The ‘Penguin’ Odyssey

Abstract

If, as Colonel Lawrence claimed, his own was the twenty-eighth translation of the Odyssey, Mr. Rieu's must be at least the twenty-ninth, and it is a tribute to the eternal fascination of the poem. As Butcher and Lang remarked many years ago, there can be no final translation of Homer; translator after translator, whether he chooses verse or prose, will continue to render him in a manner which he considers to be most faithful to the original text, or in one which he thinks most congenial to the taste of his own day. Mr. Rieu has set out to fulfil both purposes. ‘It has been my aim’, he says, ‘to present the modern reader with a rendering of the Odyssey which he may understand with care and read with appreciation.… In the very attempt to preserve some semblance of the original effect I have often found it necessary—in fact my duty, as a translator—to abandon, or rather to transform, the idiom and syntax of the Greek. Too faithful a rendering defeats its own purpose; and, if we put Homer straight into English words, neither meaning nor manner survives.’ He disparages Butcher and Lang, whom he finds ‘turgid’, and appears to aim at a style with as contemporary a flavour as possible. He does not, however, hail as a predecessor Samuel Butler, who, as we know, likewise reacted against Butcher and Lang, and gave the world a translation of the Odyssey of which the diction was to display the same benevo-lent leaning towards the Tottenham Court Road as theirs had done to-wards Wardour Street.