Translating the Odyssey, with Daniel Mendelsohn

I think when you translate something it puts you into an even greater intimacy with the text. You're peering into the bones and the sinews and the DNA. Welcome to Lesky, a podcast on new ideas in ancient Greek studies. I'm your host, Johanna Hanning, and I'm a class assistant at Brown University. Well, it's exciting times here in the Brown University Classics Department because this week we have in residence Charlie Kovell, creator of the HitNetflix series Chaos. I first met Charlie when they did a very early episode of the podcast and we wound up staying in touch. So here at Brown we've got various events planned with them all week and last night we had double the fun because we were joined by Misha Butler who played the part of Kineas in the show for a conversation. When I started the podcast I had no idea that it might lead to collaborations like this one and it's been very fun. So that's a note about a big week but now I want to mention a big decade. I'd say that the last 10 years have been a pretty big decade for the works of another Greek mythology creative type and now I'm talking about Homer. That decade kicked off in 2016 with a new Iliad translation by Caroline Alexander. Then the next year Emily Wilson's Odyssey came out to much fanfare as did a memoir about the Odyssey or really about teaching the Odyssey written by Daniel Mendelsen. Who is our guest for this episode of the podcast? Fast forward to 2023 and we got Emily Wilson's Iliad which we happen to discuss in episode 6 of Lesky if you want to wander into the back catalog. And then last fall Umberto Pascellini's cinematic dramatization of the second half of the Odyssey called the Return was released in movie theaters. And of course we've got an episode for that too. It's bonus episode number two. So now we all know that Christopher Nolan is filming his own version of the story which stars Matt Damon as a Dixias and is scheduled for release in July of 2026. Like I said, Homer's having a big decade and my guest today is here to talk to us about one more very exciting reason why. Next week the University of Chicago Press is releasing Daniel Mendelsen's own very new translation of the Odyssey. And it was an absolute delight to host him here on the podcast for a conversation about the approach that he took to translating the poem. Daniel has long been a kind of classicist hero of mine ever since graduate school when I really started carefully reading his criticism on matters classical and otherwise in places like the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. For me, he was really the first critic that I'd ever read who really knew the field. I mean, he does have a Princeton PhD in classics after all and who could write about it in a brightly elegant modern American pros idiom. In 2017, I got to interview him back when his Odyssey memoir and Odyssey, a father, a son, and an epic was about to come out. I was actually reviewing the book for Idle on now having the chance to chat with him about his new translation of the Odyssey felt to me like we were bringing the conversation full circle. But maybe that's little two on the nose given that Daniel himself has literally written the book on ring composition. It's called three rings in case you're interested. Daniel Mendelsen is an award-winning memoirist, translator, and essayist who writes frequently for the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books where he is the editor at large. His books include the International Best Sellers, The Lost, A Search for Six of Six Million, and an Odyssey, A Father, a son, and an epic, as well as a translation of the poetry of Concenting Cavaffi. His translation of Homer's Odyssey comes out next week on April 9th. So just a quick note that as ever, I've put a few references in the show notes for this episode. Now I'd like to welcome into the Lesky Daniel Mendelsen. The next voice you'll be hearing is his. It started in January of 2018. I had just published a few months earlier my memoir, "Comb Odyssey Criticism," a book called "An Odyssey, A Father, a Son, and an Epic" about how my 82-year-old father decided to sit in on my first year Odyssey Seminar at Bard. And so that had come out in September of 17, and one night in January of 2018, my phone rang, and it was the executive editor of the University of Chicago Press. And she had read my Odyssey book about my dad, and for the purposes of the book, I had translated a bunch of snippets of the text, mostly because I didn't want to have to deal with getting rights to the Fitzgerald Odyssey, which was the one that we actually read in the class that my dad took. And she said she had read my book. She had liked the translations that I had done for the book, and it turns out that Chicago has for a long time been looking to add an Odyssey to its list. They, as everybody knows, have done the Latamor Iliad, and Latamor was supposed to have done an Odyssey for them. And what happened was his editor at University of Chicago Press moved to a commercial house, Harper and Row, as it then was called. And so it was Harper who published the Latamor Odyssey, not Chicago. So Chicago has been without an Odyssey for 60 some odd years. So that's how it happened. They reached out to me and said, "I was actually, I remember very clearly, as on my hands and needs, washing my kitchen floor when the phone rang, and I sort of took the call in a state of slight shock." And she said, "Well, if you're interested, we'd like you to do an Odyssey translation for us." So I thought about it, and I've written very often about translations of classical to actually translations of all kinds of literary texts, not just classical. And so how to translate Homer in particular was very much on my mind. I was coming off of this book where I was thinking a lot about the Odyssey and what it meant. And so I said, "Yes." So that was January of 2018. And then I basically spent a year, little over a year, really sort of starting to think about what my approach would be, how I was going to think about meter issues about tone and diction. And I spent a lot of time sort of as it were scribbling, trying different things out, because I actually realized that what