odyssey in writing

[kevin at limits.org]

Jody--
Much like Dedalus, I have only my memory of university classes to go by
(and I can't find any websites that discuss the issue) but IIRC, someone
in a Position of Authority (in Athens?) ordered that Homer's epics be
written down, about 300 years (?) after they were written by Homer (that
is, circa 500 BCE).  If I have the date wrong, please, somebody
correct me.  This is the earliest "fixation" that I know of --
before that, there may have been written materials, but I was always led
to believe that Homer's works were primarily oral tradition.  Keep in mind
that, if Homer wrote a poem down and then recited it to the illiterate
masses of the day, the written poem may have served merely as crib notes.
And we do have plenty of evidence from other Indo-European epic traditions
that oral tradition can serve its own memory quite well.

As far as the question of the new Lombardo translation and his mixin'
things around in the first ten lines, has anyone read it, and if so, does
he continue these, er, shennanigans throughout?  I've noticed that
translators seem to focus on first lines even more than creative writing
teachers.  (For example, I saw Pinsky speak right after he had done his
_Inferno_, someone asked him what his favorite bit of his own translation
was, and he said he liked his phrasing "the right road lost," which is
from the first stanza.)  Translators, I'm told, are infamously either lazy
(paying the bills) or meddlesome (usually under the guise of bringing a
work of art into a new relevance for its age, up to and including
Bowlderization). Nabokov, translating his own works, was notoriously the
latter, improving on works -- much like Pynchon, I suppose, he was always
a little disapointed with his younger self, in hindsight.

Anyway, back to Lombardo:  I think this site might help put this furor
over his translation of the first line in context:

http://www.robotwisdom.com/jaj/odyssey.html

It catalogs and compares notable translations/versions of the Odyssey
(with, yes, the first line as a crib); and I in the twentieth century
alone, there are translations from such luminaries as T.E. Lawrence,
Lattimore, Fagles, Fitzgerald, Mandelbaum, and WHD Rouse. Not to mention
previous translations by Hobbes, Pope, Cowper, and of course Chapman --
though these aren't likely to show up in your local Crown Books.  With all
these translations floating about, and keeping in mind that very few
people pick up and read Homer without having read him at least once before
in school, I'd say that changing around the identity of the muse (for
whatever purpose or effect) is, as Literary Crimes go, somewhere on the
same level as a well-done modern-dress Shakespeare production (_Troilus
and Cressida_ set in Washington, DC with Demogreeks and Trojancrats,
perhaps).

Boy.  That was a bit longer than I had planned.  Happy New Year, everyone.


On Tue, 2 Jan 2001, pynchon-l-digest wrote:
> Date: Mon, 01 Jan 2001 09:50:28 -0600
> From: Dedalus <dedalus204 at mediaone.net>
> Subject: Re: Speak, Memory
> 
> jporter wrote:
> 
> > Sorry to take up bandwidth just to say this, but: Thanks alot! Does anyone
> > happen to know, off hand, the most widely accepted theory of when (where,
> > how) the Homeric epics found their way into written form, and if there were
> > more than one or even several ancient written versions, perhaps competing?
> 
> It is generally believed that Homer used the raw material of the oral Greek
> tradition to shape and fashion _The Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ some time during
> the eighth century B.C.E.  Interestingly, this is also the century in which the
> Greeks learned to write again (following the fires that destroyed their Minoan
> culture sometime in the last century of the second millenium B.C.E.).
> 
> I seem to recall a professor from college, ages ago, who mentioned that there
> had been basic "stories" floating about ancient Greece by various rhapsodes ---
> the stories were essentially skeletal, but each poet elaborated according to
> the needs of the rulers and palace audiences he'd encounter in his travels.
> Homer seems to have used these stories as the basis, elaborated according to
> his taste, and that's what we have today.  Competition was likewise common, as
> was the earliest Dionysian festivals that gave life to tragedy and comedy.
> Several rhapsodes would compete before their audiences in the palaces by
> telling the same myths, and elaborating accordingly.
> 
> Unfortunately, I have no notes or documentation for this --- only the memory of
> what a wonderful university professor once told us.  Memories of an oral
> tradition.  Oh, the irony.
>