A Plague upon the Achaeans (1.35-72)

πολλὰ δ' ἔπειτ' ἀπάνευθε κιὼν ἠρᾶθ' ὃ γεραιὸς [35]
Ἀπόλλωνι ἄνακτι, τὸν ἠύ̈κομος τέκε Λητώ:
κλῦθί μευ ἀργυρότοξ', ὃς Χρύσην ἀμφιβέβηκας
Κίλλάν τε ζαθέην Τενέδοιό τε ἶφι ἀνάσσεις,
Σμινθεῦ εἴ ποτέ τοι χαρίεντ' ἐπὶ νηὸν ἔρεψα,
ἢ εἰ δή ποτέ τοι κατὰ πίονα μηρί' ἔκηα [40]
ταύρων ἠδ' αἰγῶν, τὸ δέ μοι κρήηνον ἐέλδωρ:
τίσειαν Δαναοὶ ἐμὰ δάκρυα σοῖσι βέλεσσιν.
ὣς ἔφατ' εὐχόμενος, τοῦ δ' ἔκλυε Φοῖβος Ἀπόλλων,
βῆ δὲ κατ' Οὐλύμποιο καρήνων χωόμενος κῆρ,
τόξ' ὤμοισιν ἔχων ἀμφηρεφέα τε φαρέτρην: [45]
ἔκλαγξαν δ' ἄρ' ὀïστοὶ ἐπ' ὤμων χωομένοιο,
αὐτοῦ κινηθέντος: ὃ δ' ἤιïε νυκτὶ ἐοικώς.
ἕζετ' ἔπειτ' ἀπάνευθε νεῶν, μετὰ δ' ἰὸν ἕηκε:
δεινὴ δὲ κλαγγὴ γένετ' ἀργυρέοιο βιοῖο:
οὐρῆας μὲν πρῶτον ἐπῴχετο καὶ κύνας ἀργούς, [50]
αὐτὰρ ἔπειτ' αὐτοῖσι βέλος ἐχεπευκὲς ἐφιεὶς
βάλλ': αἰεὶ δὲ πυραὶ νεκύων καίοντο θαμειαί.
ἐννῆμαρ μὲν ἀνὰ στρατὸν ᾤχετο κῆλα θεοῖο,
τῇ δεκάτῃ δ' ἀγορὴν δὲ καλέσσατο λαὸν Ἀχιλλεύς:
τῷ γὰρ ἐπὶ φρεσὶ θῆκε θεὰ λευκώλενος Ἥρη: [55]
κήδετο γὰρ Δαναῶν, ὅτι ῥα θνήσκοντας ὁρᾶτο.
οἳ δ' ἐπεὶ οὖν ἤγερθεν ὁμηγερέες τε γένοντο,
τοῖσι δ' ἀνιστάμενος μετέφη πόδας ὠκὺς Ἀχιλλεύς:
Ἀτρείïδη νῦν ἄμμε παλιμπλαγχθέντας ὀίω
ἂψ ἀπονοστήσειν, εἴ κεν θάνατόν γε φύγοιμεν, [60]
εἰ δὴ ὁμοῦ πόλεμός τε δαμᾷ καὶ λοιμὸς Ἀχαιούς:
ἀλλ' ἄγε δή τινα μάντιν ἐρείομεν ἢ ἱερῆα
ἢ καὶ ὀνειροπόλον, καὶ γάρ τ' ὄναρ ἐκ Διός ἐστιν,
ὅς κ' εἴποι ὅ τι τόσσον ἐχώσατο Φοῖβος Ἀπόλλων,
εἴτ' ἄρ' ὅ γ' εὐχωλῆς ἐπιμέμφεται ἠδ' ἑκατόμβης, [65]
αἴ κέν πως ἀρνῶν κνίσης αἰγῶν τε τελείων
βούλεται ἀντιάσας ἡμῖν ἀπὸ λοιγὸν ἀμῦναι.
ἤτοι ὅ γ' ὣς εἰπὼν κατ' ἄρ' ἕζετο: τοῖσι δ' ἀνέστη
Κάλχας Θεστορίδης οἰωνοπόλων ὄχ' ἄριστος,
ὃς ᾔδη τά τ' ἐόντα τά τ' ἐσσόμενα πρό τ' ἐόντα, [70]
καὶ νήεσσ' ἡγήσατ' Ἀχαιῶν Ἴλιον εἴσω
ἣν διὰ μαντοσύνην, τήν οἱ πόρε Φοῖβος Ἀπόλλων:


Translation:

Then going far apart the old man prayed hard
to Lord Apollo, son of lovelytressed Leto:

Heed me, Lord of the Silverbow,
you who guard the towns of Chryse and sacred Killa,
you who rule over Tenedos in your might, Sminthian Apollo:
if ever I raised some pleasing shrine to you,
if ever I burned the rich shanks of bulls or rams to you,
then bring this wish to pass for me:
make the Danaans pay for my tears with your arrows.

So he made his prayer, and Phoibos Apollo heard him and
down he came from the peaks of Olympus, his heart enfuriated.
His bow and quiver were slung across his shoulders,
and the arrows clanged against his back as he strode in anger.
And the god came on like night.

