Within days a New York publisher will ship 27,000 copies of its latest release to bookstores across the country. Along with this merchandise will arrive advertising posters--de rigueur in these hard-marketing times--bearing a reproduction of the book's dust- jacket cover and 10,000 audiotapes of an unabridged reading of the words inside. Nothing particularly unusual about all this, except that the contents of the book in question have been around, in one form or another, for about 2,700 years.
How to explain the promotional muscle being flexed behind yet another translation of Homer's Odyssey, this one provided by Princeton professor Robert Fagles (Viking; 541 pages; $35)? Why expect people to pay $45 for a boxed set of tapes (issued by Penguin Audiobooks) on which the British actor Ian McKellen reads the text of Fagles' translation over a listening time of some 13 hours?
The principal reason seems to rest on precedent. The Fagles translation of Homer's Iliad, published by Viking in 1990 to considerably less hubbub than that heralding the upcoming Odyssey, went on to exceed all commercial expectations by selling 22,000 copies in hardback; the paperback version, now in its eighth printing, has moved 140,000 copies. And an abridged audiotape of the Iliad read by Derek Jacobi surprised Penguin Audiobooks by selling 35,000 copies.
What can fairly be called the Fagles phenomenon forms an intriguing new chapter in the long saga of efforts to knead Homeric Greek into suitable English. The first translator with access to the Greek texts and the gumption to try his hand at them was George Chapman (circa 1560-1634), whose complete version of the Iliad in English appeared in 1611, the same year that saw the release of the King James Version of the Old and New Testaments.
The King James Version, thanks to its felicities of language and the imprimatur of the Church of England, ruled supreme and largely unchallenged among English-speaking Christians for about 350 years. Chapman's Homer, a redaction of the secular words of a pagan bard, naturally received no such binding spiritual and temporal authorization. But Chapman's translations were both thrilling enough--see Keats' sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's Homer--and challenging enough to provoke competing versions. Since Chapman, nearly four centuries' worth of British and, later, American writers have taken on Homer.
Robert Fagles, 63, has been teaching literature at Princeton since 1960. It was only after translating tragedies by Aeschylus and Sophocles that he began to consider "climbing back to the source" of Greek legends and taking on the herculean tasks of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Fagles knows that well-stocked bookstores will display plenty of competition for his forthcoming Odyssey, including the highly regarded verse renditions of Robert Fitzgerald (1961) and Richmond Lattimore (1965). But, says Fagles, "every generation needs a new translation of Homer. He was a performer, and he can be re-performed."