READING THE ODYSSEY.

When I began to write my history I was inclined to count these legends as foolishness, but on getting as far as Arcadia I grew to hold a more thoughtful view of them, which is this. In the days of old those Greeks who were considered wise spoke their sayings not straight out but in riddles, and so the legends about Cronus I conjectured to be one sort of Greek wisdom. In matters of divinity, therefore, I shall adopt the received tradition.

--Pausanias, Description of Greece

I WAS ALREADY a grey-haired man before I discovered the Odyssey. Like so many others of my time (as I now discover), I had only known one small snippet of the story in its Latinised version--Ulysses and the Sirens as told in the old Victorian School Reader. When I sat down to E.V. Rieu's marvellous prose translation, it was indeed, no less momentous for me than I imagine it would have been for Keats who discovered a whole new world in Chapman's Homer:

 
   Then felt I like some watcher of the skies 
   When a new planet swims into his ken; 
   Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes 
   He stared at the Pacific--and all his men 
   Looked at each other with a wild surmise-- 
   Silent, upon a peak in Darien. 

Horses for courses, as they say. Others may prefer what they would see as more accurate translations and, of course, the real purists will insist upon reading the work in the Greek. For me, part of the delight in reading the Odyssey in the Rieu translation is in discovering little traces of the translator as a human being, not simply as some passive entity who renders one language into another. There is a point, too, beyond which accuracy is maintained only at the expense of beauty, of understanding and of feeling. There needs to be some balance. The Good News Bible may be more accurate and more readable than the old King James Version but no one could say that its passages were more memorable.

And so in E.V. Rieu's Odyssey we find that, for instance, requests or instructions to or from the various characters are invariably prefaced with the terms "kindly" or "be good enough to" or "I do ask you". Immediately, we perceive Rieu to be the very model of the well-mannered English gentleman. Indeed, Rieu's son, who has revised his father's translation for the latest Penguin Classics edition, makes this very point in his preface and has decided to expunge such expressions because they are not faithful to the original Greek teN. I do not agree with him. Those of us who cannot read Greek (and I am one) rely on the translator to give us some sense of the personality, of the characters. Rieu senior does this by presenting them as well-bred Englishmen and the effect is marvellous. We know we are seeing them only through Rieu's eyes but, at the same time, we know that Rieu himself is deeply sympathetic to the characters and so imparts a sense of real humanity to them--his humanity.

The effect is very much like that which we get from some of those famous definitions in Dr Johnson's Dictionary. Here and there, this great man of letters, this man of ponderous sentences and gob-stopping words, lets his defences down for a moment and shows us that he is, after all, a human being just like us. Thus, for instance when he gives the definition of "litch" and mentions Litchfield (his birthplace), he cannot resist a little addition--salve magna parens. I imagine the Great Cham writing those words, the tears streaming down his face. Such emotions are quite out of place in a dictionary but are nonetheless exactly that which makes the Dictionary so readable.