SCORING A HOMER

By Paul Gray

Within days a New York publisher will ship 27,000 copies of its latest release to bookstores across the country. Along with this merchandise will arrive advertising posters--de rigueur in these hard-marketing times--bearing a reproduction of the book's dust- jacket cover and 10,000 audiotapes of an unabridged reading of the words inside. Nothing particularly unusual about all this, except that the contents of the book in question have been around, in one form or another, for about 2,700 years.

How to explain the promotional muscle being flexed behind yet another translation of Homer's Odyssey, this one provided by Princeton professor Robert Fagles (Viking; 541 pages; $35)? Why expect people to pay $45 for a boxed set of tapes (issued by Penguin Audiobooks) on which the British actor Ian McKellen reads the text of Fagles' translation over a listening time of some 13 hours?

The principal reason seems to rest on precedent. The Fagles translation of Homer's Iliad, published by Viking in 1990 to considerably less hubbub than that heralding the upcoming Odyssey, went on to exceed all commercial expectations by selling 22,000 copies in hardback; the paperback version, now in its eighth printing, has moved 140,000 copies. And an abridged audiotape of the Iliad read by Derek Jacobi surprised Penguin Audiobooks by selling 35,000 copies.

What can fairly be called the Fagles phenomenon forms an intriguing new chapter in the long saga of efforts to knead Homeric Greek into suitable English. The first translator with access to the Greek texts and the gumption to try his hand at them was George Chapman (circa 1560-1634), whose complete version of the Iliad in English appeared in 1611, the same year that saw the release of the King James Version of the Old and New Testaments.

The King James Version, thanks to its felicities of language and the imprimatur of the Church of England, ruled supreme and largely unchallenged among English-speaking Christians for about 350 years. Chapman's Homer, a redaction of the secular words of a pagan bard, naturally received no such binding spiritual and temporal authorization. But Chapman's translations were both thrilling enough--see Keats' sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's Homer--and challenging enough to provoke competing versions. Since Chapman, nearly four centuries' worth of British and, later, American writers have taken on Homer.

Robert Fagles, 63, has been teaching literature at Princeton since 1960. It was only after translating tragedies by Aeschylus and Sophocles that he began to consider "climbing back to the source" of Greek legends and taking on the herculean tasks of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Fagles knows that well-stocked bookstores will display plenty of competition for his forthcoming Odyssey, including the highly regarded verse renditions of Robert Fitzgerald (1961) and Richmond Lattimore (1965). But, says Fagles, "every generation needs a new translation of Homer. He was a performer, and he can be re-performed."

Scholars have understood for hundreds of years that the two great Homeric epics originated as oral poems in preliterate Greece. (No one really knows how the written texts came into being.) But only in the past 40 or so years have linguists and anthropologists come up with a plausible theory of how those poems must have been made. Homer--or the collection of bards given that name at some point in the murky past--did not wander around Greece with 12,109 lines of the Odyssey committed to memory. Instead, the Homeric repetitions so familiar to readers of English translations--all those "wine-dark seas" and "rosy-fingered dawns"--were actually stock formulas allowing the bard to fill out his line of verse and get on with the story. The pressure on these performers, composing while they spoke or sang, must have been intense. Seen in this light, the poet's invocations to the Muse for inspiration at the beginning of the Iliad and the Odyssey have a dimension beyond the religious; these pleas could also represent a nervous bard, faced with a gathering of drowsy aristocrats, saying God help me.

A number of English translators have stressed the strange and archaic nature of Homeric narrative, which is fair enough; it is strange and archaic, at least to us. But to those who heard it first, thousands of years ago, it must have seemed both familiar and wondrous. Fagles' translations vividly convey for contemporary readers the sense of stories being told aloud.

