Which Translation: The Odyssey

William Cullen Bryant

1871 · Blank verse

Features

IntroNotesGlossaryIndexBibliographyMapsIllustrationsGreek textGreek line numbersLine-by-lineBy Iliad translatorComplete
252
Holdings
4
Reviews

Biography

William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878) was an American Romantic poet, journalist, and long-time editor of the New York Evening Post, best known for his early poem ‘Thanatopsis.’ He is grouped among the Fireside Poets for his accessible and popular poetry.

Bryant began translating Homer in his seventies, beginning in 1865 and finishing the Iliad by 1870 and the Odyssey by 1871. He aimed for clear, fast-paced, largely colloquial verse that avoided the challenges of reproducing Homer’s dactylic hexameter.

Bryant’s was the first complete American verse translation of Homer. Contemporary reviews appeared in the North American Review, Catholic World, Southern Review, and National Quarterly Review. His verse has been praised as ‘faithful, clear, fast paced, and colloquial,’ deliberately avoiding the archaic diction common to many Victorian translations.

William Cullen Bryant on Wikipedia ↗

Publication History

  • 1871 — James R. Osgood, The Odyssey of Homer; translated into English blank verse
  • 1899 — Houghton Mifflin, The Odyssey of Homer; translated into English blank verse ★
  • 1905 — Houghton Mifflin, The Odyssey of Homer; translated into blank verse; with Flaxman's illustrations (with Flaxman's illustrations)

Reviews

The proem

1.1–11
Tell me, O Muse, of that sagacious man
Who, having overthrown the sacred town
Of Ilium, wandered far and visited
The capitals of many nations, learned
The customs of their dwellers, and endured
Great suffering on the deep: his life was oft
In peril, as he labored to bring back
His comrades to their homes. He saved them not,
Though earnestly he strove; they perished all,
Through their own folly; for they banqueted,
Madmen! upon the oxen of the Sun—
The all-o’erlooking Sun, who cut them off
From their return. O goddess, virgin-child
Of Jove, relate some part of this to me.

Penelope's weaving trick

2.96–111
‘Young princes, who are come
To woo me, since Ulysses is no more—
My noble husband—urge me not, I pray,
To marriage, till I finish in the loom—
That so my threads may not be spun in vain—
A funeral vesture for the hero-chief
Laertes, when his fatal hour shall come
With death’s long sleep. Else some Achaian dame
Might blame me, should I leave without a shroud
Him who in life possessed such ample wealth!’
Such were her words, and easily they wrought
Upon our generous minds. So went she on,
Weaving that ample web, and every night
Unravelled it by torchlight. Three full years
She practised thus, and by the fraud deceived
The Grecian youths; but when the hours had brought
The fourth year round, a woman who knew all
Revealed the mystery, and we ourselves
Saw her unravelling the ample web.
Thenceforth, constrained, and with unwilling hands,
She finished it.

Calypso's double standard

5.118–131
“Ye are unjust, ye gods, and, envious far
Beyond all other beings, cannot bear
That ever goddess openly should make
A mortal man her consort. Thus it was
When once Aurora, rosy-fingered, took
Orion for her husband; ye were stung,
Amid your blissful lives, with envious hate,
Till chaste Diana, of the golden throne,
Smote him with silent arrows from her bow,
And slew him in Ortygia. Thus, again,
When bright-haired Ceres, swayed by her own heart,
In fields which bore three yearly harvests, met
Iäsion as a lover, this was known
Erelong to Jupiter, who flung from high
A flaming thunderbolt, and laid him dead.
And now ye envy me, that with me dwells
A mortal man. I saved him as he clung
Alone upon his floating keel;

Weeping on Calypso's shore

5.151–159
Him she found beside the deep,
Seated alone, with eyes from which the tears
Were never dried; for now no more the nymph
Delighted him; he wasted his sweet life
In yearning for his home. Night after night
He slept constrained within the hollow cave,
The unwilling by the fond; and day by day
He sat upon the rocks that edged the shore,
And in continual weeping and in sighs
And vain repinings wore the hours away,
Gazing through tears upon the barren deep.

