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Robert Fagles's award-winning translations of the Homeric epic poems have been received almost universally in the Englishspeaking world as the favored versions for "modern Greekless readers" to experience the power of Homer; countless reviews of his translation of The Iliad in particular praise the translation for such qualities as its "energy" and its "fluidity," its capability to "restore . . . the Greek's vividness and immediacy."1 Robert Fagles, too, notes in his preface the qualities that render the poem a "performance": the "speed, directness and simplicity that Matthew Arnold heard-and his nobility too, elusive yet undeniable, that Arnold chased but never really caught . . . a major source of Homer's energy, the loft and carry of his imagination that sweeps along the listener together with the performer."2 The translator goes on to explain his object to construct "a modern English Homer." How Fagles accomplishes this and what this accomplishment means both theoretically and practically is the general concern of this essay, occasioned by a curious passage in Book 3: Here the old men of Troy have gathered to witness the swelling armies preparing for battle below the city walls. While their fighting days are behind them, we read, "they are eloquent speakers still, clear as cicadas," and they relive their own glory days. As they do so, however, they see Helen, the source of all their trouble as well as a representation of their highest aims.
And catching sight of Helen moving along the ramparts,
They murmured one to another, gentle, winged words:
"Who on earth could blame them? Ah, no wonder
The men of Troy and Argives under arms have suffered
Years of agony all for her, for such a woman.
Beauty, terrible beauty!
A deathless goddess-so she strikes our eyes! 3
This is a crucial passage in the poem because it brings into focus a sense of the values that drive the action of the epic, embodied in a figure that, like Achilles, is half-human, half-divine, and whose influence, power, and beauty bring destruction to the wholly human world which attempts to redeem itself by achieving on the battlefield something of the "terrible beauty" embodied in Helen.
But what stops me in my tracks as I...