His Odyssey starts out speedily: "Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns/ driven time and again off course, once he had plundered/ the hallowed halls of Troy." That man, of course, is Odysseus, the epic hero of all that is to follow, and in calling him "the man of twists and turns" Fagles signals his commitment to economical, concrete descriptions. Fitzgerald's translation introduces Odysseus as "that man skilled in all ways of contending." Some readers may prefer Fitzgerald's rendering, of course, but the contrast shows clearly the straightforward method Fagles pursues.

The 19th century poet and critic Matthew Arnold commended Homer's "speed, directness and simplicity" in the original Greek, and these qualities abound in Fagles' translation. The problems the epic must resolve are quickly set forth. All the surviving Greek heroes from the 10-year siege and ultimate destruction of Troy--the subject matter of the Iliad--have long since returned to their homes except Odysseus, the King of Ithaca. There, 10 years after the fall of Troy, his faithful wife Penelope fends off a riotous band of suitors for her hand in marriage; his son Telemachus, an infant when his father went off to war, cannot repel the suitors or claim the throne without sure knowledge that Odysseus will never return. Where in the world is he?

The gods on Mount Olympus know, of course: Odysseus has been stranded for seven years on the island of Calypso, a goddess who loves him and has offered to "make the man immortal, ageless, all his days." But Odysseus says no. He wants to go home. Those who have never read any translation of the Odyssey will find much that is familiar in Fagles' retelling of the hero's homeward adventures. The cannibalistic one-eyed giant Polyphemus; Circe, the temptress who turns her prospective lovers into swine; the Sirens, whose songs lure seafarers to shipwreck: we have somehow heard of all of them.

The Homeric audiences had presumably heard of them too. For all its narrative speed, the Odyssey is remarkable in the way it resists modern notions of suspense. The question is not what will happen next but how thoroughly the bard recounts the particulars of every scene. Fagles' translation captures this peculiar quality perfectly. Late in the story Odysseus is back in Ithaca; he has revealed his identity to Telemachus and two loyal servants and challenged the hundred or so of Penelope's suitors to a fight to the death. All hell is about to break loose, and yet Homer pauses to follow one of the suitors' accomplices in search of weapons in Odysseus' storeroom. Melanthius emerges "one hand clutching a crested helmet, the other/ an ample old buckler blotched with mildew/ the shield Laertes bore as a young soldier once."

That "blotched with mildew" tells a story within the story: Laertes, Odysseus' aged father, has not gone to battle in a long time. There is something infinitely wise and childlike about this moment, a glimpse back into a nonreading age when stories were vehicles of memory as well as entertainment; a lazy or forgetful bard might be reminded by his listeners, "You left out the part about the mildew."

"It's all been downhill after that," says Fagles, only half-jokingly, about the history of Western narrative since Homer. The six years he spent translating the Odyssey involved long, grinding sessions with Greek lexicons and his own imagination, engaged in a "tug-of-war between ancient Greek words and their modern English equivalents." He passed versions of his work around to trusted colleagues, particularly Bernard Knox, who taught him more than 40 years ago at Yale and whose introduction to the new Odyssey is marvelously informative. Fagles reworked and revised some passages more than 20 times. His labors now ended, Fagles pronounces himself "bereft" at leaving Homer's world. He believes, against considerable scholarly dissent, that Homer actually existed and shaped his epics from a long oral tradition. "It's awfully hard to prove," Fagles says, "but I'm an incurable romantic."

The success of his Iliad, published six years ago, seems to him to confirm a long-held belief: "I think in this channel-surfing age people are famished for stories, for vivid accounts of humans who wrestled with their destinies and the gods. Homer is so inclusive and encyclopedic that he can relieve us of ourselves for a while." Fagles recalls a day during his long labors on the Iliad when he was standing in line at a Princeton, New Jersey, bank. "I suddenly thought, 'Don't these people know there's a war going on?'" The Trojan War, of course. Now it is Odysseus' long journey home that will be playing again at neighborhood bookstores--a story, Fagles says, "that ends but never stops."