{"id":237653,"date":"2025-05-12T07:46:50","date_gmt":"2025-05-12T07:46:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/entertainment\/books\/translating-from-troy-to-ithaca-daniel-mendelsohn-lauren-kane\/"},"modified":"2025-05-12T07:46:50","modified_gmt":"2025-05-12T07:46:50","slug":"translating-from-troy-to-ithaca-daniel-mendelsohn-lauren-kane","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=237653","title":{"rendered":"Translating from Troy to Ithaca | Daniel Mendelsohn, Lauren Kane"},"content":{"rendered":"


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New translations of Homer are bound to revive millennia-old questions of authorship and ancient diction. As Daniel Mendelsohn writes in the introduction to his rendition of the Odyssey<\/em><\/a>, published this April by the University of Chicago Press, the alluring paradox of the epic is that contemporary readers can come to it \u201cwith a bracing sense of d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu: we feel we know these narratives, we have met these characters, we recognize these themes. Yet the epic of Odysseus\u2019s return is, in many ways, as unfathomably strange to us as the one-eyed giant Cyclops was to its hero.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n

Mendelsohn, a classicist at Bard College and the editor-at-large for this paper\u2014not to mention a frequent contributor\u2014has been teaching and writing about the Odyssey<\/em> for decades. In 2017 his father joined his class, and the experience of that semester, and of going together on a cruise around the Mediterranean that recreated Odysseus\u2019s journey, is the subject of Mendelsohn\u2019s memoir An Odyssey: A Father, a Son and an Epic<\/em><\/a>. We spoke last week about the craft of translation, Homer as romantic comedy, and rereading the Odyssey<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\n

Lauren Kane<\/strong>: Tell us how you came to the project of translating the <\/em>Odyssey.<\/p>\n

Daniel Mendelsohn:<\/strong> I published my memoir about reading the Odyssey<\/em> with my dad in the fall of 2017, and for the purposes of that book I had already translated a number of short, small passages. It happened that the executive editor of the University of Chicago Press at the time, Susan Bielstein, had read that book and liked the translations. Although Chicago runs the most prestigious series of classical translations in this country, they didn\u2019t have an Odyssey<\/em> on their list to stand beside Richmond Lattimore\u2019s Iliad<\/em>, probably the most distinguished American translation of any classic. (Lattimore was supposed to do an Odyssey<\/em> for them back in the Sixties, but his editor moved to a different publisher, and he followed his editor.)<\/p>\n

So when Chicago invited me to do it, I had been thinking a lot about the Odyssey<\/em>, obviously. Susan caught me at the right moment. (Well, when she called to ask if I would consider taking on the whole of the Odyssey<\/em>, I actually was washing my kitchen floor on my hands and knees on a cold January night.) It was the right confluence of circumstances. I\u2019ve often written about translation for the Review<\/em> and other places, so it was a question that interested me. But it was really because Chicago needed it\u2014it wasn\u2019t as if I were walking around saying, \u201cOh, there are no good translations of the Odyssey<\/em>, and I<\/em> must solve the problem.\u201d<\/p>\n

When you were working on the memoir, what were those early efforts like?<\/em><\/p>\n

My thinking about what the translation ought to be evolved quite a lot between that little foray and when I really started working on it in earnest. In An Odyssey<\/em>, I was citing different passages to illuminate certain moments in the epic for the audience of a memoir. I was trying to be as literal as possible. I wasn\u2019t really thinking about all the other considerations that arise when rendering an ancient poem. In the new translation, I tried to be extremely attentive to formal concerns, particularly meter, and to convey the poetics of the original. I wasn\u2019t as worried about that when I was doing those little snippets for the memoir.<\/p>\n

Did you encounter many moments of tension between literal meaning and those formal constraints? How did you reconcile them?<\/em><\/p>\n

There\u2019s always going to be tension. One advantage I had over a lot of contemporary versions is that I evolved a much longer line than most English translators of the Odyssey<\/em> use. That gave me the space, so to speak, that I needed to convey both meaning and poetics. Homer\u2019s line is very, very long. Most English translations use iambic pentameter, or \u201cblank verse,\u201d which is about half the length of the ancient Greek line. I thought if I gave myself a lot of space, I\u2019d have a better chance of getting both the formal qualities that interest me and as much of Homer\u2019s meaning as possible.<\/p>\n