I had done in my Odyssey book wasn't going to be the mode that I wanted to use for an actual translation. The passages I translated for the sake of that book I was more interested in, let's call it a literal translation, because the readers of that book were likely not to have a lot of exposure to the Odyssey. Also, I had to re-educate myself as a Homerist. I'm a Greek tragedy person. Obviously I know about Homer what any classist does. And I had also been formed, you know, my undergraduate education. I was mentored by Jenny Strauss Clay. So there was a lot of kind of Odyssey in my intellectual DNA, so to speak. But I thought I really have to get down and dirty and immerse myself in the scholarship. So I spent about a year and maybe 15 months just doing that. I felt I had to have that under my belt, even before I looked at line one. And then once I had spent all that time both immersing myself in the scholarship and then thinking about how I was going to approach it, I started in the middle of 2019. And then I, in a funny way, COVID, I think was helpful to me in that I suddenly had nothing else to do. I think I got a lot more done than I would have done if I had my usual load of teaching and lecturing and writing. So I had a draft by the summer of 2022. So that's 1920, 20, so that was four years. And then I spent two years going over the text line by line with Jenny Clay, actually. I had centered the manuscript and I said, oh, would you take a look at this and let me know what you think. And so I thought, you know, I'd get it back with sort of comments in the margin. But Jenny being Jenny, the most rigorous intellectually rigorous person I know said this is how we're going to do it. And so for two years, we had two, two and a half zooms a week in which we would look at the Greek and then look at my translation and then argue and discuss. And so that took until the summer of 24, which is when I delivered the manuscript. And it's being published in April of 25. So that's sort of the parkour of the whole. project from start to finish. You know I think people think that when you translate you know you sit down you take out your dictionary and you start going you know and it isn't like that it isn't especially isn't like that with Homer for all the obvious reasons you know. How did you find the experience of translating the Odyssey and in particular preparing this I almost think it was a translation edition because you have a lot of apparatus to it you indicate departures from the established Greek text of the OCT. How would you compare the your process of working on this to what you did with Kavafi because I found your I've always thought your Kavafi translation was also very filological and he's someone who I mean his corpus is a mess in a very different way than Homer's is but they're both kind of messes for translators to deal with so was it was it all similar or well I think you're right in saying that my approach you know my approach is filological that's how I'm trained so that's naturally how I tackle thing but you know I'm also a teacher and as you know I'm also someone who has spent a lot of time over the past 35 years sort of writing about the classics for a mainstream audience and so uppermost in my mind as it always is is how do you get these sort of philosophical points and insights across to a general reader that's always uppermost in my mind but first you have to do the work of dealing with the text and really thinking about the words on the page in as I would say as exacting a manner as possible so I've already mentioned that you know and of course people who are listening to this understand that with Homer there are famous problems you know and difficulties both with the text with interpretation arguments about orality blah blah blah so we all know that but I also thought it was important to sort of deliver that to the reader so not only do I have a general introduction which obviously you've got to have I mean ultimately the audience for a book like that is going to be either the general reader or a student and either high school or at a university or college level so there's a general introduction but at a certain point I decided that I had to do what I did with Kavaffee which is to provide at the back of the text a very ample notes and commentary section so it's not just explaining where you know Sparta is or who Tindarius is or that kind of stuff which people need but a kind of literary commentary which I think is helpful to the ordinary reader explaining where there are disputes about the text but also noting where certain formuleic phrases appear as well in the Iliad a literary commentary sort of walking people through the text and very much the way I did in my Odyssey memoir actually which is you know why is this happening now how is Homer creating excitement or anticipation in this scene I think people like to be shepherded to a certain extent I'm not I I tried to do it in a way where I'm not imposing an interpretation but just sort of planting flags so to speak so people will notice you know for example I think it's interesting people to notice that you know when when Odysseus says you know I hate like the gates of Hades a man who says one thing and does another I think people are interested to know that that appears as well in the in the Iliad right so I'm trying to draw people attention to the you know the pretty basic stuff that we know as classices but an ordinary reader is not going to know both technical but also to some extent interpretative what was the audience that you had in mind were you thinking back to your students or were you thinking more of a general or an older public I think it's it's I mean I think of the people for whom I write when I'm writing for the New York Review of Books or the New Yorker you know intelligent grown-ups who are interested in picking up the Odyssey but of course obviously are also hoping that it will be adopted in classrooms so a lot of what went into my notes in commentary was the product of 35 years of teaching the Odyssey and knowing the kinds of questions you know that that students have about the text and and issues of interpretation for the text so I try to fold that into the commentary because I know