fitzgerald's eye was on the exact

rhythmic movement Odysseus was enacting as much as on the

Greek syntax. That his imagining ear was also alert is audible

for us in another remarkable line :

so the taut gut vibrating hummed and sang

into which Fitzgerald gets the pluck, "the taut gut," the swell

ing blur of the "vibrating" cord, and the swift modulation of

sound that forms "hummed and sang." Finally, the uncanny effect of using music as the omen to the suitors of their coming

slaughter. Most of this is Homer's, but Fitzgerald makes declarative

something the Greek only impHes. The swaUowlike musical

note smites the suitors, in English, whereas in Greek the

note was released on the air and the suitors changed color

because they were trapped in the same room with it. In

Cook's version

It sang sweetly beneath like a swaUow in its sound.

Great distress came upon the suitors, and the skin of all

Turned color.

[21.411-13]

To a less sensitive modern ear, an omen may not carry its

proper wallop, but how can you ignore one so expHcit you are smote by it?

That we are meant to see revenge as a kind of music sug

gests to Fitzgerald an even bolder resource some dozen lines

later, after Odysseus wings his shaft through the twelve ax

sockets. "Telemachos," he says,

the stranger

you welcomed in your hall has not disgraced you.



Robert Bagg 59

I did not miss, neither did I take aU day

stringing the bow. My hand and eye are sound, not so contemptible

as the young men say. The hour has come to cook their lordships' mutton?

supper by daylight. Other amusements later, with song and harping that adorn a feast.

[21.424-30]

Now this bravado is invisible to the naked eye in the Greek, which consists of the formulae Homer always used when a

person predicts a banquet followed by entertainment. How

ever, we know as he speaks that Odysseus clearly intends to

disrupt the banquet by mowing down the suitors as he sends

into the air music more brutal than a swallow's note. That

will be the only singing and harping of the day. Would

people in an ancient audience have sensed something

ominously complacent in Odysseus' words about the ban

quet never to be finished? A smart Greek, yes. This play of

mind through figures and images existed for Greeks as much

as it does now, for us.

The kind of music that Fitzgerald does mute almost com

pletely is that of Homer's tremendous hexameters. That

choice seems more than shrewd. To try to make convincing

English hexameters is about as crazy as to translate inflec

tions, since it is only the Greek language's inflected facility which makes it maUeable enough for hexameters to lay down

their decorum of strong sounds. Instead, Fitzgerald chooses

to contribute his own personal tone. It is another kind of

music, which the Greek poem is without. Because Fitz

gerald's tone suggests a man not to be taken in, a hard man

who has seen it aU, yet one who values what is skillful and

graceful, we associate this tone with Odysseus himself, who

in his original incarnation possessed heroic enlargements of

of those virtues which, Fitzgerald shows us quietly, still

survive.

But I believe there is an importance to Fitzgerald's mode

of translation beyond its sheer attractiveness. He has an in

tuitive sense of the translator's responsibiHty which I think

deserves to be stated as a theory. Parts of it I already have,




though what I now say is the heart of it.

To discover the route along which Fitzgerald reached his

understanding of the translator's responsibility, imagine what

the experience of a Greek audience at a recitation of epic must have been. EarHer I argued that it must have been

alert to images, dislocations, suggestions of motive; that is, excited and imaginative itself. More than this, the bemused

listener surely enjoyed juxtapositions, resonances, extremely delicate echoes from myth to myth and phrase to phrase. If

we can sense some of these at our staggering distance, their

minds must have been even more generously deluged with

this kind of satisfaction. All I wish to claim here is that

Homer's language contained the hum of implication just as

our own minds contain it and just as a knotty sentence of

Shakespeare's is restless with it. What Fitzgerald does is to

acknowledge this truth about the unspoken ways great poetry stirs and provokes both its poet and its reader, and he trans

lates Homer's mind as continuaUy thinking about what it is

saying. Yet, it is precisely this inclusion of his own mental reality?

