Herbert Bates (1868-1929) was an American educator who served as Instructor in English at the University of Nebraska. He spent his career editing school editions of literary classics for Longmans, Macmillan, and American Book Company, and was affiliated with the National Council of Teachers of English. He also published a volume of original poetry, Songs of Exile (1896).
Bates rendered the Odyssey in iambic tetrameter rather than the more common pentameter, arguing in his introduction that Homer’s dactylic hexameters produce heavy, plodding lines in English and that a shorter line better captures the speed of the original Greek. The translation is abridges some passages and skips most of the Telemachy (Books 1-4) to maintain poetic momentum.
Ian Johnston called the tetrameter ‘all wrong for Homer’ because ‘it’s not a verse form we are very familiar with in long dramatic poems,’ and noted the abridgment makes it ‘not altogether reliable as an accurate rendition of Homer.’