BATTLE LINES

BATTLE LINES
by Daniel Mendelsohn


ABSTRACT: BOOK review of a new translation of the Iliad. For sheer weirdness, it would be hard to find a passage in the Western canon that can compete with the tenth book of Homer’s Iliad—the one classicists call the Doloneia. Readers of Stephen Mitchell’s fast-paced and very idiosyncratic new translation of the Iliad (Free Press; $35) will have to take my word on this, because Book 10 doesn’t appear in it. Mitchell’s is the first major English translation of the poem to implement the theories of the eminent British scholar M. L. West, stripping away what West argues are the impure, later additions to the original written text. Merely to claim that there was an original text of the Iliad is sensational stuff in the world of classics. Most ancient Greeks believed that there was a poet called Homer who wrote down his poems. In the eighteenth century, a French scholar discovered a manuscript of the Iliad from the tenth century A.D. that came complete with transcriptions from the marginal notes of ancient commentators. This discovery soon led the German scholar Friedrich August Wolf to argue that the texts of the Iliad and the Odyssey that we possess had not been fixed in writing until relatively late. Mentions the Analysts. Early in the twentieth century, an American scholar named Milman Parry came up with an “oral theory” about how the lengthy poems were created and transmitted over the years. This is the orthodoxy that M. L. West has challenged. West’s controversial thesis is that there was in fact a Homer and that this poet actually wrote down a “primal text” of the Iliad, revising it over many years. However academic the debate may appear, a lot depends on who’s right. Perhaps because Mitchell is not a classicist, he is emboldened to cast West’s vision in stone. Mitchell’s Iliad is slimmer and leaner than anything we have seen before, the iambic line driving forward in a way that gives force to the English and nicely suggests the galloping dactyls of Homer’s lines. But too often his insistence on speed forces him to sacrifice nobility. Part of the way in which the epic legitimizes its ability to talk about so many levels of existence and so many kinds of experience is its style: an ancient authority inheres in that old-time diction, the plushly padded epithets and stately rhythms. All this, along with many other subtle effects, is gone from Mitchell’s Iliad, which, in its eagerness to reproduce what Homer says, strips away how he says it. The Iliad isn’t pure; its richness, even its stiffness, is part of what makes it large, makes it commanding, makes it great. It doesn’t need to be modernized, because the question it raises is a modern one: how do we fill our short lives with meaning?