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Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns
driven time and again off course, once he had plundered
the hallowed heights of Troy.

So begins Robert Fagles' magnificent translation of the Odyssey.

If the Iliad is the world's greatest war epic, then the Odyssey is literature's grandest evocation of everyman's journey though life. Odysseus' reliance on his wit and wiliness for survival in his encounters with divine and natural forces, during his ten-year voyage home to Ithaca after the Trojan War, is at once a timeless human story and an individual test of moral endurance.

In the myths and legends that are retold here, Fagles has captured the energy and poetry of Homer's original in a bold, contemporary idiom, and given us an Odyssey to read aloud, to savor, and to treasure for its sheer lyrical mastery.

Renowned classicist Bernard Knox's superb Introduction and textual commentary provide new insights and background information for the general reader and scholar alike, intensifying the strength of Fagles' translation.

This is an Odyssey to delight both the classicist and the public at large, and to captivate a new generation of Homer's students.

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Robert Fagles, winner of the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation and a 1996 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, presents us with Homer's best-loved and most accessible poem in a stunning new modern-verse translation.

Review

Samuel Butler's Odyssey is two books fighting inside one cover, and the fight is more interesting than either combatant alone. The first book is Homer's epic—the shipwreck, the Cyclops, the dog who dies at the scent of his master, the bowstring humming through twelve axe-heads. The second book is Butler's magnificent, crackpot argument that none of it happened as we thought: that Homer was a girl barely out of adolescence, writing in a Sicilian port town she never left, putting herself into the poem as the princess who finds a naked stranger on a beach and decides, against every prudential warning, to stand by him. Butler's edition, first published in 1900 and revised posthumously in 1921, packages the oldest surviving work of Western literature with a scholarly apparatus so personal and so stubborn that you cannot read the translation without hearing the translator arguing with two and a half millennia of received opinion. The result lands somewhere between a foundational text and a monomaniacal monograph, and it has more life in it than a dozen respectable critical editions.

Butler's thesis, laid out in the prefatory material and pursued through footnotes that dog the translation line by line, runs as follows. The Odyssey is not one poem but two, crudely stitched together by a later redactor. The first poem—Butler calls it "The Return of Ulysses"—comprises the Phaeacian episode and the wanderings recounted in Books IX through XII. The second—"The Story of Penelope and the Suitors"—begins at Book I line 80, runs through Book IV, and resumes at Book XIII line 187 to carry through the slaughter and the recognition scenes. The stitching is visible in the seams: a new council of the gods at the start of Book V, inserted lines at key junctures, a character who may be one nurse or two. And the author, Butler insists, was not the blind bard of Ionian tradition but "a very young woman" working "entirely at, and drawn entirely from, the place now called Trapani on the West Coast of Sicily." She knew the Iliad intimately and borrowed from it constantly—Butler deposited cross-marked copies of both epics in the British Museum to prove the debt—and she was, in Butler's proto-feminist reading, "ever jealous for the honour of women," writing a poem that elevates Penelope over Clytemnestra and puts the princess Nausicaa, the authoress's self-insertion, at the moral centre of the story.

None of this is remotely accepted by mainstream Homeric scholarship, then or now. Butler knew that. The prefaces have the tone of a man who has been shouting into a gale for years and has decided the gale is wrong. He names Wolf's Prolegomena ad Homerum as the starting point of modern debate and positions himself as Wolf's logical, if eccentric, successor—a scholar willing to follow the evidence where the Alexandrians and the Germans would not. The evidence he adduces is partly textual (the borrowings from the Iliad, the double recensions), partly geographical (he walked the Trapanese coastline himself, questioning local informants about place-names and currents), and partly what we would now call interpretive: the poem's emotional geography, Butler argues, makes no sense unless we understand the author's deep local knowledge of Sicilian topography and her equally deep allegiance to her own sex. When Athena teases the disguised Odysseus on the Ithacan shore—"Any one but yourself on returning from so long a voyage would at once have gone home to see his wife and children, but you do not seem to care about asking after them or hearing any news about them till you have exploited your wife"—Butler hears, and wants us to hear, not the goddess's voice but the young authoress's, needling her hero for the very masculine self-absorption the epic tradition has always treated as his glory.