the kinds of things that have come up in the minds of students I'm also thinking of teachers high school teachers college teachers who are doing great books course or you know whatever who aren't necessarily classisists and pointing them to items of interest that will help them teach the text in a rich way well I usually ask this further along in the conversation but you sort of set me up for it and I'm curious if after you mentioned 35 years of teaching this text you know after 35 years of doing anything you think you got a hang of it but was there anything that surprised you or that you changed your mind about in the course of working on it with this amount of you know care and precision and time yeah I mean I do think that even if you're a literary critic which we are I think when you translate something it puts you into an even greater intimacy is the word I always use intimacy with the text you're peering into the the bones and the sinews and the DNA so I do think that you're oriented to the text in a very different way than you are even when you're a scholar writing in a scholarly way about the text I can't think off hand of anything that particularly changed as far as my thinking about the text goes but I feel that I certainly know it even better you know then I thought I knew it and this is after I'd already written a book about it there well you know one thing that came out of it which is actually so you know as you know I sort of left the academic world after my PhD and I started writing full time and then I sort of came back much later to Bard so I haven't ever really been publishing as a classic scholar not since I was in grad school and I published a few articles but I did I did write a scholarly article about Yumaez a good friend of mine Lucia Athanasaki there was a festrift in her honor and Jenny said you know what I want to contribute to it and Jenny and I co-authored a three-part note and the part that I wrote about was there's a vexed passage at a certain point in the Odyssey where in the first encounter between Yumaez and Odysseus where Odysseus gets very frustrated that Yumaez isn't listening to the fact that he keeps saying oh Odysseus is on his way back and Yumaez is so pessimistic and Odysseus says look you know you're very tough customer and if I'm lying you can throw me off a cliff as a warning to other vagabonds who tell lies and Yumaez is horrified and he says you know what kind of person would people think I am if I threw my guests off of a cliff and there's a question about the diction in this passage about whether he's being ironic or not and as I translated the Odyssey it occurred to me that almost every time Yumaez opens his mouth he's being sardonic or sarcastic I mean the guy has a very kind of wise-acre tone of voice you know he's always saying things like he says to telemicus well you never come to see me you probably want to hang out with those suitors all the time you know he's got a certain tone of voice which I had never really noticed before and for the purposes of this article I suddenly thought every time this guy talks so I was writing an article in favor of the ironic interpretation of that one particular passage adducing many other examples of the way that he actually speaks very sarcastically quite often you know I so that definitely changed you know I always think of Yumaez as a this kind of nice old guy you know but I think he's quite bitter actually and he's a kind of wounded character so that's a kind of thing that will pop up you know when you have to think about a certain line very hard to figure out the tone of voice for your translation that's the kind of thing that can happen absolutely could I ask you to speak a little bit about your process just the nuts and bolts of translating is it something that I always find this really interesting is it something that you do right away on a computer or do you hand right or what would you start at the beginning do you do how do you do your drafts yeah well no I started at the beginning and went straight through and I work on a computer so I would I had I'm looking around my desk as we're talking and it's unbelievably bear for the first time in six years you know it was I have a very big desk and so on On one side I would have all my lexica and my commentaries and on the other side I would have the OCT and you know other texts and no I started at line one and I thought you know someone gave me very good advice when I started my dissertation and they said don't ever think that you're writing your dissertation. Just think I'm writing these three pages today. And that's how I got through it. And so I thought I was going to do 30 lines a day between 30 and 40 lines a day and so I would open, I had my file on my computer and I also had the LSJ in one window on my browser and you know stuff like that. The Unicode Odyssey on another and I just did 30 lines. It gets both more and less complicated as you go on. So more complicated because as especially with an oral epic like Homer where there's a lot of repetition you can sometimes be halfway through the poem and you realize that there's a formulaic phrase that you suddenly have a better way of doing and then you have to go back and change everything that you've already done. On the other hand the nice part about translating an oral poet is suddenly you'll be in a 15 line passage and you think oh my god wait I've already translated this. I can have lunch you know. So I did find that the first, I would say the first four books were the hardest because that's when I was really putting to work. Some of the ideas I had worked out on paper say about formulaic epithets or that kind of thing. But it's one thing to have them worked out beforehand. You know what am I going to do with you know rotoductilose a-os or something like that. But when you're actually translating and you're seeing the material in context as it unfolds as different characters use these different formulaic phrases and then you start really thinking. And so I don't think I really got into a groove where I felt confident about how I was tackling everything until maybe the beginning of book five at which point I had to go back and sort of go through everything I had done in