"Aoi! It Was Good To Kill Him!"

The lucky elite who can read Homer in Greek know that even the best translation is really a new version of Homer. His poetry cannot be reproduced in English. Conversely, an old saying has it that every age must retranslate the classics in its own image--otherwise they die. Hence translation is a job for poets rather than linguists, for the task is to preserve the ancients' spirit yet make it vividly relevant to moderns.

Dryden did it for Virgil, Pope for Homer. A few living poets have recently produced such elegant efforts as Richmond Lattimore's Iliad and Robert Fitzgerald's Odyssey. But to four lively classicists at the University of Texas, who have just launched a pert quarterly called Arion, the field cries out for even zestier treatment. Arion has set out to banish the philological quibbling and fusty Victorian translations that have stupefied students for generations. Applying the verbal and visual techniques of Eliot, Pound, Joyce, Henry James and the movies, it aims to reawaken pleasure in the wit and wisdom that once served as the main dish of education. Arion clearly reflects the exuberant yet scrupulous hand of Co-Editor William Arrowsmith, 38, translator in 1959 of the lusty Satyricon of Petronius. To many Arion readers, Arrowsmith's version of Aristophanes' rollicking Knights' Prologue made the first issue worth its price ($1.50). Editor W. Robert Jones of the staider Classical Journal calls Arion "most provident in peril, courage and hope."

Out last week was Arion's even better second issue, with English Poet Christopher Logue's new version of The Iliad's Book XVI, which culminates in a bloody battle between Greeks and Trojans. Among Logue's curdling visual effects:

His neck was cut clean through

Except for a skein of flesh off which

His head hung down like a melon. Or:

As flies shift up and down a haemorrhage alive with ants,

The captains in huge masks drift past each other,

Calling, calling, gathering light on their

breastplates. And:

God blew the javelin straight

At Pyraechmes as he pitched downwards twenty feet,

Headfirst, back arched, belly towards the Greeks--who laughed--The tab ends of his metal kilt dangling across his chest.

Whether it was the fall that scared him,

Or the vague flare that Patrolocus' javelin made

As it drifted through the morning air towards

His falling body like a yellow-headed bird,

We do not know. Suffice to say he shrieked until,

Midair, the cold bronze apex sank

Between his teeth and tongue,

Parted his brain, pressed on, and skewered him

Against the upturned hull.

His dead jaw gaped. His soul

Crawled off his tongue and vanished into sunlight . . .

Aoi! It was good to kill him!

The fact that even Homer described all this in a flatter manner hardly disturbs Arrowsmith's co-editors, who include D. S. Carne-Ross, 40, onetime BBC editor, and John Sullivan, 32, a transplanted Oxford don who recently won a $1,000 prize as the best teacher at Texas. They view translation as reseeing and refeeling of structure and meaning. Carne-Ross argues: "The translator's job is to get inside the text, to work his way through the words and relive the informing experience which lies behind them." Poet Logue has done just that for The Iliad, says Carne-Ross, and so proved that "it wasn't dead at all, it had merely been embalmed. Thanks to Logue's irresponsible behavior. Homer is on the move once more. The genie is out of the bottle."

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