War and Peace

By Melvin Maddocks

THE ILIAD

Translated by ROBERT FITZGERALD 594 pages. Anchor Press/Doubleday. $15.

A "poem of force," French Philosopher Simone Weil once called the Iliad in what must be regarded as howling Gallic understatement. On Homer's blood-drenched plains of Troy, spears cleave through a man's tongue and shatter his teeth or pierce an eye socket. Swords sever heads. Armies mow down opposing ranks like "a line of reapers formed, who cut a swath/ in barley or wheat." Death spreads across the pages like a pool of ink--"numbing darkness," "unending night." Awesome griefs are recorded. Hair gets torn, ashes smeared. But when a mourning fast is proposed, the answer is: "So many die, so often, every day,/ when would soldiers come to an end of fasting?"

Was there ever a poem more dedicated to machismo? By the time of Aristotle, about 900 years later, the Greek definition of virtue had evolved into the good and the beautiful. In the Iliad, virtue meant pride in battle, warrior's honor, heroics in the primitive sense. For all their groans, the Greeks relished war. Helen's face was hardly required to launch a thousand ships. To both sides, for nine years "warfare seemed/ lovelier than return, lovelier than sailing/ in the decked ships to their own native land."

Dagger Thrust. Each age must measure its knowledge of war, its concept of force against the Iliad, and that is one reason the poem has been translated and retranslated, from Alexander Pope's resounding version in 1720 to Richmond Lattimore's literal yet poetic rendering of 1951. In Pope, for instance, dactylic hexameters were given their royally cadenced English equivalent to which Homeric heroes stepped rather like late-Renaissance princes. Robert Fitzgerald, Harvard's Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory and a poet (Spring Shade, 1971) in his own right, has cut back on the pomp without scaling down the epic. His battlefield seems bleaker--black and white rather than Pope technicolor. His protagonists are closer to Beowulf than to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The blank-verse lines may flex to a Homeric simile, but in combat they are as direct as a dagger thrust. What Fitzgerald has done is provide all that a late-20th century translator and his audience can share on the subject of war --only the most austere emotions.

Yet it is what lies outside of war that makes a masterpiece of the Iliad, and makes this translation a fitting companion to Fitzgerald's justly celebrated Odyssey. Two cities decorate the shield of Achilles, newly forged for the climactic duel with Hector, champion of the Trojans. One city is at war, its walls besieged like Troy's. The second city is at peace. In the margins of Fitzgerald's Iliad, this second city keeps peeping through, full of tender wives, proud fathers, grazing cattle, freshly plowed fields, fruitful vineyards and (see the comparative samples in box) boys and girls dancing.

A subliminal hymn to life infuses the Iliad, as if everything had to be named and pronounced and celebrated. Greek warriors loved to talk almost as much as they loved to fight. When the Greek Diomedes meets the Trojan Glaucus and asks, "Young gallant stranger, who are you?", Glaucus, though "hot for combat," takes a four-page time-out to answer his foe, including a 50-year family history of slain monsters and sexual intrigues. When the conversing enemies discover that their grandfathers had once exchanged gifts (a "two-handled cup of gold" for a "loin-guard sewn in purple"), they shake hands and go off to split other skulls.

Sheets and Fleeces. The 24-hour presence of sheer heroism was a heavy assignment for Homer; it is an impossible burden for the contemporary reader. Fitzgerald has a marvelous knack at releasing the tension that overexposure to even the best of heroes can produce. Suddenly, with merciless self-awareness, Homer-Fitzgerald heroes can see the absurdity of fighting almost ten years over a woman who ran off with another, less than pre-eminent man. "What an affliction!" Hector says of Paris, his own brother, while alluring Helen herself measures her lover in two brilliant Fitzgerald lines: "This one--his heart's unsound and always will be,/ and he will win what he deserves."

There is time for everything in Homer. Time for long-winded old Nestor and the worldly counsels of wily Ulysses. Time for funeral games--chariot races, wrestling matches, archery shootouts. Time for sumptuous scenes, like one in Achilles' tent which Fitzgerald makes the most of: the guests, sipping from wine goblets, sit in "easy chairs with purple coverlets" and are served mutton, goat and "savory pork" roasted over coals before retiring to "deep-piled" beds with linen sheets and fleeces.

And there is always time for nature. Time, almost slow-motion time, for the world of mist and lightning and sea and fire (mentioned 200 times in the Iliad, according to one scholar). Time, repetitious time, for rosy-fingered dawn to be duly noted again, reminding the poet and his audience that life is a drama in which even heroes are finally upstaged by the stage itself.

Wholeness is the mark of genius. The preciousness of life when threatened by death, the sweetness of the memory of the city at peace when it is surrounded, this is the full-to-bursting taste in the mouth of Achilles as he picks up his shield--and in the mouth of the reader as he lays down Fitzgerald's Homer. qedMelvin Maddocks

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