The First Penguin: E.V. Rieu's The Odyssey

1. Homer, The Odyssey, translated by E.V. Rieu

Fittingly, this is one of the first Penguin Classics I purchased, way back in 1992 at a used bookstore in Tulsa, Oklahoma.  I still have the price tag on the front cover of a very worn paperback book: $1.00.  Even as a high school student (as I was then) I could foot that bill.  Imagine when books were such rare and precious commodities, buying one of the great masterpieces of the ancient world for spare change!  Of course, that was the very idea behind paperbacks in general, and Penguin Classics in particular: to offer laymen/women the fruits of a specialized education.  Not surprisingly, this was the first book published in the Penguin Classics imprint way back in January of 1946.  It is a testament to the story as well as to the translation that it still reads like a lightning-fast, edge-of-the-seat modern work.  And in this case, it actually reads like a novel, for Rieu made a prose translation of the epic which coheres as a modern novel with remarkably little squinting. 

In general, I am against prose translations; or if not against, exactly, at least uninterested in reading them.  Poetry should be poetry, even in translation, to capture the sense of music, rhythm, and metaphor.  Also, the work should preserve some sense of heightened purpose, particularly in ancient literature which was meant to be recited by a single performer, in a communal, concert setting.  A prose translation would be like a modern band handing out sheet music for the audience to read over while they simply recite the songs’ lyrics.  In short, the sense of a performance would be lost, even though English cannot hope to capture what made the Greek world sing.  All that said, Rieu’s translation is masterful and quite successful.  While it removes the work from a sense of communal performance, it makes an artful slip into another community, that of the novel: so instead of hearing a great bard recite the famous invocation to the Muses, we now hear the voice of a Dickensian narrator, inviting us for an intensively private/public experience.  As Rieu explains his Introduction from 1945, “the Odyssey, with its well-knit plot, its psychological interest, and its interplay of character, is the true ancestor of that long line of novels that have followed it.  And though it is the first, I am not sure that it is not still the best.  Let the reader decide for himself.”