That said, there are always moments when you\u2019re going to have to choose which baby to throw out of the lifeboat. It quite often depends on the context: if it is a moment where the literal meaning is of absolute consequence, you\u2019re going to go with that, even though it may not be as beautifully poetic as you want. But then there are some moments where you think, OK, I\u2019m going to sacrifice precision in order to have a beautiful rhythm or the right diction or whatever. I don\u2019t think there is a universal rule for these things. You end up dealing with them on a case-by-case basis and then crossing your fingers and hoping for the best.<\/p>\n

Were there any passages or episodes in particular that posed a challenge in this respect?<\/em><\/p>\n

There\u2019s a famous problem in Book 1 when Zeus talks about how mortals always blame the gods for their problems. And he says, No, it\u2019s always their own fault, and as an example he cites a character called Aegisthus. He says, \u201cLook at Aegisthus! He seduced Agamemnon\u2019s wife, then murdered Agamemnon. We told him not to do it, and he got in a lot of trouble and was killed.\u201d Now Zeus uses a certain adjective to describe this very dastardly character, amum\u00f4n<\/em>, and the usual translation, the sort of obvious way you would translate this adjective, is \u201cblameless.\u201d The problem is that of all the things that Aegisthus is, blameless is not<\/em> one of them. He\u2019s a really wicked character. So translators have twisted themselves into knots trying to figure out what on earth Homer was thinking when he used this adjective. Does it mean he\u2019s physically <\/em>flawless? Very handsome? Does it mean his pedigree\u2014that he\u2019s a great aristocrat? Some people just translate it and let the reader deal with it.<\/p>\n

I brought it up with Jenny Strauss Clay, a great friend of mine who was my undergraduate mentor at the University of Virginia and a very eminent Homer scholar, who had an interesting insight. She said to me, \u201cWell, you can divide this word into pieces. The a- <\/em>part means \u2018without,\u2019 and the -mum\u00f4n<\/em> part has to do with blame. So yes, it can mean \u2018without blame.\u2019 But it has an active as well as a passive sense\u2014it can mean not only that you cannot be<\/em> blamed but that you cannot blame other<\/em> people.\u201d In the end, the phrase I used is \u201ca man who was not one to blame,\u201d which you can read either way. I say this because a lot of people, when they think about translation, think you sit down with a dictionary and look at the text and get going, but you really have to have an interpretation. There are moments when the reader has to trust you to do the work for them. You need to make a decision. I don\u2019t think there\u2019s any translation that is not also an interpretation. There\u2019s no such thing as an absolutely transparent translation.<\/p>\n

You have previously translated the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Greek poet Constantine Cavafy. How did that work compare with this?<\/em><\/p>\n

It\u2019s a totally different experience, of course. Cavafy is essentially a modern poet. He\u2019s using a language that people still speak. His language can be odd, but it is often very plain and, so to speak, pinpointable. I happen to have a Greek\u2013English dictionary from about 1900. I thought it would be interesting in the case of certain strange words to see, well, how would an English-speaking person at the time Cavafy was alive have translated this word? You can do stuff like that with a contemporary, or near-contemporary, poet. Also, Cavafy was a fluent English speaker. He had a brother who translated some of his poems into English under his supervision. So there are models for how he thought he ought to sound in English. Obviously Homer is a whole other ball game. Homer\u2019s language is a very strange, purely literary language. No one ever spoke it. It\u2019s an amalgam of different dialects of Greek from different eras. It\u2019s really the Wild West, and with Homer there\u2019s no one to ask. With Homer it is all a sort of a fantasy. Just to talk about \u201cHomer\u201d\u2014we don\u2019t even know who we\u2019re talking about. It\u2019s both more liberating and more daunting, I would say.<\/p>\n

In your introduction, you trace some of the ways that the <\/em>Odyssey has shaped contemporary narratives, one of them being the romantic comedy. How does the relationship between Odysseus and Penelope, the central plot in a way, break with or conform to our notions of marriage today?<\/em><\/p>\n

