【荷马史诗】伊利亚特Iliad.doc

H 0 MER The TRANSLATED BYRobert FaglesINTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY BERNARD KNOX PENGUIN CLASSICS THE ILIADThe Greeks believed that the Iliad and the Odyssey were composed by asingle poet whom they named Homer. Nothing is known of his life.While seven Greek cities claim the honor of being his birthplace ancienttradition places him in Ionia located in the eastern Aegean. His birth-date is undocumented as well though most modern scholars now placethe composition of the Iliad and the Odyssey in the late eighth or earlyseventh century B.C.ROBERT FAGLES is Arthur W. Marks 19 Professor of Comparative Litera-ture Emeritus at Princeton University. He is the recipient of the 1997PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation and a 1996 Academy Awardin Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Fagles hasbeen elected to the Academy the American Academy of Arts andSciences and the American Philosophical Society. He has translated thepoems of Bacchylides. His translations of Sophocles Three Theban PlaysAeschylus Oresteia nominated for a National Book Award and HomersIliad winner of the 1991 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award byThe Academy of American Poets an award from The Translation Centerof Columbia University and the New Jersey Humanities Book Awardare published in Penguin Classics. His original poetry and his translationshave appeared in many journals and reviews as well as in his book ofpoems I Vincent: Poems from the Pictures of Van Gogh. Mr. Fagles was oneof the associate editors of Maynard Macks Twickenham Edition ofAlexander Popes Iliad and Odyssey and with George Steiner editedHomer: A Collection of Critical Essays. Mr. Pagles most recent work is atranslation of Homers Odyssey available from Penguin.BERNARD KNOX is Director Emeritus of Harvards Center for HellenicStudies in Washington D.C. His essays and reviews have appeared innumerous publications and in 1978 he won the George Jean NathanAward for Dramatic Criticism. His works include Oedipus at Thebes: Sopho-des Tragic Hero and His Time The Heroic Temper: Studies in SophocleanTrageay Word and Action: Essays on the Ancient Theatre Essays AncientandModern awarded the 1989 PEN/Spielvogel-Diamonstein Award TheOldest Dead White European Males and Other Reflections on the Classics andBacking into the Future: The Classical Tradition and its Renewal. Mr. Knox isthe editor of The Norton Book of Classical Literature and has also collabo-rated with Robert Fagles on the Odyssey and The Three Theban Plays.PENGUIN BOOKS H 0 MER The TRANSLATED BYRobert FaglesINTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY BERNARD KNOXTo the memory of my father and my mother and for Lynne Katya and Nina-humeis gar theai este pareste te iste te panta.himeis de kleos oion akouomen oude ti idmen- TRANSLATORS PREFACEquotHomer makes us Hearers.quot Pope has said quotand Virgi/leaves us Read-ers.quot So the great translator of Homer no doubt unknowingly set atodds the claims of an oral tradition and those of a literary one as wewould call the two traditions now. Homers work is a performance. evenin part a musical event. Perhaps that is the source of his speed directnessand simplicity that Matthew Arnold heard-and his nobility too elusiveyet undeniable that Arnold chased but never really caught. Surely it isa major source of Homers energy the loft and carry of his imaginationthat sweeps along the listener together with the performer. For there issomething powerful in his song quotthat unequald Fire and Rapturequot-Pope again-quotwhich is so forcible in Homer that no Man of a truePoetical Spirit is Master of himselfquot while he experiences the Iliad. quotInHomer. and in him only it burns every where clearly and every whereirresistibly.quot But it also brings to light the Homeric Question facing alltranslators: How to convey the power of his performance in the mediumof writing quotHomer makes us Hearers and Virgilleaves us Readers.quot Yet the contrast may be too extreme. Virgil the writer was certainlyno stranger to recitation. Homer the performer. as the Introductionspeculates. may have known a rudimentary form of writing. And writingmay have lent his work some qualities we associate with texts in gen-eral-idiosyncrasies at times. and pungency and wit-and with the Iliadin particular its archltectonics its magnificent scale. and the figure ofAchilles. But even if Homer never used an alphabet himself. he nowseems less the creature of an oral tradition whom Milman Parry dis-covered. and more and more its master. as envisioned by Parrys sonAdam. Homer the brilliant improviser deployed