Nausicaa finds Odysseus

6.127–141
Thus having said, the great Ulysses left
The thicket. From the close-grown wood he rent,
With his strong hand, a branch well set with leaves
And wound it as a covering round his waist.
Then like a mountain lion he went forth,
That walks abroad, confiding in his strength,
In rain and wind; his eyes shoot fire; he falls
On oxen, or on sheep, or forest-deer,
For hunger prompts him even to attack
The flock within its closely guarded fold.
Such seemed Ulysses when about to meet
Those fair-haired maidens, naked as he was,
But forced by strong necessity. To them
His look was frightful, for his limbs were foul
With sea-foam yet. To right and left they fled
Along the jutting riverbanks. Alone
The daughter of Alcinoüs kept her place,
For Pallas gave her courage and forbade
Her limbs to tremble.

War-widow simile

8.521–532
So sang renowned Demodocus; the strain
Melted to tears Ulysses, from whose lids
They dropped and wet his cheeks. As when a wife
Weeps her beloved husband, slain before
His town and people, fighting to defend
Them and his own dear babes from deadly harm,
She sees him gasp and die, and at the sight
She falls with piercing cries upon his corpse,
Meantime the victors beat her on the back
And shoulders with their spears, and bear her off
To toil and grieve in slavery, where her cheeks
In that long bitter sorrow lose their bloom;
So from the eyelids of Ulysses fell
The tears,

Cyclops eats the men

9.287–299
“I spake; the savage answered not, but sprang,
And, laying hands on my companions, seized
Two, whom he dashed like whelps against the ground.
Their brains flowed out, and weltered where they fell.
He hewed them limb from limb for his repast,
And, like a lion of the mountain wilds,
Devoured them as they were, and left no part—
Entrails nor flesh nor marrowy bones. We wept
To see his cruelties, and raised our hands
To Jove, and hopeless misery filled our hearts.
And when the Cyclops now had filled himself,
Devouring human flesh, and drinking milk
Unmingled, in his cave he laid him down,
Stretched out amid his flocks.

The Nobody trick

9.364–371
“‘Thou hast inquired, O Cyclops, by what name
Men know me. I will tell thee, but do thou
Bestow in turn some hospitable gift,
As thou hast promised. Noman is my name,
My father and my mother gave it me,
And Noman am I called by all my friends.’
“I ended, and he answered savagely:—
‘Noman shall be the last of all his band
Whom I will eat, the rest will I devour
Before him. Let that respite be my gift.’

Circe recognizes Odysseus

10.325–336
“‘Who art thou? of what race and of what land,
And who thy parents? I am wonder-struck
To see that thou couldst drink that magic juice
And yield not to its power. No living man,
Whoever he might be, that tasted once
Those drugs, or passed them o’er his lips, has yet
Withstood them. In thy breast a spirit dwells
Not to be thus subdued. Art thou not then
Ulysses, master of wise stratagems,
Whose coming hither, on his way from Troy,
In his black galley, oft has been foretold
By Hermes of the golden wand? But sheathe
Thy sword and share my couch, that, joined in love,
Each may hereafter trust the other’s faith.’

Anticlea's shade

11.204–215
“She spake; I longed to take into my arms
The soul of my dead mother. Thrice I tried,
Moved by a strong desire, and thrice the form
Passed through them like a shadow or a dream.
And then did the great sorrow in my heart
Grow sharper, and in winged words I said:—
“‘Beloved mother, why wilt thou not keep
Thy place, that I may clasp thee, so that here,
In Pluto’s realm and in each other’s arms,
We each might in the other soothe the sense
Of misery? Hath mighty Proserpine
Sent but an empty shade to meet me here,
That I might only grieve and sigh the more?’

Achilles in the underworld

11.488–501
‘Noble Ulysses, speak not thus of death,
As if thou couldst console me. I would be
A laborer on earth, and serve for hire
Some man of mean estate, who makes scant cheer,
Rather than reign o’er all who have gone down
To death. Speak rather of my noble son,
Whether or not he yet has joined the wars
To fight among the foremost of the host.
And tell me also if thou aught hast heard
Of blameless Peleus—whether he be yet
Honored among his many Myrmidons,
Or do they hold him now in small esteem
In Hellas and in Phthia, since old age
Unnerves his hands and feet, and I no more
Am there, beneath the sun, to give him aid,
Strong as I was on the wide plain of Troy,
When warring for the Achaian cause I smote
That valiant people.