one through four and sort of bring everything onto the same level. So I would say those were the hardest and then it was every morning I'm an early riser I would get up I'd make a pot of coffee come upstairs and working out a very rough draft of 30 to 40 lines would take me usually from eight in the morning till about one in the afternoon. And then you know and as you know sometimes you're going to come across a word which is famously problematic and that means you might have to stop for three days in order to start doing your research. So the notorious examples which is already in book one is amumon right how do you translate when Zeus at the beginning of book one says you know the narrator says Zeus was put in mind of that amumon man. I guess this now blameless which is the typical way of translating amumon clearly does not it's not an appropriate epithet of I guess this who was the most blameworthy character. So then you have to delve deep into that you have to read I stopped and I spent three days reading and Perry's book which is devoted to that one word you know searching through the bibliography you know so but usually it would take me four and a half five hours to get 30 lines done but there were you know there were stopping points where I suddenly realized I had to deal with an issue which had vast interpretative ramifications and then I would spend a week just reading articles and reading books and trying to figure out where I stood on a certain issue before I could proceed. So that's basically my that was my process sort of taking little bites then you know you get to a certain point you think oh I've done four books of the Odyssey and it starts to feel like something that may not be so impossible after all but that came much later you know I just tried to look at the the passage in front of me every morning and think about only that and you know as I said it would often be the case where two thirds of the way through I'll think oh no this is the right way to deal with this word and then thank God for computers then I would have to go through the whole text and switch things around but I think basically that's how I did it. You mentioned earlier that this you know this translation of course is different than the snippets of translation that you did in your Odyssey memoir or come other things book. So I'm I guess I'm wondering about the voice that you found for this and sort of where and was that something that you always had in your head or was that something that maybe clicked into places you were saying okay after doing the first four books. Yeah I think it was something I worked out in practice during the first four books you know hitting the right tone a tone that you know the other thing about tone is right you have to be consistent. So the narrator has to sound the same all the time the characters have to sound more or less like themselves and it did take me a while as I said to sort of get into the groove and I also you know I was making decisions as I went along for example at a certain moment I thought and I write about this in my translators note you know whenever I had a choice between using an English word that had Latinate roots or Anglo-Saxon roots I would always go with the Anglo-Saxon roots I think that helps give the poem a more archaic and also a planar tone tonality. So things like that would sort of present themselves you know as I went along and then I'd say oh this is how I'm going to do it and then I would go back and fix what I'd already done and then I would know how to deal with it moving ahead. But there were certain decisions about tone and diction that I was making as individual cases presented themselves which I then adopted as a rule. Yeah I remember being struck by that and then you know the translation that the preference for the Anglo-Saxon which I think is a really interesting matter to flag for a couple of reasons. First of all it made me think back to you know Shemez Haney was someone who thought a lot about using the Anglo-Saxon roots and maybe think back to some of his essays and poems but also made me think to the idea in you know modern Greek the concede in modern Greek stays where I've had Greeks say that they enjoy speaking English because it is also a language that you have the multiple registers that you can pick between whereas they have the cathodevousa or the the demotic right we do have this the classic example of being queenly royal or regal. You can go English French Latin and you can construct a lot of conversation making those those sorts of choices. So I think it was a really really interesting choice that got for the and of course the great irony for is that like for us the the lower register like the Anglo-Saxon is feels the oldest which is the inverse of the Greek. But I think that that is really does contribute a lot to the voice of this I think is very effective and a really important thing to flag. Thank you. So could you maybe say a few things about some of these epithets that people who have been reading the poem you know even in Greek forever maybe take for granted but that you have you bring some insight into so I'm thinking in particular and you discuss it in the translators note the what we usually say as winged words and you had a really interesting observation about how words don't actually have wings. Well so it's not there was an article early 20th century article and I'm the blanking on whose it was which first put the V in my bonnet about that because I think first of all winged or winged whichever way you want to say is that you know so so many of these epithets have sort of lodged themselves in the consciousness of English literature right gray eye to Athena and Rosie finger dawn and winged words but I really wanted to sort of think about and I'm just going to preface everything I say in this conversation by saying I'm going to use Homer to represent the entire process of composition. So I think that whoever came up with the phrase epeopteroenta was thinking of feathers not wings and was thinking about the fletching on arrows that the words are darting at people you know people have written about the way that when this epithet occurs it's usually in moments of heated conversation or