Volume 21, Number 20 · December 12, 1974
On Looking Into Fitzgerald's Homer
By D.S. Carne-Ross
The Iliad
translated by Robert Fitzgerald
Anchor Press/Doubleday, 594 pp., $15.00
Of the many difficulties that test the translator of the Iliad two are worth singling out. Far more sharply than with the Odyssey he faces the problem of what to turn the poem into. Though the Odyssey is not 'our first novel,' there is just enough life in the cliché to allow translator and reader to collaborate in the pleasures of a narrative mode that has not been improved on. This has always been an amenable poem. Odysseus' series of encounters in books 5-12 will submit to a wide range of interpretation; the second half of the poem, though it has its longueurs, provides a narrative action—the hero's return and recovery of his home—that is exciting in itself and points to further levels of meaning, psychological, social, cosmological, that we can accommodate readily enough. The Iliad is a far more formidable object, a huge uncompromising tragic masterpiece that must be taken on its own terms before it will speak to ours.
Review, 3417 words
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