Bookplanet: a shorter Iliad

On Baricco’s Homer
Review by NICK TOSCHES

Its oldest surviving manuscript fragments date only to the second or third century B.C., but the “Iliad” came into being much earlier, in the eighth century B.C., and came to be attributed about a century later to a poet named Homer. With its fierce, fine Bronze Age war beats, its lines exhaling brutality and delicacy in turn, the “Iliad” was to the Greeks the breath of life for all of word and rhythm that followed. That pre-eminence has proved enduring.

Homer’s “rosy-fingered dawn” and “wine-dark sea” are themselves the first dawn and first-sighted sea of a new world of poetry: the effulgence, inspired and inspiring, of a new way of seeing and saying. All we read today would be unwritable without the “love,” “death” and “dark” that come to us in the first book of the “Iliad.”

That this fountainhead of Western literature begins, exquisitely, with the word “wrath,” just as the poem itself is one of “dismal death” and “corpse-fire,” of “men killing and men killed,” of “vile things” and “vile destiny,” shows that, like other epic wellsprings, such as the Old Testament, most of which postdates Homer, it is more knowing in its awareness of humanity’s most distinguishing trait — inhumanity — than literature of later ages. What came to be called “psychology” more than 2,000 years after Homer has been largely a degeneration from, rather than an advancement of, that awareness.

The first complete translation of the “Iliad” was commissioned by Petrarch. This Latin “Iliad,” which arrived in 1366, was not only the first, but one of the worst, translations. It nevertheless brought Homer to prominence among Renaissance humanists, who brought forth other, better Latin renderings. In the 16th century, Homer passed from Latin into the European vernaculars. The British poet George Chapman’s translation into English was published in 1611, the same year as the King James Bible; and from Chapman to the present day there have been many Englishings of the “Iliad.” The Loeb Classical Library edition has for more than 80 years offered the original Greek text facing A. T. Murray’s literal yet elegant prose translation. The poet Richmond Lattimore’s translation came in 1951, the poet Robert Fitzgerald’s in 1974.

Late in the fourth century, before undertaking the translation of the Bible that became the Vulgate, Jerome declared that the Old Testament in Latin was “like a beautiful body concealed by a dirty gown.” Of the Psalms, Solomon and Job, he said: “All these books are composed in hexameters and pentameters in the Hebrew original. But we read them in prose! Consider how much Homer would lose in prose!”

True enough. But Murray’s prose “Iliad,” recently revised by William F. Wyatt, gives us precisely what Homer said. As for how he said it, no one has ever been quite able to sustain it in translation; but Lattimore evokes a kindred metrical magic, and Fitzgerald summons the Homeric spirit through blank verse. The physician-poet Oliver Wendell Holmes proposed that rhythms of verse are related to the beat of the heart and that the poet’s respiratory rate is reflected in the length of his metrical lines. If this is so, no one breathed or had a pulse quite like Homer.

So what of Alessandro Baricco’s volume, “An Iliad”? Not a new translation of the “Iliad,” which runs to more than 15,000 lines, this is a slight and slender book, less than 5,000 lines, not counting the introductory and concluding notes.

Is it a retelling then? It would appear so. But Baricco says no. He proclaims his intention and his success regarding Homer’s “Iliad” in the same breath: “To rewrite it, as I have done.” Ann Goldstein, a very gifted translator, has performed an act of kindness here. Baricco’s original words, come mi è accaduto di fare (“as I happen to have done”), are even haughtier than “as I have done.”

I put aside Baricco’s novel “Ocean Sea” because it turned out to be what the publisher’s blurb said it was: a “postmodern fable of the human malady.” I enjoyed “Silk,” his wisp of a novel, but it was a simple tale that would have been better if it had been simply told.

Now his “Iliad,” derived from the respected Italian translation of Maria Grazia Ciani (who receives no credit on the cover, title page or copyright page, but is acknowleged in “A Note on the Text”), recasts the song of Troy into a series of monologues by several of Homer’s characters.

Baricco has decided on “removing repetitions.” But repetition is integral to the epic, whose mnemonic reverberations of phrase and epithet echo the distant days when it was recited and passed on by memory alone. The word “formulaic” has come to have negative connotations, yet it must be remembered that formula lay at the heart of the invocative powers of all primitive magic, as it still lies at the heart of all religious ritual. For one set against repetition, it is odd that the words “The year was 1861. Flaubert was writing Salammbô, electric light remained hypothetical” should appear more than once in Baricco’s “Silk”: an ineffectual calculated effect if ever there was one.

“Silk” was the commercial success that established Baricco, and “An Iliad” — the original Italian title translates as “Homer, Iliad” — has been another commercial success, attributed by some in Italy to what has been called the “Baricco trademark”: the handsome young writer, his white shirt sleeves rolled up, mesmerizing an audience of literature groupies and à la page female high school teachers.

There are some fine lines here: the opening sentence, “It all began on a day of violence”; “I am Aeneas, and I cannot die”; and a few others. But too much barely rises to the realm of the lackluster and stilted.

“ ‘What are you doing up, and armed?’ Menelaus asked. ‘Are you looking for someone to send into the Trojan camp, to spy on the enemy’s moves?’ ” Baricco never indicates where we are in relation to the actual Homeric text, but we are here in Book 10, Lines 37-39, and compared with the translations of this passage by Lattimore and Fitzgerald, there is nothing of cadence or grace in Baricco’s prosaic variation. It reminds me of the “Honeymooners” episode in which Ralph Kramden, with an exaggerated thespian air, rehearses bad lines for his failed stage debut at a Raccoon Lodge fund-raiser.

I wanted very much to like this book, but the book disallowed it. Bringing new light, new readers to a thing such as the “Iliad” is noble. Using it as a premise for self-indulgence is not.

In his introductory note, Baricco celebrates the “paradox” of translating a translation. “Borges would undoubtedly have been ecstatic,” he writes, as if certain that Borges would have found this work of interest, as if translations of translations were something new. (Arthur Hall’s “Ten Books of Homers Iliades,” published in 1581, was a translation of a French translation.) Why not inflate the chest even further and say that Homer himself would undoubtedly have been ecstatic?

Baricco’s preciosity detracts from his book’s modest pleasures. His note at the outset aggrandizes what follows, and his note at the end announces a movement for peace that “will succeed, sooner or later, in taking Achilles away from that fatal war.”

But Achilles cannot be taken away from that fatal war. As Cedric H. Whitman, the most perceptive of Homeric scholars, wrote, the fate of Achilles, “death-devoted, already dead,” is to learn that “integrity and life are irreconcilable.”

Baricco’s “Iliad” is not heroic. It is not much of anything. This is a shame: a waste of Baricco’s considerable gifts, a misrepresentation of something great.

(Nick Tosches is the author of the novel “In the Hand of Dante” and many other works of fiction, nonfiction and poetry.)