The translation itself is brisk, conversational, and unembarrassed about the liberties it takes with the Greek. Butler opens the book by printing Butcher and Lang's stricter prose version of the first sixty lines alongside his own, a move that makes clear his working principle: prose translation of poetry is already a liberty, so you might as well take the liberties that make the English read like English. The result can sound almost startlingly modern. "There is a time for making speeches, and a time for going to bed," Odysseus tells Alcinous, before launching into the still sadder tale of his comrades who perished "through the treachery of a wicked woman"—a sentence that moves in one breath from conversational ease to the grave cadences of heroic narrative. Butler's Odysseus speaks like a man who has told these stories many times, refining them for effect, aware of his audience. When he describes the Cyclops episode—the wine, the stake, the pun on "Noman" that lets him escape—the prose carries the sprung rhythm of a practiced raconteur. When he describes the bed built around the living olive tree, the prose slows and stills, and you can feel the translator recognizing that this is the poem's true climax, the moment when recognition becomes proof and proof becomes the bodily knowledge of a marriage.

The footnotes are a second book running underneath the first, and they are often more absorbing than the translation they annotate. Butler cross-references Homeric lines against their Iliadic sources with the obsessive precision of a detective building a case. He proposes emendations and then sometimes withdraws them as "too fanciful." He brackets passages he believes the redactor inserted, notes where the text "is here apparently corrupt, and will not make sense as it stands," and supplies a plan of Odysseus's house so the reader can follow the geography of the slaughter. The cumulative effect is unsettling in the best way: you cannot settle into the poem as a seamless, authoritatively transmitted monument, because Butler is always tapping you on the shoulder to point out a crack in the marble. The Homeric Question becomes a live argument rather than a philological abstraction, and the reader is conscripted into the jury.

The poem itself, Butler's apparatus notwithstanding, remains what it has always been: a story about homecoming so deep in the human grain that it has organized Western narrative ever since. The structure is a four-part braid. Telemachus's coming-of-age voyage occupies the first four books, taking a boy who "could not" behave properly "when I was younger" and turning him, through the counsel of Athena-disguised-as-Mentor and the hospitality of Nestor and Menelaus, into a man who can declare "I am master here." Odysseus's first-person wanderings—the Lotus-eaters, Polyphemus, Circe, the descent to Hades, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, the cattle of the Sun—fill the long middle of the poem with pure adventure narrative, told by the hero himself to the Phaeacian court. The disguised return occupies Books XIII through XX, as the king of Ithaca enters his own house as a beggar, endures abuse from Antinous and the goatherd Melanthius, watches his old dog die upon recognizing him, fights the town beggar Irus, warns the suitor Amphinomus of the doom he will not escape, and is recognized by his nurse Euryclea at the scar on his thigh—a scar the poem pauses to narrate in full, flashing back to a boar hunt on Mount Parnassus and the grandfather who named the boy Odysseus. And the slaughter and recognition occupy the final books: the bow that only the beggar can string, the arrow through twelve axes, the massacre in the hall, the hanging of the twelve maids who slept with the suitors, the bed that cannot be moved because it is rooted in a living olive tree, and the enforced peace Minerva imposes on the kinsmen of the slain.

What holds the braid together is the poem's relentless interest in the problem of identity under duress. Odysseus is recognized, or fails to be recognized, or recognizes others, in scene after scene that tests what it means to be someone. His own men fail to recognize him when he returns from Circe's palace with the herb Moly. The Phaeacians do not know him until he names himself. The suitors cannot see the king in the beggar until the first arrow is already in Antinous's throat. The old dog Argos, alone among the creatures of Ithaca, needs no proof—he "knew his master's voice" and dies on a dung-heap at the gate. Penelope, who has held off the suitors for twenty years with a loom-trick Butler's own critics doubted any "good needlewoman" would sustain, refuses to trust even the man standing before her until he describes, with furious precision, the marriage bed he carved from the rooted stump of an olive and built the bedroom around. "Any one but yourself," Athena had teased him. But Penelope is not anyone but herself, and her refusal to be convinced by anything short of the bed's secret is the poem's deepest statement about what marital knowledge consists of.

Butler's authoress thesis, whatever its scholarly standing, catches a real feature of the poem that more orthodox readings tend to underplay. The Odyssey is unusually interested in women's agency and women's judgement. Penelope's cunning is the mirror of Odysseus's—she weaves and unweaves, he lies and disguises—and the poem explicitly honors her for it, having Agamemnon's ghost prophesy that "the immortals shall compose a song" in praise of her constancy while Clytemnestra's "song shall be hateful among men." Circe and Calypso detain the hero for years and must be, respectively, outwitted and persuaded before he can leave. Nausicaa, encountering a salt-crusted naked stranger who has just crawled from a thicket of olives, chooses to help him despite the obvious risk to her reputation, and she tells her maids, in a line Butler must have underlined three times, that the Phaeacians are a people who care for strangers. Helen, who caused the war, now drugs the wine of grief at Sparta so that Menelaus and Telemachus can bear to speak of the dead. Arete, not Alcinous, is the one Odysseus must win over when he reaches the Phaeacian court. Even the disloyal maids are given a specificity of punishment—twelve of them, hanged from a ship's cable—that Lord Grimthorpe, in one of the skeptical letters Butler reproduces, calculated was physically impossible for a single cable to sustain. The poem's gender politics are a patriarchy, certainly: Telemachus sends his mother to her loom with the declaration that "speech is man's matter," and the hanged maids are a brutal object lesson in what happens to women who exercise the wrong kind of sexual agency. But it is a patriarchy porous enough to admit a great deal of female power, and Butler's insistence on reading the text as a woman's work, however methodologically dubious, sensitizes the reader to that porosity.