When talking about Greek literature, you have to have two heads. One head has to be conscious of the fact that this is an unbelievably different culture from our own. We may want to think that we\u2019re like the Greeks and Romans because we get so much from them, but in many, if not most, respects, they\u2019re alien to our way of thinking. Somebody like Penelope would have been married at maybe thirteen or fourteen, with no choice in the matter, obviously. So that\u2019s one head, right? They\u2019re nothing like us. This is a child bride in an arranged marriage.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, you have to deal with what the poem tells us, which is a romance. I mean, there\u2019s no way around it. And it\u2019s a two-sided romance. She is clearly deeply in love with him, and he is clearly deeply in love with her. That\u2019s just in the text. You can\u2019t get away from it. Now that may be a fantasy, an unrealistic fantasy, on the part of whoever and however many people created the Odyssey<\/em>, but it\u2019s in the text. Every day she weeps for him. She dreams about him. She wishes he were home. There is obviously a sexual double standard\u2014he\u2019s allowed to have these dalliances with various goddesses, and she has to remain absolutely faithful. But even still, he does reject a goddess\u2019s offer of immortality with her in order to go back to Penelope, who will age and die. That means something.<\/p>\n

So you can\u2019t dismiss or neglect either head. This text grew out of a profoundly patriarchal culture, and yet it has some of the most remarkable passages extolling an absolute equality of mind between a husband and wife. There\u2019s a very famous moment in which Odysseus uses this word to describe the ideal marriage, homophrosyn\u00ea<\/em>, which means a total parity of mind. The Odyssey<\/em> also contains one of the great feminist passages in literature, when the goddess Calypso is forced to give up Odysseus, whom she\u2019s madly in love with, and she rails at the gods for the double standard: the gods can get away with anything, but whenever a goddess wants to have an affair with a mortal, they break it up. So, you know, the Odyssey<\/em> seems to be remarkably conscious of these disparities and strangenesses about its own culture\u2019s handling of male-female relations.<\/p>\n

There are two recent film adaptations of the <\/em>Odyssey, including Christopher Nolan\u2019s forthcoming epic. Why or how does it seem to be speaking to this moment in particular?<\/em><\/p>\n

My theory is that there\u2019s something special the Odyssey<\/em> has, something that the Iliad<\/em> does not have at all. I want to call it a sort of \u201cpost-ness.\u201d It\u2019s obviously a postwar poem, but it\u2019s also a sort of post-everything poem. The old order has disappeared. The gods have receded. They\u2019re almost not present at all, except in a couple of crucial moments, and certainly not in the way they\u2019re present in the Iliad<\/em>, where they\u2019re all over the action and fighting in the battles. You feel the gods have withdrawn. Odysseus is a lone guy in a strange world with no familiar landmarks. The whole poem is haunted by a feeling that the old world order has come to an end, and now we\u2019re just on our own, making our way as best we can. That may be what\u2019s speaking to people.<\/p>\n

The Odyssey<\/em> has always felt more modern to me than the Iliad<\/em>. It has a meta quality\u2014it is almost postmodern in the way it comments on its own narrative structures. There are a number of scenes of bards reciting poems very much like the Odyssey<\/em>, and these scenes show us the audience reactions. It\u2019s like a wink at the audience. It can feel very up to the minute. Considering it\u2019s an almost three-thousand-year-old document, that\u2019s not bad.<\/p>\n

Did reading the <\/em>Odyssey with your father affect your translation?<\/em><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve taught the Odyssey<\/em> countless times over the past thirty-six years, but I don\u2019t think I\u2019ve ever thought as hard about the Odyssey<\/em> as I did when I had my father as a student and then on that cruise recreating the voyages of Odysseus. Having my father in the classroom made me pay attention to the father-son stuff more than I ever did before. There\u2019s a lot of it in the Odyssey<\/em>, perhaps more actually than the material about the husband and wife. People forget that when Odysseus finally returns home, the climactic reunion is not with Penelope, although that\u2019s obviously a big moment. It\u2019s with his father, Laertes. That\u2019s the final reunion. I don\u2019t think I had registered that material as powerfully as I did during the experience with my dad. My head was just in the Odyssey<\/em> in such a profound way.<\/p>\n

That prepared me for the kind of global take on the poem that you need to have when you go into a translation. You have to think you know what it\u2019s about<\/em>. I know that sounds simultaneously crazy and simplistic, but you need to have a strong sense of what is important in the poem. You have to be a critic before you\u2019re a translator, because when you get to the moments of tension we were talking about earlier, when there\u2019s a question of which way you\u2019re going to go, you can\u2019t solve the problem unless you have a strong idea of what the poem is about globally. Every word that you translate really is influenced by your global idea about what this whole thing adds up to.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know if many people pick the <\/em>Odyssey back up after they read it as, say, undergraduates. Something like <\/em>Middlemarch people sometimes say you should reread every decade or so, and it seems like the <\/em>Odyssey could be the same: your understanding of it shifts as you enter different stages of life.<\/em><\/p>\n