emotion. So I think that that the actual metaphor is from archery and not from you know it's archery not aviary so to speak and so with that in mind I thought well how do you get that across and what I came up with was, you know, something like she spoke to him then with words that flew toward him like arrows. I wanted the arrows to be in the reader's mind because I actually think that's what Homer was thinking about. The words are feathered or fletched, not winged. Also, as I wrote in the introduction, whenever I think of winged words, I think of the flying elephants and Walt Disney's Fantasia and that somehow always cracks me up. So, you know, I was trying to sort of get to the root of things, the same things with glaucofies, which has traditionally been translated as gray-eyed, but actually seems to be derived from glauques, the owl, and I live in the country, so I've encountered owls in barns, and it's an extremely unnerving experience in the dark to see these gleaming, fixed stare. And I think, you know, if you look at archaic representations of Athena, she has those big giant googly eyes, and I think that's what it really means is owl-eyed. But of course, glaucofies also has the connotation of gleaming, something that gleams. So, what I finally came up with was, you know, Athena, she of the bright owl eyes. I wanted the image in the reader's mind to be about the stare, the fixed stare, shiny yellow eyes of an owl, because I think that's what we're meant to feel. And as you know, apropos of epithets, and I write about this as well in my translator's note, I am a great believer in the Homeric stylistic. So, unlike many contemporary translators, I don't try to translate away the epithets. I repeat them exactly the way they are repeated in the text, because I feel, and this again, you know, this is just a matter of personal taste. But particularly for a student encountering Homer, I want that student to feel the archaic, you know, what I call the starch and the collar, the stiffness of the text. It's for me a very important part of how Homer feels. So, you know, people have found wonderful ways to sort of, as it were, modernize or adapt the epithets to make them feel fortuitous. So, Emily Wilson has a wonderful, I think it was Emily Wilson who says, you know, Athena's eyes lit up, which is a wonderful image if you want to take that approach to make it seem like not that she always has these bright, staring eyes, but at that moment her eyes lit up. That's certainly one way to do it. But I like my reader to feel Homer's stylistics. For me, that is such an integral part of the text that I wouldn't ever want to get rid of the formulaic repetitions. I feel like I can never think of this word. Maybe you know it. It starts with a P and it's what mountain climbers stick in the face of the rock in order to get a grip. And it has said, there's a word for that. And I think that's what those formulaic epithets and lines and passages are. I think you want the sense of familiarity when you come across that, oh, that thing again, you know, it's certainly had its uses in an oral performance, but I think even on the page, it's like a basso continuo in a way. You keep having that sort of fud in the background. I like the kind of rhythm those formulaic bits convey. So that's how I approached it. It's funny when you said the starch in the collar, I had actually the translators note open to precisely this passage, which I love to use two images in this paragraph where you're talking about maintaining this balance between conveying the work's strangeness, but then, but also keeping a natural register where you say, sometimes this is a matter of diction, a very occasionally using slightly old fashioned words that will feel to the reader like the princesses P under the mattress, just enough of a bump to make you take notice. I love that. And you give the example of from book one when Athena expresses to Zeus her anxiety about Odysseus, she says, "But my heart is cleft into on behalf of my clever Odysseus." So that's the example you give there. And then you say at other times, I bend the syntax of normal English somewhat, sometimes following the Greek word order in order to, as it were, put some starch in the collar of a line. So you then quote to them, "The father of men and of gods began to speak," right? Or "And then to her feet she strapped the beautiful sandals." I don't want to, nor do I think the reader needs to have the text simplified or made easier or more understandable, as I say, these that little P under the mattress, I think it's important to feel. I should have said at the outset that, you know, mine is a line for line translation almost always unless the syntax of the Greek just makes it impossible. So that was also something I was, you know, that forces you sometimes into a kind of a slightly archaic word order or a slightly unusual word order. But I felt that was something I wanted to go with, you know, to, you know, it isn't the New York Times. It isn't, you know, national geographic. It's verse of a very highly stylized kind, and I feel that should come across in a translation. Well, maybe we could hear a passage from you just, I mean, we're speaking in, I guess, kind of theoretical abstract terms. So, but let's let the listener get a chance to hear some of this for themselves, and then maybe we can talk about your, your metrical choice afterwards. Okay. I'm going to do our goss. Fan favorite. Which always, I still, you know, the only thing that gives me hope for humanity right now is that I still have students who cry when they're talking about the our goss passage, and I just think that's giving me hope for the future. So this is 17 to 91 to 3. 