Achilles Requests Thetis’s Aid (1.393-412)

ἀλλὰ σὺ εἰ δύνασαί γε περίσχεο παιδὸς ἑῆος:
ἐλθοῦσ' Οὔλυμπον δὲ Δία λίσαι, εἴ ποτε δή τι
ἢ ἔπει ὤνησας κραδίην Διὸς ἠὲ καὶ ἔργῳ. [395]
πολλάκι γάρ σεο πατρὸς ἐνὶ μεγάροισιν ἄκουσα
εὐχομένης ὅτ' ἔφησθα κελαινεφέιïΚρονίωνι
οἴη ἐν ἀθανάτοισιν ἀεικέα λοιγὸν ἀμῦναι,
ὁππότε μιν ξυνδῆσαι Ὀλύμπιοι ἤθελον ἄλλοι
Ἥρη τ' ἠδὲ Ποσειδάων καὶ Παλλὰς Ἀθήνη: [400]
ἀλλὰ σὺ τόν γ' ἐλθοῦσα θεὰ ὑπελύσαο δεσμῶν,
ὦχ' ἑκατόγχειρον καλέσασ' ἐς μακρὸν Ὄλυμπον,
ὃν Βριάρεων καλέουσι θεοί, ἄνδρες δέ τε πάντες
Αἰγαίων', ὃ γὰρ αὖτε βίην οὗ πατρὸς ἀμείνων:
ὅς ῥα παρὰ Κρονίωνι καθέζετο κύδεΐ γαίων: [405]
τὸν καὶ ὑπέδεισαν μάκαρες θεοὶ οὐδ' ἔτ' ἔδησαν.
τῶν νῦν μιν μνήσασα παρέζεο καὶ λαβὲ γούνων
αἴ κέν πως ἐθέλῃσιν ἐπὶ Τρώεσσιν ἀρῆξαι,
τοὺς δὲ κατὰ πρύμνας τε καὶ ἀμφ' ἅλα ἔλσαι Ἀχαιοὺς
κτεινομένους, ἵνα πάντες ἐπαύρωνται βασιλῆος, [410]
γνῷ δὲ καὶ Ἀτρεΐδης εὐρὺ κρείων Ἀγαμέμνων
ἣν ἄτην ὅ τ' ἄριστον Ἀχαιῶν οὐδὲν ἔτισεν.


Translation:
But you, if in fact you can, protect your son:
go to Olympus, and beseech the help
of Zeus—if ever you pleased him in word
or deed. For often in your father’s halls
I’ve heard you boast that you alone of all
the gods did save Blackclouded Zeus from dark
destruction once when all the other gods—
Poseidon, Hera, Pallas Athena, too—
were keen to bind him. Goddess, you did seek
to free him from his binding chains, and so
you swiftly brought to high Olympus’s peak
the hundred-handed one whom gods do name
Briareus, but all mortal men call
Aigaion. Greater than his father is
he in sheer force, and so he sat beside
the son of Kronos, gloating in the glory.
The blessed gods feared him and dared not bind
the other. Go remind him now of this
and sit beside him, grasp his knees and see
if he could somehow help the Trojan host
to drive the Achaeans back against the ships
around the harbor, killing them, that they
enjoy their king, and he, the wide-ruling son
of Atreus, Agamemnon, may come
to know his grave mistake—that he has not
honored the best of the Achaean men.


Comments:
As a kind of experiment, I translated this section into rough blank verse. I was inspired to give this a shot since I’ve been teaching Shakespeare in my class on “Critical Humors” and have been reading a lot of Marlowe during my convalescence. I was contemplating the suppleness of Marlowe’s iambic pentameter, in particular how he achieves that supple quality by avoiding the temptation to run lots and lots of monosyllabic words together, which is the easiest way to maintain an iambic beat, given that most disyllabic words in English are naturally trochaic. Marlowe simply (but often brilliantly) works these disyllabic trochees in by beginning them mid-foot, thereby avoiding too many diaereses within a single line. I began to think that adopting that tactic might be a way to make the iambic pentameter work for translating Homer into an idiom that’s contemporary enough without being overly prosaic. I’m also allowing myself a little more leeway than Marlowe allows himself with both the syllable count in each line (sometimes 10, sometimes 11) and the adherence to the iamb itself in the first half of the verse. It seems to me that a strict adherence to iambic pentameter will lead me to adopt too many of the archaic-sounding tricks which early modern poets drew upon. In this section you can see some of these tricks—like adding “did” before a monosyllabic verb to create a simple iamb, or inverting the natural order of subject – verb. So by not allowing myself to use too many of these tricks (in order to keep the idiom more contemporary), I actually would make it much more difficult to render Homer into iambic pentameter. Hence my decision to loosen up the iambic pentameter itself and worry most about having it assert itself toward the end of the verse (as does Homer’s dactylic hexameter, which almost always ends with the strict -uu -x).

So do I think this experiment was a success? It was on the one hand slower going but on the other more challenging and enjoyable. Having a stricter poetic form to adhere to is probably a good thing, since otherwise the translation doesn’t really feel poetic to me as I write it. When I am translating freely (as I’ve done until today), I am sometimes pleased with this or that rendition of a feature of Homer’s poetry, but overall the only thing poetic about it is that I am choosing where to have the line break. That’s a pretty minimal poetic threshold, and what I think I need to begin doing is raising that threshold little by little, while still keeping the language lively and contemporary. Though I am clearly no Marlowe, I am pleased with how today’s passage sounds, especially considering how literally it translates the Greek. So I look forward to experimenting more with this approach and developing greater facility with it, but I’m not yet certain that it’s the best way to go.