“Father” is best

From the trailer for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey :

Antinous to Telemachus: “You’re pining for a daddy you didn’t even know, like some sniveling bastard.”

Telemachus, in what sounds like a reply: “My dad is coming home.”

Daddy? Dad? Really? He’s the goddam paterfamilias!

There’s nothing wrong with bringing Homer into vivid contemporary English (as, say, Stanley Lombardo does), but that English has to sound right. “Daddy” and “dad,” to my ear, don’t.

In Homer’s poem, Telemachus calls his father πατὴρ (patēr), “father.” He calls the swineherd Eumaeus ᾰ̓́ττᾰ (atta), which also means “father.” In Lombardo’s translation, Telemachus calls Eumaeus “Papa” — a wonderful way to mark the swineherd as Odysseus-like (a royal son and displaced person), countrified, and grandfatherly. (Lombardo’s Telemachus calls Odysseus “Father,” of course.) The Phaeacian princess Nausicaa addresses her father Alcinous as πάππα (pappa). Richmond Lattimore, Robert Fagles, and Lombardo all bring that in English as “Daddy,” which seems appropriate for a teenaged daughter asking to borrow the car(t). Robert Fitzgerald has more fun with the word: his Nausicaa addresses her “dear Papà.”

But Telemachus’s Odysseus? That’s his father, not his dad. And I can’t imagine even the surliest suitor using the word “daddy.”

Related reading
All OCA Homer posts (Pinboard) : Whose Homer?

[Anyone who’s seen O Brother, Where Art Thou? will recognize a borrowing in this post.]