its stock inherited fea-tures with all the individual talent he could muster. Never more so infact. than in his use of the fixed and formulaic. frequently repeatedphrase. Not only is Homer often less formulaic. but the formulas them-selves are often more resonant more apt and telling in their contextsthan the hard Parryites had argued for at first. So the original form ofHomers work while a far cry from a work of literature as we know itnow. is not exactly a song either. pure and simple. It may be more the ixX TRANSLATORS PREFACErecord of a song. building over the poets lifetime perhaps or whatMarianne Moore would call quota simulacrum of spontaneity.quot Obviously at a far remove from Homer in this translation I have triedto find a middle ground and not a no mans land if I can help itbetween the features of his performance and the expectations of a con-temporary reader. Not a line-for-line translation my version of the Iliadis I hope neither so literal in rendering Homers language as to crampand distort my own-though I want to convey as much of what he saysas possible-nor so literary as to brake his energy his forward drive-though I want my work to be literate with any luck. For the moreliteral approach would seem to be too little English and the moreliteraryseems too little Greek. I have tried to find a cross between the two amodern English Homer. Of course it is a risky business stating what one has tried to do orworse the principles one has used petards that will probably hoist thewriter later. But a word or two of explanation seems in order and thefirst refers to the more fixed and formulaic pans of Homer. I have treatedthem in a flexible discretionary way not incompatible with Homersway I think-especially when his formulas are functional as well asfixed-while also answering to the ways we read today. It is a matterof quotriding easy in the harnessquot as Robert Frost once said of democracy.and my practice ranges from the pliant to the strict. With one of themost frequently repeated phrases for example-the line that introducesindividual speeches-I have been the freest. trying to anticipate thespeakers nuance of the moment yet retaining at least. the ritual ofintroductory words for every speech. When Homer introduces a speechof quotwinged wordsquot however I rarely if ever omit that well-knownphrase though I like the flight of the words to vary with a quick burstat times and a longer drift at others according to what a character hasto say. And so with Hectors flashing helmet in the epithet that clingsto Hectors name: I like to ally its gleaming with his actions now noddinghis head in conversation now rushing headlong into the front lines.But a flashing helmet it is again and again and not only to make hisown career appear more meteoric and abruptly snuffed out but also tosupport a chain of tragic ironies throughout the poem. For the flashinghelmet-Hectors own at first-is soon replaced by the one he stripsfrom Patroclus when he kills him: the helmet of Achilles. So as prophecywould have it. when Achilles destroys Hector in revenge he must destroyhimself as well his flashing mirror-image embodied in his Victim. andthe helmet he will wear. fire-new and forged by Hephaestus flasheslike the helmet of Ares when Achilles .closes for the kill Book 20.45 TRANSLATORS PREFACE xi22.158quot The more the epithet recurs in short the more its power canrecoil. And the inevitability of its recoil for Hector is further stressed bya repeated passage in the Greek repeated verbatim in the English version.The words that describe the death of Patroclus are exactly those thatdescribe the death of Hector six books later 16.1001-5 22.425-29:the first death both in the mind of Achilles the avenger and in the styleof his maker will have served as warrant for the second. All in all thenI have tried for repetition with a difference when variation seems useful.repetition with a grim insistence when the scales of Zeus the Homericmoral balance is at issue. Turning briefly to Homers metrics: though my way is more remoteit is also meant to occupy a flexible middle ground here between hishexameter line-his quotear ear for the sea-surgequot as Pound describes it-and a tighter native English line. If as the Introduction claims thestrongest weapon in Homers poetic arsenal is variety within a metricalnorm the translation opts for a freer give-and-take between the twoand one that offers a good deal more variety than uniformity. Workingfrom a loose five- or six-beat line but inclining more to six I expand attimes to seven beats-to imply the big reach of a simile or some ve-hement outburst in discourse or the pitched fury of combat on the