He sat apart from the ships and shot his arrows among them,
and the clamor made by the silver bow was terrible.
The mules he attacked first and the swift hounds,
but then he aimed his sharp arrows at the men themselves, and
shot. The funeral pyres burned everywhere always.

For nine days the god’s arrows fell upon the army,
but on the tenth Achilles summoned the host to a meeting,
for the whitearmed goddess Hera put the thought in his mind,
worried as she was when she saw the Danaans dying.
And so they gathered together and formed an assembly,
and swiftfooted Achilles stood up before them and spoke:

Son of Atreus, beaten down as we are now, I think
we’ll have to run for home—if we can even escape death at all,
since it looks like war and plague together will crush us Achaeans.
But come, let us consult some seer or priest or even some
dream interpreter—for a dream, too, comes from Zeus—
someone who could say why Phoebus Apollo is so angry,
whether he faults us for some vow or sacrifice, and
whether accepting perfect offerings of sheep and goats
he would perhaps be willing to ward us from this plague.

Having spoken thus he took his seat, and then Kalkhas stood up,
the son of Thestor and by far the best at deciphering bird omens;
he knew all that was and all that would someday come to pass,
and he had brought the Achaeans to Troy through the
prophetic genius that Phoebus Apollo had granted him.


Comments:

There are several specific challenges in this section that touch on important broader issues. One challenge here is the formal quality of Chryses’ language in his prayer to Apollo. The prayer is not simply improvised out of nothing; both Chryses and behind him Homer are working with the traditional genre of the prayer. There is a pattern that must be followed (address the god by his cult titles, remind him of past acts of piety and things done in his service, make the request). So the Greek has a more rigid and constrained quality here—it is more formulaic than ever. How to get this over into English, given that this prayer form is not familiar to us? I relied on anaphora and the archaic-sounding “heed” to cue the reader that this is not a colloquial moment, that this is heightened, ritualistic speech. But the broader question this raises is how to approach the many formal speech genres (prayers, boasts, harangues, insults, etc) that Homer uses and shows his characters using. The audience should come to recognize the generic quality of these when characters make use of them because this would encourage the audience to “hear” affinities and differences between the ways different characters make use of the genres. To some extent this can be accomplished by translating the formulaic diction of each genre in a consistent way throughout, but I would also like to find a way to suggest genre through the formal characteristics of my translation.

A second challenge is recognizing special effects in the Greek and finding ways to convey them in English. Homer’s Greek rolls along in such a way that one can easily lose sight of its carefully crafted and polished quality. The ironic downside of achieving an apparent effortlessness of style is that it can “teach” the reader not to invest much effort in the poetic details. One simple special effect in this passage is the enjambment and onomatopoeia of ball’ (“shot”) in line 52. These enjambments would be highly noticeable in performance given that it seems the aoidoi paused slightly at the end of each verse (perhaps to play an extra hexameter note as is done in the reconstructed performance available on the Ancient Greek Music website). Here, the preceding line runs “but then he aimed his sharp arrows at the men themselves,” which in Greek is actually not a complete sentence: “aimed” (ephieis) is a participle, not a finite verb, so at the end of the line the audience is left hanging, waiting for the verb to complete the sense. You then get the harsh and dramatic and monosyllabic ball’ at the beginning of the next line followed by a full stop. As the Kirk commentary (I think) notes, this is meant to imitate the sound of the bowstring twanging. A nice effect. In English, I followed the enjambment, but instead of an onomatopoetic word (e.g. “twanged”) I chose “shot” because that’s just what sounded right. “Twanged” doesn’t sound serious enough to me and the moment is a grim one. I can’t say twang without picturing a banjo (wrong intrument here!).

Another special effect, just to mention it, is the dramatic isolation of a stark and simple statement. There are two excellent ones here, and all I did was go ahead and isolate them as Homer did (actually, I increased the first one’s isolation by making it occupy its own verse). They are: “And the god came on like night” (one of my favorite lines in the poem) and “The funeral pyres burned everywhere always.”

My final comment concerns the visual layout of the translation. How should one decide how to lay out the poem on the page? Here we have no original to work from. What should we be shooting for? The Greek texts we all work from do not look like whatever Homer’s written version might have looked like. Ours are in a script developed in the Renaissance and we have all kinds of aids to understanding such as punctuation, accents, breathings, indents, quotation marks, line numbers, and a blank space between each word—none of which was a characteristic of even classical-era texts, much less early archaic ones. So I’m not sure where that leaves us. I guess it frees us to lay out the text however we want to. Maybe the best strategy is to lay it out so that it is eminently readable—that is, readable out loud. So for now I’m inserting line spaces between what seem to me like the paragraph-type sense units of the poem. Nobody wants to read:
FORNINEDAYSTHEGODSARROWSFELLUPONTHEARMY
The only conceivable advantage to this would be that it would slow the reader down to a crawl, and Homer wouldn’t seem quite so effortless. Then we might notice the delicate craftsmanship of each and every verse. Or we might go crosseyed and insane.