In Book 21 of Homer’s Iliad, the Trojan War reaches the heights of Mount Olympus when brewing hostilities between the gods finally erupt in an earth-shattering battle. Leading the charge on behalf of the Trojans is Ares, furious that he had been wounded by the Greek warrior Diomedes in a previous battle. Ares turns on Athena, Diomedes’ divine protector, brandishing his weapon and accusing the goddess of guiding the spear that had struck both his body and his pride.
It is one of the most tense and exhilarating scenes of Homer’s epic poem, but the momentum falls somewhat flat in many English translations of the text, when the irate Ares turns to Athena and shouts, “You dog-fly!”
To a contemporary, English-speaking audience, the insult is simply laughable. And so, in his recently released rendition of the Iliad, renowned scholar and translator Stephen Mitchell decided to replace the phrase with “you nasty bitch.” His choice of words is undoubtedly a daring step away from both the literal meaning of the Greek and from the type of high-flown language that normally characterizes English translations of Homer. It is also only one of many alterations that Mitchell makes to the original text, in an attempt to transmit the spirit of the Iliad to a modern audience.
Mitchell’s translation of the Iliad marks his most recent effort to bring classic works of literature to the masses. His past translation projects — which include The Book of Job, The Gospel According to Jesus, and Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Wilke — often forgo a stilted, literal translation in favour of a more fluid rendition of the text in idiomatic English.
The liberties that Mitchell takes with his interpretations of classic texts tend to ruffle the feathers of conservative-minded scholars, but that hasn’t prevented his translations from cracking the bestsellers’ lists. And while Mitchell is proficient in German, French, Italian, Danish, Hebrew, Latin, and Greek, some of his most successful works have been adaptations of texts written in languages that he does not speak. Indeed, his popular versions of the Chinese philosophical text Tao Te Ching, the Hindu Bhagavad Gitai, and the Babylonian epic Gilgamesh are all poetic interpretations of existing translations.
[pullquote]the essence of Homer is speed, simplicity of thought, content, and nobility[/pullquote]
Mitchell began working on his rendition of the Iliad several years ago, after growing frustrated with the pervasively dull language that afflicts other translations of Homer’s epic poem. “I tried to read the Iliad for years and I could never get past Book One because the power of the language never matched the power of the story,” he says. “[Translating the Iliad] was an opportunity for me to read it, first of all, and to spend time with this vast mind of Homer and the gorgeous music of the Greek original… I wanted to recreate something of that music in English because I thought that we needed it.”
In order to capture the melodic quality of Homer’s poetry, Mitchell modernized any language that sounded awkward or cumbersome in translation. He claims that this relatively liberal approach to the original text was inspired by “On Translating Homer,” a famous essay by the 19th century poet Matthew Arnold.
“[Arnold] makes the very insightful point that the essence of Homer is speed, simplicity of thought, content, and nobility,” Mitchell notes. “And anybody who doesn’t translate those qualities isn’t translating Homer. So rather than a faithfulness to the literal meaning of the Greek words, I felt that another kind of faithfulness was necessary: a faithfulness to the story, to the great drama — in other words, finding what works in contemporary English.”
Mitchell’s translation of the Iliad also leaves out most of the epithets — stock character descriptions like “white-armed Hera” and “swift-footed Achilles” — that were repeatedly used by Homer to complete the metre of the verse.
“To me, the epithets are an important part of the Greek because they form a part of the high level of diction of the style, and they contribute to the nobility in Greek,” Mitchell says. “In English, most often they’re simply tedious… I felt that my loyalty to the speed and simplicity meant that a lot of the epithets … needed to be dropped, and there was no sacrifice in nobility when I did drop them. As a matter of fact, to my ears, the nobility only increased.”
Mitchell’s quest to create a more refined translation of the Iliad was also guided by the textual scholarship of M.L. West, a renowned classicist who has identified passages of Homer’s Iliad that appear to be interpolations by other authors. Mitchell decided to omit these passages from his translation, even leaving out the whole of Book 10, which describes a raid against the Trojans.
The product of Mitchell’s fine-tuning is a taut, fast-paced drama that reinvigorates the excitement and the pathos of Homer’s original text. Mitchell is currently working on a translation of the Odyssey, allowing him to spend more time with Homer and to explore the profound beauty of yet another canonical text.
“The texts that I find myself attracted to … have a clarity of mind about them that brings them beyond the ordinary human experience of conflict and separation, and having the world divided into for and against, and good and evil,” Mitchell says. “There’s a kind of vastness of mind at work in a great poet like Homer or one of the anonymous writers of texts like the Tao Te Ching … and a kind of luminescence about them.”