the sin of Monet, Degas, and Renoir?which drives the Latti morean HteraHsts up a wall. Metaphorically, at least, as shall

be seen. Here, in mid-diatribe, is Albert Cook, whose recent version of the Odyssey succeeds in following the poem line

by line, enjambments included. Cook says :

The Hteralist provides the reader, or at least the student, with the comfortable assurance that for the vast desig native tapestry of the original a pink thread may some

times do duty for a red one, or a blurred one for a blurred

one, but never a blue one for a red one, and never a poly chrome burst for a single color of the original. The im

pressionist, on the other hand, for all the rationales he can muster, can never free himself of the charge leveled

by T. S. Eliot at Gilbert Murray (who translates rather

more Hterally than most of the impressionists now ac

tive ) : "So here are two striking phrases which we owe to

Mr. Murray; it is he who has sapped our soul and

shattered the cup of all life for Euripides. . . . Professor



Robert Bagg 61

Murray has simply interposed between Euripides and

ourselves a barrier more impenetrable than the Greek

language."

Any rendering builds a wall. One can only hope to build

a translucent one. We always need masonry, but also

bricks that are translucent to begin with.6

He obviously thinks Liddell and Scott are the only suppliers of translucent bricks. Eliot's famous thrust against Murray is uncomfortably close to importing into criticism the tech

nique of the Big Lie; as frequent with Eliot's arresting phrases there is a lash of truth in a sea of wrongheaded malice. The

few images Murray slips in can be defended only if they

provide something indispensable, not merely a rime or a

sonority; but to claim that Murray's translations establish a

barrier more impenetrable than the Greek language is pre

posterous?we know a great deal of what is happening in a

Euripides play after reading Murray, and we know what

emotional tone a late Victorian minor poet thought existed in

his time's idiom akin to Euripides' dramas.

Cook, however, equates the presence of the translator's

sense of his own mind with the willful building of a blank

wall. Since I am convinced that only his own presence of

mind will give a translator's work a chance of literary success,

forgive me this reply in kind to Cook and Eliot:

What a Hteralist assumes the right to do is to introduce

an element into his EngHsh version as gratingly foreign to Greek as the most outrageous liberty taken by

an

impressionist, because the Hteralist imposes a numbness

of sensitivity that does not deHght in its words, does not

meet its audience's desire to range among the poem's

implications, and does not know in which generation it is

alive.

To try to imagine how the Greeks would look on our trans

lation of their poetry, and so understand the kind of blank

6 The Odyssey, tr. Albert Cook ( New York 1967 ) pp.x-xi.




ness of mind I find in the Hteralists' work, we will go quickly to the fortieth century and look at a translation with com

mentary, by a sensitive philologist, of some surviving curios

ities. ( Most philologists in this era have become the emenders

of ancient cinema. The greatest reputation belongs to the

daring Macrobe, of Entropy University, who, not content to

snip and rearrange ceUuloid, finally made sense of Antonioni's

Blow-Up by emending a visible tennis ball back into the ac

tion at the film's end.) But our philologist has discovered

this line and a half, all that remains of one of Hamlet's solilo

quies, preserved in mirror image on a ditto of a discarded

exam:

O! most wicked speed To post with such dexterity to incestuous sheets.

This is exquisite, our man assures us, to anyone who has spent the necessary fifteen years to master English. With icy au

thority he tells us, however, that his version gives, as ade

quately as the tools of modern learning wiU allow, precisely what the English says. It reads :

O sinning swiftness, trotting so righthandedly To sheets that once were incestuous lovers.

He provides some notes to bolster his version.

dexterity. Usually "cleverness," but sometimes, as here, the opposite of "sinisterly," i.e. "righthandedness," since it is obviously a hand that must take hold of the

sheet. Compare Greek eu.

incestuous sheets. A misplaced epithet, or, the part for

the whole.