27. Now a dog that was lying close by raised his head and pricked up his ears, our goss, who belonged to Odysseus of the steadfast mind, he himself had raised him with no chance to enjoy him. For long before that he'd gone off to awesome Ilyon. In days gone by, the young men would bring him as they hunted down wild goats and rodeer and hairs. But now he lay there, missed by no one since his master had gone away, deep in the dung that was piled high in front of the palace doors. The dung of nules and cattle which Odysseus's slaves would bring out to the huge estate to spread around on the fields. So their lay our goss, flash, riddled with vermin that plague of dogs. Now though as soon as he sensed that Odysseus was close by, look, he wagged his tail and both his ears went flat. But after he hadn't the strength to come closer to his master, who looked in the other direction and brushed away a tear which he easily hid from Umios, whom he questioned straight away. Umios have very odd that this dog lies in the dung. His body shows beautiful breeding, although it's hard for me to know if he's got racing speed to match that lovely appearance of his, or is merely like those dogs that men keep at their tables, which their masters like to groom in order to make themselves grand. You replied to him then in turn, "Umios, my swine herd." Sure enough, this is the dog whose master died far away. If he were only the way he once was, his looks, the feats he'd perform, just as Odysseus left him as he went off to Troy. You yourself would marvel to behold his speed and strength. No beast that he ever chased in the deepest part of the woods could ever get away. He was also a great one for tracking. But now he's beset by trouble. Somewhere far off his master has perished, and the women are heedless and take no care of him. When the masters of the house don't rule the roost, the slaves no longer have any desire to do an honest day's work. Zeus, whose thunder sounds far off, takes half a man's worth away as soon as the day of enslavement gets him in its grip. So, saying he went inside the bustling palace, going straight through the hall to join the Lordly suitors, and Argos, his fate, Black Death, took him in its grip the moment he saw Odysseus after twenty years had passed. Alright, we'll give people a second to grab a tissue. So, Jane, are you going to do the audiobook? Did you do the audiobook? I did the audiobook. Talk about experiences that give you insights into Homer. I think every classist who teaches Homer or works on Homer should have. to read the whole thing aloud because that really makes you feel the way this thing was supposed to happen. Not least, you know, people are always talking about Sizzurai and why they're in certain places. I can tell you why they're in certain places. They're in certain places because Stactylic Exameter is a long line and you've got to take a breath. It's that easy. And you know, so much comes out in a recitation that even if you spent your life thinking about the poem, it suddenly boom, there it is. This is a performative object. It is meant to be performed and what you're looking at is a script basically. And there are so many ways that you feel the rhythms. You feel the characters, you know, I try to give everyone a slightly different voice, not hamming it up. But I thought, you know, God should sound different from humans and as women should sound a little bit different from men. So I thought it was one of the great educational experiences of my life. And very hard. It was six days, seven hours a day. And you've got a director talking to you in one half of your microphone, you've got your engineer next door and they're kind of stopping you and they'll say, well, I found it very useful. And that's why I keep saying I'm now thinking of the Odyssey as a script for a performance. You know, the director would say, well, but if this is meant to be ironic, don't you want to hit this word harder and blah, blah, blah. You know, I found the whole thing absolutely riveting and a lot of fun. But also there's a giant bowl of throat lozenges next to you as you do this whole thing. Altoids, butterscotch candies, you know, and boy, do you really need them. But I thought it was great. I had a really great time. I think it's going to be released shortly. They're doing the edits right now. That's fantastic. Well, could you maybe say a little bit about your choice to use the examiner line? Yeah. So I, one of the things I decided was that again, and this again speaks to my interest in my audience, you know, I didn't see it as a sort of a gimmick like, oh, it's going to be line for line, you know, because that's been done. But I thought people who are particularly teachers who are going to be consulting secondary literature and, you know, it talks about lines 13 through 26. And I thought, well, you want to turn to a translation where lines 13 through 26 are the same as the Greek text. You know, how many times when I've been using fagals over the year, I'm looking for a line which I know what the line is in Greek and I have to scour page after page and look at the headings to find where it is in the text. So I did decide to do that. And when I realized I wanted to do line for line, I thought, well, the only way this can work as a line for line translation, in my opinion, is to have a very long line because the hexameter is, as we know, a long line. And Greek, as we also know, is verbally a highly much more, infinitely more efficient system than the English verbal system. You know, when I'm talking to non-classicists, I always use the example, you know, in Greek, you can express the idea of to the women who are about to be married in one word, right? And in English, you need a whole line for that. So you're taking a long line in a language that's much more efficient and you want to find a line that is long enough to sort of get everything that's in the Greek line into the English line. And then I thought, well, I don't want to do hexameters strictly, but you can hear in the reading that I just do that there is a sort of a six-beat. Most of my lines have six strong beats and there's usually a pause somewhere in the middle of those. So I'm sort of mimicking the Homeric line without reproducing it. I think if you actually went for strict hexameters, it starts to sound like John Philip Susa, you know, which you don't want. You don't want it sound like an organ grinder. So I, you know, and I switched it up, sometimes I use an anapest to get a line started. I do want people to feel at various places in my line, two shorts and a long, whether it's a long and two shorts or two shorts and a long or, you know, a core I am or something like that. But I want them to have a sense of the rhythm. But again, I'm not