The Homeric world the poem conjures is organized around the household—the oikos—and its threatened integrity. The suitors' crime is not merely that they want to marry Penelope; it is that they have been "eating up" Odysseus's substance, consuming his herds and wine, ruining his son's patrimony. When Odysseus reveals himself to his father Laertes in the vineyard, the proof he offers is not the scar but the memory of the fruit trees Laertes once gave him as a child: thirteen pear trees, ten apple trees, forty fig trees, and fifty rows of vines. The tokens of identity are agricultural. The poem's vision of the good life is literally rooted: the marriage bed that grows from the earth, the vineyard with its counted trees, the oar that must be carried so far inland that a passerby mistakes it for a winnowing shovel—at which point Odysseus can finally plant it in the ground, sacrifice to Poseidon, and die "full of years and peace of mind." Butler's obsessive localization of the poem's geography around Trapani—his insistence that the harbour of Phorcys, the cave of the nymphs, the goat-island opposite the Cyclopes' shore are all real places on the Sicilian coast—is, in a strange way, an extension of the poem's own logic. If identity is geographical, if home means this soil and not that one, then it matters enormously where the poem was written. Butler wants the Odyssey to have a home, too.

The weaknesses of the edition are inseparable from its strengths. Butler's prose, for all its brisk readability, sometimes flattens the archaic strangeness of the Greek into a bluff Victorian conversational tone that can feel like a minor-key reduction. "Heart, be still, you had worse than this to bear on the day when the terrible Cyclops ate your brave companions"—this is powerful, but it is also slightly too comfortable, slightly too much like a nanny soothing a child. The footnotes, while fascinating, are so pervasive and so partisan that they can overwhelm the text they are supposed to serve; a reader who simply wants to follow the story will find herself constantly tugged aside to consider the geography of the Aegadean islands or the likelihood that a particular line was lifted from Iliad xxii. And Butler's two-poem thesis, while provocative, creates more problems than it solves. The seams he identifies are real—the double council of the gods, the confusion over whether Eurynome and Euryclea are one nurse or two—but a redactor clumsy enough to leave such obvious stitches would also, presumably, be clumsy enough to leave evidence of his own hand throughout, and Butler's argument that the redactor "inserted lines and wrote a new council of the gods" to give "even a semblance of unity" attributes to the interloper both incompetence and a surprisingly sophisticated literary intelligence. The authoress thesis, meanwhile, rests on a chain of inferences that modern scholarship has largely declined to follow. That a poem shows sympathy for women does not prove a woman wrote it; that a poet describes a landscape accurately does not prove she never traveled beyond it. Butler's method, for all its footnoted fastidiousness, is ultimately an argument from the gut—a reader's powerful intuition dressed in the clothes of textual criticism.

But the gut argument, in this case, is more illuminating than many a sober one. Butler belongs to the tradition of the Homeric Question that runs from Wolf through the Analyst and Unitarian debates of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and his specific contribution—the Trapani localization and the female authorship—sits at the intersection of historiography, empiricist skepticism, and an early, idiosyncratic feminist hermeneutics. He is doing what critics do: reading the text closely enough to notice things other readers have missed, then constructing an elaborate apparatus to make those things visible. That the apparatus is wrong in its conclusions does not mean it is worthless. Butler's notes force the reader to see the poem's borrowings from the Iliad, its geographical specificity, its doubled scenes and structural joints—features that exist in the text whether or not Butler's explanation of them is correct. He makes you a more attentive reader of Homer by making you argue with him.

This is, finally, an edition for two kinds of reader: the one who wants a readable, vigorous prose Odyssey in English, and the one who wants to watch a nineteenth-century controversialist wrestle with the foundations of the Western canon. The first reader will occasionally be exasperated by the footnotes; the second will occasionally wish the translation would get out of the way so she can follow the argument. But the double experience is the point. Butler's Odyssey does not let you forget that every translation is an interpretation, that every received text has a history of reception, and that the poem you are reading is not a smooth monument but a layered, contested, living artifact. The man who chides his own heart in the darkness—"Heart, be still, you had worse than this to bear"—is both Homer's hero and Butler's construction, and the tension between them is where the book lives.