Homer in four translations

In The New York Times, Emily Wilson, who has now translated both the Iliad and the Odyssey, writes about four translations of a speech by Hector from Iliad 6.

When I taught Homer and other ancient writers in translation, I was very fond of bringing in multiple versions of a passage. Reading across translations and exploring the source text via the Perseus Digital Library is a great way to get closer to the poetry. When I was preparing to interview the classicist Stanley Lombardo in 2003, I sat in the library with the Lattimore, Fitzgerald, Fagles, and Lombardo translations of the Iliad and Odyssey and the Loeb texts of the poems, scanning every line in each translation for items of possible interest. As the poet said, you can observe a lot by just watching.

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One point in Wilson’s commentary that complicates things greatly:

Wilson writes that Hector “is a deeply loving father and husband who makes the choice to leave his family to almost-certain enslavement and death” by fighting on the Trojan plain. “His death,” she writes, “will entail his wife’s rape and enslavement, their baby’s violent death and the sack of their city.”

I have to disagree. These events won’t come about because of Hector’s death in battle. They’ll come about because Troy is doomed. As Hector says earlier in his meeting with his wife Andromache in this episode:

Deep in my heart, I know too well
There will come a day when holy Ilion [Troy] will
    perish,
And Priam and the people under Priam’s ash spear.

Hector imagines the pain he will feel — he’ll be alive — as his wife is taken by the Greeks, and as he goes on to say, he hopes to be dead, “the earth heaped up above me,” before it happens.

Related reading
All OCA Homer posts (Pinboard) : Aeschylus in three translations : Homer in four translations : More Homer : Sappho in two translations : Virgil in three tranlations : More Virgil

[Lines from the Iliad are in Stanley Lombardo’s translation (1997).]