No, no, my friend, we’re off! Six months have passed
since Father heard the ocean howl and cast
his galley on the Aegean’s skull-white froth.
Listen! The blank sea calls us—off, off, off!
I’ll follow Father to the fountainhead
and marsh of hell. We’re off. Alive or dead,
I’ll find him.
Robert Lowell, of course. The lines carry the stamp of his vivid rhetoric. The howling ocean, the skull-white froth, the marsh of hell declare that oratory of sea and Gothic landscape distinctive of Lowell. Yet these lines purport some scrupulous relation to the opening couplets of Racine’s Phèdre. “My version is free,” says Lowell, “nevertheless I have used every speech in the original, and almost every line is either translated or paraphrased.” We must be reading from different editions:
Le dessein en est pris, je pars, cher Théramène,
Et quitte le séjour de l’aimable Trézène.
Dans le doute mortel où je suis agité,
Je commence à rougir de mon oisiveté.
Depuis plus de six mois éloigné de mon père,
J’ignore le destin d’une tête si chère;
J’ignore jusqu’aux lieux qui le peuvent cacher.
Not only has Lowell made no attempt to render the general meaning, but the whole thrust of his version goes wrong. Racine opens on a muted, dubious note. The long vowel endings, the repetition of j’ignore, the dark, delicate premonition in doute mortel, define Hippolyte. Rougir tells us of his easy blushing. The lines “place” him accurately in the complex tangle of the drama. They bespeak his candid but shy and bending virtue. Nothing of all this is even hinted at in the robust eloquence of Lowell. Let us try elsewhere.
The crux of the play occurs in Act II, scene v. Maddened by her incestuous love, Phèdre seeks out Hippolyte. Through hint and oblique metaphor she tries to enforce upon his chaste, naïve spirit an awareness of her own ardent and dread condition. At first the young prince shows no apprehension of what she is trying to get across. Suddenly a terrible light flashes through his incredulous mind. Stunned, he asks the Queen whether she has forgotten that his father, Theseus, is her husband. In a final surge of reason and self-command, Phèdre seeks to deny her own revelation:
Et sur quoi jugez-vous que j’en perds la mémoire,
Prince? Aurais-je perdu tout le soin de ma gloire?
Hippolyte stammers his apology and turns to flight. But now the doors of chaos spring open. Phédre drops all pretense and yields to the rush of her roused blood (blood and fire is the dominant trope of the whole play). She proclaims her love in wild, self-accusing accents. All the horrors that have gathered beneath the mask of decorum stand naked:
Ah! cruel, tu m’as trop entendue.
Je t’en ai dit assez pour te tirer d’erreur.
Hé bien! connais donc Phèdre et toute sa fureur.
J’aime.
Yet this ultimate crisis is conveyed essentially through a change of syntax. It is the brusque passage from the formal, customary vous to the intimate tu which proclaims the catastrophe. Repeated four times in three lines (once in the verb connais donc), this tu signifies the total collapse of Phèdre’s governance over her own soul. Only an art as formal and economic as that of Racine can provoke so great a shock by so sparse a means. In the taut stylistic conventions of French neoclassicism, a change of grammatical person can stand for an entirety of moral ruin. Music knows such reversals in a change of key. Any translation of Racine must grapple with them. Lowell does not even attempt to do so:
You monster! You understood me too well!
Why do you hang there, speechless, petrified,
polite! My mind whirls. What have I to hide?
Phaedra in all her madness stands before you.
I love you! Fool, I love you, I adore you!
Clearly, you and thou cannot reproduce the formidable shock of vous and tu. What is required is some equivalent change in tonality, a veering away from contained pressure to wild, agonized avowal. But having pitched the whole preceding play in a key of uniform vehemence, Lowell can no longer modulate. The crucial sense of inward collapse is lost. Moreover, “I love you! Fool, I love you, I adore you!” is a betrayal of Racine’s superb strategy. What Phèdre says is “j’aime,” meaning simply “I am in love.” Then comes a momentous caesura. The actual designation of her love—“je t’aime”—is hurried over in a burst of self-revilement. Even in her hour of unreason, Phèdre retains that fineness of spirit which makes her a tragic and not a melodramatic heroine. “Speechless,” “petrified,” “polite” are gratuitous inventions by Mr. Lowell. Racine knew there was no need of waste motion; Hippolyte’s posture is implicit in the discourse. All Phèdre says, with a delicate ambiguity on entendre, is: “Ah! cruel man, you have heard [understood] me all too clearly. / I have said enough to dispel your confusion.”
