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The Homeric audiences had presumably heard of them too. For all its narrative speed, the Odyssey is remarkable in the way it resists modern notions of suspense. The question is not what will happen next but how thoroughly the bard recounts the particulars of every scene. Fagles' translation captures this peculiar quality perfectly. Late in the story Odysseus is back in Ithaca; he has revealed his identity to Telemachus and two loyal servants and challenged the hundred or so of Penelope's suitors to a fight to the death. All hell is about to break loose, and yet Homer pauses to follow one of the suitors' accomplices in search of weapons in Odysseus' storeroom. Melanthius emerges "one hand clutching a crested helmet, the other/ an ample old buckler blotched with mildew/ the shield Laertes bore as a young soldier once."
That "blotched with mildew" tells a story within the story: Laertes, Odysseus' aged father, has not gone to battle in a long time. There is something infinitely wise and childlike about this moment, a glimpse back into a nonreading age when stories were vehicles of memory as well as entertainment; a lazy or forgetful bard might be reminded by his listeners, "You left out the part about the mildew."
"It's all been downhill after that," says Fagles, only half-jokingly, about the history of Western narrative since Homer. The six years he spent translating the Odyssey involved long, grinding sessions with Greek lexicons and his own imagination, engaged in a "tug-of-war between ancient Greek words and their modern English equivalents." He passed versions of his work around to trusted colleagues, particularly Bernard Knox, who taught him more than 40 years ago at Yale and whose introduction to the new Odyssey is marvelously informative. Fagles reworked and revised some passages more than 20 times. His labors now ended, Fagles pronounces himself "bereft" at leaving Homer's world. He believes, against considerable scholarly dissent, that Homer actually existed and shaped his epics from a long oral tradition. "It's awfully hard to prove," Fagles says, "but I'm an incurable romantic."
The success of his Iliad, published six years ago, seems to him to confirm a long-held belief: "I think in this channel-surfing age people are famished for stories, for vivid accounts of humans who wrestled with their destinies and the gods. Homer is so inclusive and encyclopedic that he can relieve us of ourselves for a while." Fagles recalls a day during his long labors on the Iliad when he was standing in line at a Princeton, New Jersey, bank. "I suddenly thought, 'Don't these people know there's a war going on?'" The Trojan War, of course. Now it is Odysseus' long journey home that will be playing again at neighborhood bookstores--a story, Fagles says, "that ends but never stops."