Achilleid Books and Clairview Books (2025) h/b 621pp £22.50 (ISBN 9781912992652)
What, one may ask, is a ‘classical translation’? One that, in D.’s words, offers ‘newness in venerability’ and is ‘newly allegiant to what is properly antique’. There is an antipathy towards modernism which D. sees—in post-Lattimore (1951) translations—as banal with a tendency towards ‘flatness of expression’ most often through excessive ‘monosyllabism’. By contrast D.’s credo seems to be, Make it old!
Perhaps the best way to convey D.’s unique approach to translation is to select a few lines as an illustrative sample. So, here is D.’s version of the famous 24.527-532 (D. 24.576-580):
For double
The urns of offerings upon Zeus’ doorstep set:
The one blessings bestowed, the other of bane.
On whom thunderbolted-hurling Zeus a tandem
Lot bestows, encounters now blessing, now bane ….
Misprints such as ‘Headlley’s Beowulf” (the not so famous Seamus!) are rare, but is the strange ‘thunderbolted-hurling’ a misprint or a spelling influenced by metre? In the opening of his preface D. introduces his version as the ‘first translation of Homer into a twelve syllable s—dodecasyllabic, iambic hexametric s—line’. The translation, D. tells the reader, owes much to the metre and he makes a grand claim that this is an Iliad ‘without precedent in the long annals of Homeric translation’.
One linguistic feature that stands out is anastrophe, familiar from Yoda’s speech pattern (‘Yodish’ of Star Wars). Compare `the greatest teacher failure is’ (Yoda) with ‘sends me Zeus or delivered the goddess these words or approached he sideways’ (all from book 11). Greek inflections are discussed and the flexibility of word order that this affords, which D. tries to convey in his English. Sometimes he exhibits a preference for a suffix such as ‘-ward’ which avoids the use of a monosyllabic preposition: ‘groundward, leftward’, for example. Tropes such as alliteration are prominent and well deployed (e.g. ‘when the west wind whips’) and occasionally less common figures such as polyptoton (‘fulfillment, fulfill, fulfilled’ at 14.210-1) enrich the narrative. D. draws attention to his use of shortened perfect passive participles (e.g. ‘exasperate’ for ‘exasperated’). Unusual usages of familiar words occasionally appear (‘trouncing on the throng’ D. XI 336 or ‘lest he be embezzled’ D. XXIV ‘or in cloudiness attired’ D. XIV 377). His choice of vocabulary is often idiosyncratic, intermittently archaic as he aspires to reflect the richness of Homeric diction (e.g. ‘dight’, ‘fountainous Ida’, ‘gladsome grasses’). While there are features of Homeric style which some translators omit, D. does use a full range of formulaic epithets, sometimes deploying them according to sense. Repetition he keeps but with some variation: for example, Agamemnon’s dream in book II conveys Zeus’ message with some slight changes.
Some may be persuaded that D.’s approach reflects the Homeric dialect, others not. Some may be impressed by the D.’s ability to sustain his idiosyncratic style in a poem of this scale, some may find it odd. Some may wonder whether D. is perhaps too dismissive of modernism and invests too much significance for his version.
It’s certainly different.
Alan Beale