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Scholars have understood for hundreds of years that the two great Homeric epics originated as oral poems in preliterate Greece. (No one really knows how the written texts came into being.) But only in the past 40 or so years have linguists and anthropologists come up with a plausible theory of how those poems must have been made. Homer--or the collection of bards given that name at some point in the murky past--did not wander around Greece with 12,109 lines of the Odyssey committed to memory. Instead, the Homeric repetitions so familiar to readers of English translations--all those "wine-dark seas" and "rosy-fingered dawns"--were actually stock formulas allowing the bard to fill out his line of verse and get on with the story. The pressure on these performers, composing while they spoke or sang, must have been intense. Seen in this light, the poet's invocations to the Muse for inspiration at the beginning of the Iliad and the Odyssey have a dimension beyond the religious; these pleas could also represent a nervous bard, faced with a gathering of drowsy aristocrats, saying God help me.
A number of English translators have stressed the strange and archaic nature of Homeric narrative, which is fair enough; it is strange and archaic, at least to us. But to those who heard it first, thousands of years ago, it must have seemed both familiar and wondrous. Fagles' translations vividly convey for contemporary readers the sense of stories being told aloud.
His Odyssey starts out speedily: "Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns/ driven time and again off course, once he had plundered/ the hallowed halls of Troy." That man, of course, is Odysseus, the epic hero of all that is to follow, and in calling him "the man of twists and turns" Fagles signals his commitment to economical, concrete descriptions. Fitzgerald's translation introduces Odysseus as "that man skilled in all ways of contending." Some readers may prefer Fitzgerald's rendering, of course, but the contrast shows clearly the straightforward method Fagles pursues.
The 19th century poet and critic Matthew Arnold commended Homer's "speed, directness and simplicity" in the original Greek, and these qualities abound in Fagles' translation. The problems the epic must resolve are quickly set forth. All the surviving Greek heroes from the 10-year siege and ultimate destruction of Troy--the subject matter of the Iliad--have long since returned to their homes except Odysseus, the King of Ithaca. There, 10 years after the fall of Troy, his faithful wife Penelope fends off a riotous band of suitors for her hand in marriage; his son Telemachus, an infant when his father went off to war, cannot repel the suitors or claim the throne without sure knowledge that Odysseus will never return. Where in the world is he?
The gods on Mount Olympus know, of course: Odysseus has been stranded for seven years on the island of Calypso, a goddess who loves him and has offered to "make the man immortal, ageless, all his days." But Odysseus says no. He wants to go home. Those who have never read any translation of the Odyssey will find much that is familiar in Fagles' retelling of the hero's homeward adventures. The cannibalistic one-eyed giant Polyphemus; Circe, the temptress who turns her prospective lovers into swine; the Sirens, whose songs lure seafarers to shipwreck: we have somehow heard of all of them.