Zeus, Protector of Strangers, must be watching over Robert Fagles. Fagles has now ventured twice into the territory of the Homeric poem—a land from which most ordinary translators might never hope to return—and this time he has brought back a fresh, readable translation of the Odyssey. A stronger poem than his much acclaimed Iliad, Fagles’s Odyssey gives us an English Homer that is as compelling to hear as to read—an Odyssey that conjures the sea-surge of Homer’s poetry through the rhythms and workings of English.
Consider the rugged beauty that Fagles achieves at the opening of book eleven, the book devoted to Odysseus’s descent into the underworld:
Now down we came to the ship at the water’s
edge,
we hauled and launched her into the sunlitbreakers first,
stepped the mast in the black craft and setour sail
and loaded the sheep aboard, the ram andthe ewe,
then we ourselves embarked, streaming tears,
our hearts weighed down with anguish …
But Circe the awesome nymph with lovelybraids
who speaks with human voice, sent us a hardyshipmate,
yes, a fresh following wind ruffling up inour wake.
“Stepped the mast in the black craft” vies with Pound’s turn on the same line, and this whole passage exemplifies the forthright dignity and American energy of Fagles’s Odyssey. Here as elsewhere, the translation captures some of the