slavishly imitating a Homeric hexameter. What I do think is important, I do think is important for the reader. And again, this is about stylistics is I really feel, you know, and I've reviewed so many translations of Homer over the years. So I've thought about this a lot. As we all know, this sort of go to meter for English translations of both Greek and Roman epic, it tends to be blank verse, I am big pentameter. And which, you know, which is a natural line in English. But you know, part of the way that Homer achieves the dignity, I would say, the element of the Homeric tonality that I would refer to as dignity is through the length of the line. It's a long, important, rolling, stately line. And I thought I've got to invent a long six feet line in English that kind of captures the feel of a Homeric hexameter. But more importantly, is long enough to accommodate as much of what is in one line of Homer in English, which is a tough act because English is not as efficient. So that's how I came up with this sort of rolling six feet line, you know, often with a breakdown in the middle. I thought it had a kind of stateliness, which to me is an important element of the Homeric feel. One of the overarching themes of the translators know, and then obviously as meant, you know, which is then manifested in your work in the work of translation, is, you know, you have this real commitment to bringing a lot of the Homeric stylistics to making those shine through in your translation as much as possible. So not only with choices, metrical choices, choices, how many do with diction, but also with the sonic dimension of, so I was wondering if you could say a little bit about that. Like where were there, what kinds of things do you feel like you can bring from a Homer into English? But I'm also curious to hear if there are any things that you were sort of frustrated that you're like, actually, I just can't do this in English. Well, I was thinking a lot about the sounds, which are very important to me, you know, as somebody, I think here having translated Kavafi, having translated a non-classical author, actually a modern author, where I also think that the sounds, the sound effects are incredibly important, obviously, you know, I do sometimes worry, and now I speak as a classist to classist that we go, particularly with regards to Homer, you know, we get so wrapped up in our sort of approach to the poem in interpretative issues and questions about the orality that we forget that this is poetry, and we need to think of it as poetry, and that a big part of poetry is how it sounds, you know, that's really important. So I, and I have, as you know, in the translators, you know, a number of passages where I'm trying to draw the reader's attention to asinance and alliteration in particular, and to show them why certain passages are filled with these devices, but also in certain cases why trying to reproduce the sound effects has is not necessarily a straightforward. So for example, the passage, which as we know is repeated several times, the account of Penelope's trick with the weaving of Valerati Shroud, and so in the Greek, this is Odyssey 299 and following three lines, the passages loaded with the A sounds, right, she says, "Irte, eiroi, ta feion, ais, hotaken min moiro, lo ae, kathelese, ta neiliga, ostana, toio, meis, is moi, kathedemon, achaia, don, nemise, se, right?" So I thought, you know, all those long drawn out A signs, she's talking about the Shroud, she's talking about mourning, you know, it has a kind of plain to effect in the Greek, and I have to say, I've been preparing a kind of PowerPoint presentation to sort of take on the road for my book, Poptore, you know, when I can explain these things. And Fagels actually goes, tries very hard to reproduce that A sound. He says, "This is a Shroud for old Lord Learatees for that day, when the deadly fate that lays us out at last will take him down. I dread the shame my country woman would heap upon me." So you know, he's really thinking about that. My problem with that is A, A, the long A in English is a happy sound, right? Hurray, yay, hey, right? So I rendered the passage, but the resonance that I used was ooze and ooze, which are sad sounds in English. So an owl, right, so you get these sort of, it's a shroud for proudly arities for the hour when hour come and doom, death will strike him down, death which draws out our sorrow, blah blah blah. You know, so I'm thinking about all kinds of effects, not necessarily a one-to-one transposition of a sound from Greek into English, but how did this sound to a Greek ear and how do I make an English, an anglophone ear have that experience? So, you know, I was also thinking a lot about alliteration. There's a wonderful passage when someone is describing poor lair teas out on the farm, wasting away, and he talks about how he's mourning and weeping and his the flesh is shriveling on his bones in his own dates. And the Greek is, and I actually don't have the reference for some reason, but the Greek is, it's a half line and a full line, "a la sonachete to go oite, haisai o judo minos, the new thay dump ostio fichros." So, the line is loaded with all these aspirated consonants, ch-f-h-sh, right? So, you practically can hear the skin flaking off of the flesh. It's such a genius thing. And so, when my translation, I was trying to accomplish the same thing. I have, so he sits there lamenting, sighing, shedding tears as the flesh shrivels off his bones. Lots of aspiration. So, there was some of the kinds of things that I was really trying to be attentive to. And then, as you know, I'm also very interested in engemment, which is also something I learned from Kavathi to pay attention to engemment. Now, that, obviously, for reasons I don't need to explain to your listeners, is tough in an inflected language, because if you want to reproduce an effect in English, that is caused by an engemment in Greek. It means you want your English line to land on the same word as the Greek word lands on. So, as an example, for obvious reasons, the words "oi-koss" and "nostos" and "domata" are often in the first position in a line of homework to give them great emphasis. You know, and it'll say, I want to come new line home to