The Sirens' song

12.184–192
“‘O world-renowned Ulysses! thou who art
The glory of the Achaians, turn thy barque
Landward, that thou mayst listen to our lay
No man has passed us in his galley yet,
Ere he has heard our warbled melodies.
He goes delighted hence a wiser man;
For all that in the spacious realm of Troy
The Greeks and Trojans by the will of Heaven
Endured we know, and all that comes to pass
In all the nations of the fruitful earth.’”

Hyperion's cattle

12.341–352
All modes of death
Are hateful to the wretched race of men;
But this of hunger, thus to meet our fate,
Is the most fearful. Let us drive apart
The best of all the oxen of the Sun,
And sacrifice them to the immortal ones
Who dwell in the broad heaven. And if we come
To Ithaca, our country, we will there
Build to the Sun, whose path is o’er our heads,
A sumptuous temple, and endow its shrine
With many gifts and rare. But if it be
His will, approved by all the other gods,
To sink our barque in anger, for the sake
Of these his high-horned oxen, I should choose
Sooner to gasp my life away amid
The billows of the deep, than pine to death
By famine in this melancholy isle.’

Argos recognizes Odysseus

17.324–328
He spake, and, entering that fair dwelling-place,
Passed through to where the illustrious suitors sat,
While over Argus the black night of death
Came suddenly as soon as he had seen
Ulysses, absent now for twenty years.

Sleepless Odysseus

20.25–34
As when one turns and turns
The stomach of a bullock filled with fat
And blood before a fiercely blazing fire
And wishes it were done, so did the chief
Shift oft from side to side, while pondering how
To lay a strong hand on the multitude
Of shameless suitors—he but one, and they
So many. Meantime Pallas, sliding down
From heaven, in form a woman, came, and there
Beside his bed stood over him, and spake:—
“Why, most unhappy of the sons of men,
Art thou still sleepless?

Stringing the bow

21.404–412
Such was their talk; but when the wary chief
Had poised and shrewdly scanned the mighty bow,
Then, as a singer, skilled to play the harp,
Stretches with ease on its new fastenings
A string, the twisted entrails of a sheep,
Made fast at either end, so easily
Ulysses bent that mighty bow. He took
And drew the cord with his right hand; it twanged
With a clear sound as when a swallow screams.

Odysseus reveals himself

22.1–8
Then did Ulysses cast his rags aside,
And, leaping to the threshold, took his stand
On its broad space, with bow and quiver filled
With arrows. At his feet the hero poured
The winged shafts, and to the suitors called:—
“That difficult strife is ended. Now I take
Another mark, which no man yet has hit.
Now shall I see if I attain my aim,
And, by the aid of Phoebus, win renown.”

The disloyal maids

22.465–474
He spake, and made the hawser of a ship
Fast to a lofty shaft; the other end
He wound about the kitchen vault. So high
He stretched it that the feet of none who hung
On it might touch the ground. As when a flock
Of broad-winged thrushes or wild pigeons strike
A net within a thicket, as they seek
Their perch, and find unwelcome durance there,
So hung the women, with their heads a-row,
And cords about their necks, that they might die
A miserable death. A little while,
And but a little, quivered their loose feet
In air.

The olive-tree bed

23.181–190
She spake to try her husband; but, displeased,
Ulysses answered thus his virtuous queen:—
“O woman, thou hast said unwelcome words.
Who hath displaced my bed? That task were hard
For long-experienced hands, unless some god
Had come to shift its place. No living man,
Even in his prime of years, could easily
Have moved it, for in that elaborate work
There was a mystery; it was I myself
Who shaped it, no one else.

Shipwrecked sailor simile

23.233–241
As welcome as the land
To those who swim the deep, of whose stout barque
Neptune has made a wreck amidst the waves,
Tossed by the billow and the blast, and few
Are those who from the hoary ocean reach
The shore, their limbs all crested with the brine,
These gladly climb the sea-beach, and are safe—
So welcome was her husband to her eyes.
Nor would her fair white arms release his neck,