field-or contract at times to three. to give a point in speech or action sharperstress. Such interplay between variety and norm results. I suppose. froma kind of tug-of-war peculiar to translation between trying to encap-sulate the meaning of the Greek on the one hand and trying to find acadence for ones English on the other yet joining hands. if possibleto make a line of verse. I hope it results at any rate not only in givingmy own language a slight stretching it may need and sometimes getsthese days but also in lending Homer the sort of range in rhythm paceand tone that may make an Iliad engaging to a modern reader. It maybe a way as well again at a far remove of trying to suggest the tensionin Homers metrics his blend of mass and movement both-so muchongkos yet so much grace and speed. In aiming for these and other objectives in a version of the Iliad Ihave had many kinds of help. The greatest has come from my collab-orator Bernard Knox whom I would rather call a comrade. Not onlyhas he written the Introduction and Notes to the translation but he hascommented on my drafts for several years. And when I leaf throughI Here and throughout the volume. except for the list of textual variants on p. 619line numbers refer to the translation. where the line numbers of the Greek text willbe found at the top of every page.xii TRANSLATORS PREFACEthose pages now his commentary seems to ring my typescript socompletely that I might be looking at a worse-for-wear dog-eared man-uscript encircled by a scholiasts remarks. Or is it something of a battle-map as well The vulnerable lines at the center are shored up by acombat-tested ally whose squads reinforce the weakest sectors and whodeciphers Homers order of the day and tells a raw recruit what war-the movements of armies and the sentiments of soldiers-is all about.And more what tragedy-in this the first tragedy-really means. InBook 9 of the Iliad old Phoenix calls for a man of words and a man ofaction too. My good fortune has been to work with such a man. Several modem scholars and critics cited in the bibliography havehelped as well and so have several modem translators of the Iliad inwhole or part. Each has introduced me to a new aspect of the poemanother potential for the present. quotFor if it is truequot as Maynard Mackproposes quotthat what we translate from a given work is what wearingthe spectacles of our time we see in it it is also true that we see in itwhat we have the power to translate.quot So my debts to others are con-siderable and here I say my thanks to William Arrowsmith RobertGraves Martin Hammond. Richmond Lattimore. Christopher LoguePaul Mazon Ennis Reese and E. V. Rieu. A few I have known in personmost I have never met. Yet I suspect we all have known each other ina way having trekked across the same territory perhaps having allencountered the nightmare that haunted Pope-quotthat he was engagedin a long journeyquot as Joseph Spence reports. quotpuzzled which way totake and full of fearsquot that it would never end . And if you reach theend the fears may start in earnest. In any event the translator I haveknown the best is the one to whom I owe the most. Robert Fitzgerald.both for the power of his example and because at a sensitive momenthe heartened me to quotfit on your greaves and swordbelt and face themoil or the melee.quot Many other friends have come to my side some by reading someby listening to me read the work-in-progress and responding in closedetail with criticism or encouragement or a healthy combination of thetwo. Most encouraging of all none has asked me quotWhy another IliadquotFor each understood. it seems that if Homer was a performer. then histranslator might aim to be one as well and that no two performancesof the same work-surely not of a musical composition. so probablynot of a work of language either-will ever be the same. The timbreand tempo of each will be distinct let alone its deeper resonance. buildand thrust. My thanks then. to Marilyn Arthur. Paul Auster SandraBerrnann. Charles Beye. Claudia Brodsky Beth Brombert Victor Brom- TRANSLATORS PREFACE xiiibert Clarence Brown Rebecca Bushnell Robert Connor Robert F. Go-heen Rachel Hadas Robert Hollander Samuel Hynes Edmund KeeleyNita Krevans Janet Lernbke. David Lenson William Levitan HerbertMarks J. D. McClatchy Earl Miner William Mullen Georgia NugentJoyce Carol Dates Joanna Prins Michael Putnam David Quint RichardReid James Richardson. Charles Segal Steven Shankman MichaelSimpson. Raymond Smith Paolo Vivante and Theodore Weiss. And several classicists have lent a steady hand: William A. ChildsGeorge Dunkel Elaine Fantham Andrew Ford John Keaney RichardMartin Glenn Most