Homer for Moderns

In a letter to a British friend, one day in 1934, Poet Ezra Pound was in a complaining mood: the world had all but lost contact with the classics, and it was high time someone did something about it. What was needed, said Pound, was a whole new series of translations, freed of the false and stilted elegance of those then in print. "The border line between 'gee whiz' and Milton's tumified* dialect must exist," Pound wrote. Why didn't his friend try to find it?

As Pound well knew, Dr. William H. D. Rouse was just the man for such a challenge, for he had already spent a good 30 years trying to breathe life back into the teaching of the classics. A sprightly, bearded scholar who hated buses and chemistry ("So far as there is anything at all to this science, a man with a classical education will pick it up in six months"), Dr. Rouse had taught a whole generation of students at Cambridge's Perse School to talk Latin and Greek as freely as they would any modern language. By the time he died in 1950, he was known as Britain's most lively and controversial translator, responsible for a new Homer boom. This week there are signs that the boom is still on: total U.S. sales of the Rouse Odyssey and Iliad, Mentor Classics announced, have topped 600,000, and a brand-new English edition of the Odyssey has just come out.

With Pound peering over his shoulder,

Rouse tried to make Homer sound to modern ears as he must have sounded to those who first heard his stories centuries ago. "The first essential," Pound had said, "is the narrative movement . . . Everything that stops the reader must go . . ." Sometimes Rouse did stop the reader ("NO, NO! Doc," Pound would cry), and sometimes he became entirely too free ("Just plain damn bad. Careless, frivolous. Missed opportunities all over . . ."). But gradually, his work was finished to suit even Pound's taste. "Homer speaks naturally," Rouse said, "and we must do the same."

To make his narrative natural, Rouse did away with poetic affectations, eliminated the "thee's" and "thou's" of earlier translators, edited such elaborate phrases as "Odysseus of many counsels answered her saying . . ." to "Odysseus answered . . ." He changed Poseidon, Girdler of the Earth, to Earthshaker Poseidon, called the Cyclops "Goggle-eyes" instead of "froward," transformed the "fair-tressed Dawn" into "welcome streaks of light." He restored some of Homer's humor by translating a few names literally (Acroneus, Ocyalus and Elatreus became Top-ship, Quicksea and Paddler), allowed his characters to say such things as "Daddy, dear . . ." or "Old fellow . . ." All in all, Rouse added quite a bit of spice to the mounting variety of Homer translations --as readers could see for themselves by comparing:

Alexander Pope, who made Homer sound thus:

Vulcan, draw near, 'tis Thetis asks your aid . . ."

Lang, Leaf & Myers, who wrote:

Hephaistos, come forth hither, Thetis hath need of thee . . .

and Rouse, who said

Husband! come in here. Thetis "wants you! . . .

* Poet Pound meant tumefied, i.e., swollen.

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