The excessive sibilance of the line may have projected some form of negative emotion.

Later on in the book I'm quoting from, Shakespeare's Frag ments (no complete plays survive), there appears what we



Robert Bagg 63

recognize as Macbeths immensely quiet response to his wife's

crazed suicide: "She should have died hereafter." This our

Hteralist commentator renders: "The necessity was that she die later, not now."

The solemn judgment I want to extricate from this absurd

digression is that our involvement with the great poetry of our own language is intimate and aHve, and the survival of our sense of splendor is so fragile that a

displacement of words can darken it to the grotesque. It is a delusion to op erate as if the Greeks' involvement was any less animated. If he is to translate this animation, a modern translator does

well to provide a similar stimulus to the mind's activity, either from what he can deduce from his knowledge of the text and the cultural life running through it, or he must

simply guess what probably was happening. It's clearly re

assuring if a translator has great deep learning, and tact

tempered by recklessness.

Unfortunately, the prime loyalty of most people who are

deep and subtle scholars of it is to Greek. Naturally?since they learned it because English was somehow lacking to their

spirits. The result of this loyalty is a kind of translator's death wish. All his invested delight and love drive the scholar to

leave intact the pre-eminence of his original. What a scandal if a modern version could do just as weU as the original! So instead of using all he knows about the text and its place in the culture, and all the felicities of English to receive grace

fully the ancient poem, the scholar punishes EngHsh for its in

adequacies and numbness; he inflicts the greatness of Greek on our speech, like a

distorting lash of nostalgia from a tyrant great in his own time.

Fitzgerald has learning and sense enough to see, like Keats, that English ought to be kept up. His mode of translation will not censor or repress our consciousness of how we feel in

present life, or luxuriate in phony contemporaneity. The

suggestion that the modern mind and the ancient mind can be assimilated he never makes. Rather, his practice suggests, the good translation wiU preserve and dramatize the

estrangement of our mind from theirs. What is translated in




a characteristic passage of Fitzgerald is the great abyss itself

between what we think and they felt. A HteraHst who refuses

to aUow this abyss into his poem denies us all the emotion its

implacable existence evokes for us. To locate my sense of

Fitzgerald maintaining, moment by moment, the strange

symmetry between our time and Homer's poem which shapes the abyss, we can look at the great scene of fulfillment and

final homecoming in Book 23. Penelope is speaking:

"But here and now, what sign could be so clear

as this of our own bed?

No other man has ever laid eyes on it?

only my own slave, Aktoris, that my father

sent with me as a gift?she kept our door.

You make my stiff heart know that I am yours."

Now from his breast into his eyes the ache

of longing mounted, and he wept at last, his dear wife, clear and faithful, in his arms,

longed for as the sunwarmed earth is longed for by a

swimmer

spent in rough water where his ship went down

under Poseidon's blows, gale winds and tons of sea.

Few men can keep alive through a big surf

to crawl, clotted with brine, on kindly beaches

in joy, in joy, knowing the abyss behind:

and so she too rejoiced, her gaze upon her husband,

her white arms round him pressed as though forever.

[23.225-40]

We can grasp the moment after separation when two people return to each other's arms, for Fitzgerald's words give us our

own and Homer's emotion fully in tune, but what of that

tremendous simile?their embrace is Hke a spent swimmer

received by the glad land?

For Odysseus it is more than a simile, it once happened to him, as he swam in out of storms to Nausicaa's Phaeacia,

and it is the only image that could compress his entire life.



Robert Bagg 65

At the moment we experience Odysseus and Penelope weep

ing at last in each other's arms, we find entering that feeling the unimaginable sensation of washing ashore to the glad land, out of range of a god's hatred, and rolling in upon that, our

completed knowledge of the long painful way home

across seas, flowing through the embrace and carrying us

backward in thought.



translating the abyss: on robert fitzgerald's "odyssey"

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