Fantasy Homer

03Feb09

From the blurb on the Paris Review’s interview with Robert Fagles:

INTERVIEWER: I would indulge in a Barbara Walters moment because I happen to know that you are a football fan.

FAGLES: Who’s a football fan?

INTERVIEWER: You are!

FAGLES: Can’t keep any secrets.

INTERVIEWER: It would be great to work a fantasy football team out of the Iliad and the Odyssey.

FAGLES: Out of the Iliad and the Odyssey? Good. I know who’d be thrown off the team as captain. Agamemnon. He’s a disaster as a leader! Achilles is the best broken-field runner. And the one I’d most like as a coach is Penelope. Good at tactics, better at building morale, emotional when it counts. I don’t mean to be gallant. I’m not half-kidding.”

Poor Agamemnon. Cursed House of Atreus! Conquer half of Greece and still can’t even make Robert Fagles’ Homeric fantasy football team.

Now I need to go to the library and read the rest of that interview since only that blurb is available online. I’m curious if it goes on.

I was kind of surprised to run across Robert Fagles at the Paris Review. If you aren’t familiar, Fagles is best known for his translations of ancient greek literature, specifically Homer.

At my nerd college, The Iliad was the first book every student read, and one of the first things we learned was that which translation you choose is, like, really important. There were two camps for Homer: Lattimore or Fagles.

Lattimore was a literal translation and proponents loved to endlessly repeat the phrase, “It’s true to the Greek,” but it was clunky and foreign-sounding and extremely dry; Fagles was poetic and captured the meaning of the words and idioms, replacing them with English counterparts, which made it enjoyable and allowed for emotional reactions, but you lost a good deal of the Ancient Greek flava. Each translator had a devoted following and we all pretended allegiance was philosophically significant; which was more important, the letter or the spirit of the work?

I started with Lattimore because we were also studying Ancient Greek and freshly aware of how much nuance was already lost in translation. Not that I even got close to translating any Homer; Homer is to Ancient Greek as Chaucer is to Modern English. That the literal translation of Homer is better was based on principle alone.

Furthermore, Ancient Greek itself is only theoretically fascinating. Like any foreign language, there are words and nuances of meaning that don’t exist in English, and can’t be captured by any translation, but it’s also horrendously complex, irregular, and punishingly difficult. You can’t get an ear for it because it’s unspoken. For all the work it requires, the small insights you gain seem cheap. In reality, unless this particular dead language is your thing, or some particular ancient Greek is your thing, or you are a hopeless masochist, there comes a point where you must declare Greek a bastard and move on with your life.

Back to Fagles: Somehow I ended up reading a chunk of the Odyssey in the Fagles translation later in the year. Fagles made Homer a gripping, emotional, page-turner. Full of humanity and courage and love and archetype. Unlike the Lattimore, you didn’t have to mentally translate the emotion from the Greek.

I defected firmly to the Fagles camp.

I felt pretty confident in my private choice, and that the whole issue was just too excessively nerdy to ever come up outside of school, but oh! I was wrong! I asked my parents for the Fagles translations of the Iliad and Odyssey for my birthday that year. Perhaps because I specified the translation, they felt the need to buy the books in a special bookstore on the UofC campus. When they went to select the books, some random guy literally blocks their path and starts telling them they DO NOT want to buy the Fagles, that the Lattimore is far superior, that the Fagles can’t even be called a translation. He went on and on, and proceeded to browbeat my bewildered parents until they bought something else entirely.

Who knew people felt so passionately? It’s like some secret, hot-button nerd argument along the lines of “Who was the best Star Trek Captain?”

I’m still a Fagles girl.

So who would I pick for my fantasy Homer team? I don’t know enough about football to choose positions, but I imagine you’d want big, aggressive, tough players. I think Fagles is on the right track (sorry again, Agamemnon.) I’d grab Hector and Ajax for brawn, and Clytemnestra for general bloodthirstyness. Can I pick the magical creatures? Giants, centaurs, witches, and sirens? How about the gods? This would be a very entertaining game! And those Greeks, they’d probably want to play naked.

I’d definitely watch football if it had more centaurs.

Filed under: And That Is Why I Am So Emo, Geekery, Purloined Words   |  10 Comments
Tags: Agamemnon, Ancient Greek, centaurs, Fagles, football, Homer, Lattimore, naked, nerd argument