I agree. Certainly with the Greek and Latin classics, the typical attitude tends to be that maybe you\u2019re going to read them in high school or college or whatever, but once you\u2019ve done them, you\u2019ve gotten them under your belt. Whereas I am somebody who reads Proust every ten years because I just feel like it\u2019s going to change every time. The Odyssey<\/em> is like that. One of the things the Odyssey<\/em> is about is time, and how people change over time. I mean, that\u2019s the whole problem, right? When he gets home to Ithaca, he has to somehow prove he\u2019s the same guy who left. The whole plot hangs on that question. And yet, how could<\/em> you be the same person after twenty years? That paradox is something you certainly appreciate as you get older. I always joke with my students that they will never understand the Odyssey<\/em> until they go to their twenty-year high school reunion. Then you know what it\u2019s like to be a different person after time passes.<\/p>\n

So the Odyssey<\/em> is a poem that keeps changing as you keep changing. Take the tragedy of this couple. Odysseus and Penelope get together again after all these obstacles, but there\u2019s still a little fissure\u2014even after they\u2019re reunited, they\u2019re very aware of all the time they never had together, time that cannot be recouped. They talk about this when they finally fall into bed with each other and start recounting what they\u2019ve been through, everything that happened during all the years that they\u2019ll never get back. That\u2019s the kind of thing I think about now, whereas when I was thirty I\u2019m sure I was focused on the adventures and what they mean and how to interpret them. As a text, it\u2019s a moving target because it is about the passage of time.<\/p>\n

What does a working day look like, an average day translating the <\/em>Odyssey?<\/em><\/p>\n

I spent about a year and a half just immersing myself in the bibliography, which as you can imagine is endless, and also trying to work out what my poetic line was going to be like. But once I actually started translating, it was very regular. With something like this you have to be absolutely mechanical. I would say I did between thirty and fifty lines a day. Basically, I would work for five hours, between say eight in the morning and one in the afternoon, and then I would have lunch and then do some of the many other things that I do in life. But I always found my head was better in the morning.<\/p>\n

A lot of translating is problem solving. It\u2019s a crossword puzzle to a certain extent. So in the mornings I felt very up to the task of solving problems. But as with anything this monumental, you can only do it bit by bit because if you think, \u201cOh, I have to translate the Odyssey<\/em> today,\u201d you would just lie down on the sofa with a cold compress. So instead I would think, \u201cToday I\u2019ve got my thirty lines, that\u2019s what I\u2019m focusing on.\u201d The reason it takes five hours is there will be one of these problem words and you\u2019re going to have to read three scholarly articles to figure out what your orientation is. That word I was talking about, \u201cblameless,\u201d there\u2019s a whole book about that one word<\/a>, a fat book. So I had to stop for, you know, four days and read it. But it was very regular. On the lighter side, you have to remember that Homer is an oral and formulaic poet, so sometimes I would get to a passage of seven or eight lines and realize I had already translated them somewhere else, and I would think, \u201cOh! Today I can go to the movies.\u201d<\/p>\n

How do know when you\u2019re done?<\/em><\/p>\n

You would never be done if you had your druthers. At a certain point, I think you just feel you\u2019ve solved the problems that you\u2019re going to be able to solve. Let\u2019s put it that way. I think with all big projects, you could go on forever. But there are other things you need to do. You get to a point where you think, well, all of the things I was interested in accomplishing, I think I\u2019ve accomplished. And the things that I\u2019m not going to figure out, I\u2019m never going to figure them out. So that\u2019s what the end feels like. You\u2019ve done what you can, and everything else is in the lap of the gods, right?<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

New translations of Homer are bound to revive millennia-old questions of authorship and ancient diction. As Daniel Mendelsohn writes in the introduction to his rendition of the Odyssey, published this April by the University of Chicago Press, the alluring paradox of the epic is that contemporary readers can come to it \u201cwith a bracing sense […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":237654,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[101],"tags":[87705,3917,46386,5722,803,87706,26879,7518],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-237653","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","tag-brief-encounters","tag-daniel","tag-ithaca","tag-kane","tag-lauren","tag-mendelsohn","tag-translating","tag-troy"],"yoast_head":"\nTranslating from Troy to Ithaca | Daniel Mendelsohn, Lauren Kane - Som2ny Network<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=237653\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Translating from Troy to Ithaca | Daniel Mendelsohn, Lauren Kane - Som2ny Network\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"New translations of Homer are bound to revive millennia-old questions of authorship and ancient diction. 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