the house of my land, of my fathers, and the high roof palace, or whatever. So, you have to think of ways to, I think, you know, when the engemment is very important, and the line breaks in a very pointed way, I had to, you know, work overtime to think of ways to get my English line to sort of mimic that. But I do think it's important, you know, the, a great example of the way that Homer uses in German as part of sort of characterised, you know, when Odysseus, in book 11, sees Ajax in the underworld in the famous moment where he, he, he starts gushing to Ajax, trying to win him over. And then, of course, you know, Ajax stalks away without saying anything. And the, all Odysseus has about a 15 line speech in which every line is enjammed, except for two lines, which means what you're getting as you listen to this is this sort of torrent of words, you know, there's not a single thought ends at the end of a line. He's rushing, rushing, bullshitting, gabbing, you know, he's, he's doing what he always tries to do, which is to win him over with the kind of flood of words. And it's really done. So things like that, I was very, it's trying to be very attentive to. Something that I've been wondering about for a long time perhaps, you know, ever since I first heard the conceit from you. And I can't remember, maybe I first read this conceit from you in the Odyssey memoir book, or, you know, if I got it from you in conversation, but this notion that you're either an Iliad person or an Odyssey person. And I guess my question for you is, what do you think makes you an Odyssey person? If we accept that premise, when the listener can read your introduction, find out more about it, though it is really just that. I mean, yeah, what makes you an Odyssey person? Well, because I mean, in, in my own writing, and this is, you know, has to do with writing that has nothing to do with the classics, I've always been interested in narrative, the way that narrative relates to truth in my Holocaust book, where I was interviewing a lot of Holocaust survivors and hearing stories about things that happen. I had to think hard about the way that a character's point of view can color in narrative. The elusive embrace, I wrote a lot about my grandfather, who is a great storyteller, but also a great liar. So I was sort of raised by an Odysseus figure in a lot of ways, somebody who enchanted people with wonderful stories and truth may have not been the utmost consideration. And so I think from the beginning, almost maybe even before I encountered the Odyssey, I was being sort of schooled in the problematics of the Odyssey, which is about, and this is a phrase I use a lot in my Holocaust book, the difference between what happened and the story of what happened. You know, how does narrative almost automatically falsify even with the best intentions? And of course, as I don't need to explain to you, the Odyssey is very preoccupied with these questions, not simply as a wonderful narrative in itself, but as a narrative about someone who problematizes a relationship between narrative and truth, and a narrative that, as we all know, in a kind of meta way is very interested in the mechanics of narrative and its effect on audiences. So I would say I've just always gravitated to the Odyssey, and also as I think the other element of it, which I'm only now, you know, my old age, starting to give more credit to, is, you know, this idea about home, trying to get home, and what it means to be separated from one's people, I think as the grandchild of four immigrants, having been raised on stories about the other place, so to speak, the place that you used to belong to, but which you can't revisit anymore, always gave the Odyssey a special kind of resonance for me, having been surrounded in my childhood by people who couldn't go home or who were driven out of their home, so I think that, the more I think about it now, the more I think that that had a great, it was a great force of why the Odyssey seemed to touch me, and so I would think that there's those two things, you know, I was writing my first book in the late 1990s, and which had a lot to do with family history and stuff, and I was thinking about my grandfather, and you know, I always like to say, I thought my grandfather invented ring composition. I remember this sense of absolute astonishment when I went to college and was doing an Odyssey course with Jenny Clay in my third year at UVA, and we were talking about ring composition, I thought, holy mackerel, somebody figured this out long before grandpa invented this, you know, but so, you know, the all kidding aside, I was sort of raised by someone who had great oral technique, so to speak, and so when I encountered the Odyssey for the first time, a lot of it just made a lot of sense to me. I remember the first time I had to teach Odyssey 19 and ring composition and the scar and the blah, blah, and I thought this makes such sense to how else would you tell this story? So I think those are primarily, you know, what has made me an Odyssey person. That's great, and we'll thank you. I think that all that remains for us here is the word association game. Okay, I'm ready and not a little terrified. Okay, so just whatever comes to mind, don't ever think it, we'll start with an easy one since you given the passage you read, which is Argos. First thing that comes to mind, dead dog. And we didn't get into this, but I'm going to say polutripus. Oh my god, problem word. How about no sauce? Delicious homecoming. Okay, examiner. A challenge. And last one is Odyssey. Everything. Well, thank you so much, Daniel. It was a treat to get to talk to you. Congratulations on the book. Thank you. It's a pleasure as always to talk to you and thanks for having me on. Thank you for joining us for this episode of Lesky Podcast and special thanks for their support of the podcast to the Brown University Department of Classics and the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study. Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast so you never miss an episode and we'd be grateful if you'd take a moment to rate the podcast and leave a review. It will help other listeners to find us. 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