Only some way, though: Verity's strong, graceful approach preserves the wonderfully Homeric double revelation of the scene - until that moment, had we quite noticed the equivalence between Briseis and Patroclus, each in a way captive to the whim and charisma of Achilles? Had we thought to wonder if that might have fostered an intimacy between them? For that matter, had we thought much about Briseis at all - not as a plot device, but as a person? The enjambments here are all of dark surprise and bad things - they stutter the lines down forward to that heartbreakingly insufficient 'you were always kind to me.' It's expertly done.Throughout his translation, Verity enlists subtlety and stark insistence to do the work most translators handle with clever (and even, in Fitzgerald's case for example, anachronistic) word-choice. There's certainly directness there, although as in the Lattimore translation, fidelity to the original goes some way toward blunting the dramatic impact of the moment (first-time readers of Homer especially might not feel the full power of it). 'Patroclus, chief delight of my heart, how wretched I am!When I went from this hut you were still living, butnow, marshal of the people, I come back to find youdead how one evil always follows another for me!I saw the man to whom my father and revered mothergave me disfigured with the sharp bronze in front of my city,and my three brothers, born to the same mother as I was,all of them very dear to me, meeting their day of death.Even so, when swift Achilles killed my husband and sackedthe city of godlike Mynes, you would not let me weep,but declared that you would make me godlike Achilles'lawful wedded wife, and would take me in your ships to Phthia,and would hold a marriage feast among the Myrmidons so now I mourn you inconsolably you were always kind to me.' Look at the piteous little moment from Book Nineteen when plaintive captive Briseis comes upon the corpse of Patroclus laid out in the tent: This does indeed happen, although not always to the extent - or even in the ways - that Verity himself might intend. If we take our translator at his word, we should then turn the page and begin to find directness and power. Both approaches, not unknown to recent translators, tend to get in the way of the poem's directness and power. Similarly, I have kept clear of 'poeticizing' Homer at one extreme and reducing the scale of his invention to the level of a modern adventure story at the other. I have tried to avoid importing alien imagery, and have preserved variations in sentence length. Stephen Mitchell has produced a looser, ear-driven adaptation of a recension of the poem made by Homer scholar Martin West, and now, for Oxford University Press, Anthony Verity has taken the other route, trying to stay as close to Homer as possible: In the golden age of 20th century translations, the one by Richmond Lattimore was the quintessential by-the-book version, and perhaps the one by Robert Fitzgerald could stand in for all the more adaptive versions (up to a certain point, that is: the psychedelic metamorphoses of our late, great Idomeneus, Christopher Logue, for example, can have no part in this).The 21st century now has one example of each school of thought. So when it comes time to translate Homer into English, two paths diverge.Basically, it's the choice of any translation: do you make a scrupulous representation of the original at the risk of killing its appeal, or do you take liberties with the original in the hopes of conveying its spirit? The long history of Homer in English is studded with great examples of both. Homer was writing in a poetified diction and meter, over 15,000 lines of dactylic hexameter that bears virtually no relation to the natural dum-dee-dum of spoken English. When Homer (whoever he was - I think the Earl of Oxford is the current leading candidate) composed his poem thousands of years ago, it was already an intensely artificial thing as translators never tire of telling us, no ancient Greek ever spoke the ancient Greek that fills the lines of this epic and gives it such unmatchable power. It's not Homer's war between the valiant Trojans and the angry Greeks avenging the abduction of Helen, but it shares at least two things in common it: each side has merit, and each side is immovably convinced that the gods are for it.The war is one of translators - or more properly, translators' philosophies. The Iliad translated by Anthony Verity Oxford University Press, 2011Fittingly enough, there's a war perpetually raging around Homer's Iliad.
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