One more example: at the close of Act IV, Phèdre spurns her accomplice and confidante, Oenone. Loathing has taken her by the throat. She knows that what has come to pass is monstrous and heaps her own sense of guilt on the pliant, wretched nurse:
Qu’entends-je? Quels conseils ose-t-on me donner?
Ainsi donc jusqu’au bout tu veux m’empoisonner,
Malheureuse! Voilà comme tu m’as perdue.
Au jour, que je fuyais, c’est toi qui m’as rendue.
Tes prières m’ont fait oublier man devoir.
Et puisse ton supplice à jamais effrayer
Tout ceux qui, comme toi, par de lâches adresses.
Des princes malheureux nourrissent les faiblesses,
Les poussent au penchant où leur coeur est enclin,
Et leur osent du crime aplanir le chemin.…
Now Lowell’s text:
Must I still listen and drink your poisoned breath?
My death’s redoubled on the edge of death.
I’d fled Hippolytus and I was free
till your entreaties stabbed and blinded me,
and dragged me howling to the pit of lust.
may your punishment be to terrify
all those who ruin princes by their lies,
hints, acquiescence, filth, and blasphemies—
panders who grease the grooves of inclination
and lure our willing bodies from salvation.
The tone could hardly be more remote from Racine. Marlowe, Tourneur, and Webster glow behind Lowell’s diction. At the outset there is a plain error: it was not from Hippolytus that Phèdre had escaped, but from the sight of the sun (le jour). She was about to kill herself when Oenone persuaded her to live and enact her passion. What is more serious: the whole context of Lowell’s version is Christian-baroque. There is nothing in Racine’s lines, or in his lyric, Euripidean mode, of “the pit of lust,” of “blasphemies,” of “panders who grease the grooves of inclination,” or of bodies “lured from salvation.”
Let me be clear: I yield to no one in my admiration of Lowell’s poetry or in my awareness of his stature as a poet. I rejoice in the rhetorical flourish and pace of his Phaedra. As an exercise in verse drama it is often brilliant. More than anyone else now writing iambic pentameter, Lowell can instill into an English cadence the weight and noble violence of Latinity. But I submit that Phaedra has an unsteady and capricious bearing on the matter of Racine. Far too often, it strives against the grain of Racine’s style and against the conventions of feeling on which the miraculous concision of that style depends. Lowell’s play is much closer to Seneca’s Hippolytus. It has the same grim rhetoric and extravagance:
Expelle facinus mente castifica horridum,
Memorque matris, metue concubitus novos.
Miscere thalamos patris et gnati apparas,
Uteroque prolem capere confusam impio!
Perge, et nefandis verte naturam ignibus.
Cur monstra cessant?
In short: what Lowell has produced is a variation on the theme of Phaedra, in the manner of Seneca and the Elizabethan classicists. To link this version with Racine implies a certain abeyance of modesty. But modesty is the very essence of translation. The greater the poet, the more loyal should be his servitude to the original; Rilke is servant to Louise Labé, Roy Campbell to Baudelaire. Without modesty translation will traduce; where modesty is constant, it can, sometimes against its own intent of deference, transfigure.
By contrast, Robert Fitzgerald’s Odyssey is freely submissive to the voice and aims of the Homeric text. Fitzgerald is taking his place beside Chapman and Pope in the unbroken lineage of English Homeric translations. In many respects he excels them.
Fitzgerald’s supreme virtue is to have solved the dilemma of adequate language. Avoiding the obtrusive singularities of Chapman’s approach and the mannered archness of T. E. Lawrence, he has developed a mode which is at once neutral and modern, lyric yet full of technical resource. It has many of the qualities of very good prose, being at all times in forward motion and responsive to the claims of precision. But it has the economy and soar of the poet. Written in a flexible blank verse, Fitzgerald’s narrative moves with such ease of tread that we often forget the sheer virtuosity of the artisan. And throughout, we have the impression of an idiom that is both our own, yet more stable and refined than the colloquial parlance which mars the Homeric versions of Rieu and Robert Graves:
Laërtês’ son, whose home is Ithaka.
I saw him weeping, weeping on an island.
The nymph Kalypso has him, in her hall.
No means of faring home are left him now;
no ship with oars, and no ship’s company
to pull him on the broad back of the sea.
As to your own destiny, Prince Meneláos,
you shall not die in the bluegrass land of Argos;
rather the gods intend you for Elysion
with golden Rhadamanthos at the world’s end,
where all existence is a dream of ease.
Snowfall is never known there, neither long
frost of winter, nor torrential rain,
but only mild and lulling airs from Ocean
bearing refreshment for the souls of men—
the West Wind always blowing.
“Bluegrass land” is characteristic. It is not, of course, a precise equivalent to the Homeric epithet; Lawrence’s “Argos of the fair horse-pastures” is closer. But Fitzgerald’s term, being anchored in our own present terms of reference, is translation in the full rare sense. It re-defines and makes native to our own ground the Homeric vision. Equally deft is Fitzgerald’s conveyance of the pastoral close. Chapman is no mean precedent:
A never-troubled life, where snow, nor showres,
Nor irksome Winter spends his fruitless powres,
But from the Ocean Zephyr still resumes
A constant breath, that all the fields perfumes.
Lawrence comes nearest the actual sound of the Homeric wind; it “sings soft and thrillingly.” Yet Fitzgerald alone manages to combine the sensuous with the mythological; in the Greek, Okeanos and the West Wind have exactly that embodied presence which Fitzgerald gives them.
No poem is more pervious than the Odyssey to the lives of the sea. The roil and hiss of water, the storm rising, and the drowsy calm of the night-swell salt its every line. The diverse tempests which assail Odysseus are a test of the translator’s skill, of his practical grasp of what the poem is about. One of the worst storms is recounted in Book XII. Fitzgerald does it full justice:
We held our course, but briefly. Then the squall
struck whining from the west, with gale force, breaking
both forestays, and the mast came toppling aft
along the ship’s length, so the running rigging
showered into the bilge.
On the after deck
the mast had hit the steersman a slant blow
bashing the skull in, knocking him overside,
as the brave soul fled the body, like a diver.
With crack on crack of thunder, Zeus let fly
a bolt against the ship, a direct hit,
so that she bucked, in reeking fumes of sulphur,
and all the men were flung into the sea.
They came up ‘round the wreck, bobbing a while
like petrels on the waves.
No more seafaring
homeward for these, no sweet day of return;
the god had turned his face from them.
There are details one might argue about. I wonder why Fitzgerald inverts the natural direction of the narrative, “knocking him overside, / as the brave soul fled the body, like a diver.” Lawrence is both more obvious and true to Homer: “He dropped from his high platform in one headlong dive, and the brave spirit left his bones.” Chapman’s dire close is unmatched: “And there the date of their return was out.” But taken as a whole, Fitzgerald’s is the most vivid and circumstantial of available versions. It has the breathless terror of Odysseus’ narrative. It has none of the spurious associations brought in by Lawrence’s “brimstone smoke.” The terms are beautifully exact without being precious.
Sometimes Fitzgerald adds. In the Nekuia, Odysseus’ conjuration of the mighty dead in Book XI, occurs a renowned episode. The wraith of Achilles has receded:
for he had gone off striding the field of asphodel,
the ghost of our great runner, Akhilleus Aiákidês,
glorying in what I told him of his son.
Among the thronging shadows one stands aloof, implacable. It is Ajax who went mad after Odysseus bested him in the contest for the arms of the slain Achilles. He cannot forgive:
but one
remained alone, apart: the son of Télamon,
Aîas it was—the great shade burning still.…
Nowhere in either Homer or previous translation do we find that sumptuous image. The Greek is perfectly plain: Ajax stands apart because he is still angry, or as Chapman puts it in his gnarled manner: “Only the spirit Telamonian / Kept farre off, angrie for the victorie / I. wonne from him.” “Burning still” is transfiguration, justified by the implicit metaphor of anger, but fusing with Homer’s meaning a new poetry. Dante seems to hover within resonance. But in strong contrast with Lowell’s practice, Fitzgerald’s addition does not distort or “improve” the original; it augments while remaining strictly concordant with the inward motion and tone of the Greek.
There are many other felicities and solutions one would want to examine in this superb achievement. Fitzgerald’s book is a primer in the vexed craft of translation. Teiresias prophesies to Odysseus that he will suffer a gentle, mysterious end. Here is how Fitzgerald renders this famous passage:
Then a seaborne death
soft as this hand of mist will come upon you
when you are wearied out with rich old age.
“Soft as this hand of mist” is not a bad motto for translators.