Over the years, some 100 people have translated the entire “Iliad” into English. The latest of them, Emily Wilson, explains what different approaches to one key scene say about the original, and the translators.
In one of the most moving and memorable scenes from the “Iliad,” the great Trojan warrior Hector says farewell to his wife, Andromache, who has urged him not to risk his life by fighting on the plain. He gives their baby back to her, tells her to go home, and reiterates his decision to advance on the enemy.
Around 100 complete English translations of the “Iliad” have been published over the past 400 years. Their variety shows no clear trajectory of cultural change: Some of the more recent Homers are more archaic and less idiomatic than many earlier ones, but some are not. A wide variety of forms are used to “translate” the dactylic hexameter of the original, including prose and free verse as well as several poetic meters.
The translations reflect a wide range of possible interpretations of this short passage. Is Hector harshly scolding Andromache for offering advice about the war, despite her gender? Or is he treating her with gentle pity? Is she worried only about her husband’s death, or is she also concerned about her own imminent enslavement and their baby’s slaughter? Are her concerns valid? Does the warrior risk his life despite his love for his family, or because of it? Why must men fight? Why must women weave? How strange, or how familiar, is the society of the poem?
Each of these translations — along with dozens more — suggests a different understanding of the central themes of courage, marriage, fate and death.
The Original ‘Iliad’ 6. 482-497
The original poem is composed in beautifully musical, metrically regular dactylic hexameter, and designed to be performed out loud: It is poetry for the mouth and ear, not the page.
The scene evokes the complex emotions of three separate characters — the frightened baby, the woman, the man — and it also includes a silent fourth, the enslaved nurse.
The text provides a vivid account not only of Hector’s words, but also of his actions. At the end of the passage, he picks up again the shining helmet that he took off because its plume frightened his little son, and in so doing, he becomes again “bright-helmed Hector,” as the traditional formula of heroic poetry describes him: He again assumes his role and costume as a man who lives and will die by war.
Before this passage, Andromache has pleaded with Hector to adopt a safer strategy, rather than go to almost certain death by meeting the enemy on the open plain. As she reminds him, Hector is risking much more than his own life. His death will entail his wife’s rape and enslavement, their baby’s violent death and the sack of their city.
Hector’s response suggests a fascinatingly contradictory attitude toward his own actions. His firm tone could suggest brash confidence and/or a man steeling himself for a heartbreaking choice to prioritize his own honor over the lives and freedom of everyone he loves — a choice that becomes possible only when presented as no choice at all.
George Chapman (1611)
The first complete translation into English, by the playwright and erstwhile soldier Chapman, creates a staunch, fatalistic version of Hector, reflecting the poet’s interest in Stoicism. Chapman uses a metrical form that was already old-fashioned in his day, “fourteeners,” or rhyming heptameters; the original does not rhyme.
The translation expands on the original in ways that may be startling by modern norms — for instance, by rendering the single word for “tearfully,” dakruon, as “fresh streams of love’s salt fire.”
…This said, th’ heroic sire
Gave him his mother; whose fair eyes fresh streams of love’s salt fire
Billow’d on her soft cheeks, to hear the last of Hector’s speech
,In which his vows compris’d the sum of all he did beseech
In her wish’d comfort. So she took into her od’rous breast
Her husband’s gift; who, mov’d to see her heart so much oppress’d,
He dried her tears, and thus desir’d: “Afflict me not, dear wife,
With these vain griefs. He doth not live, that can disjoin my life
And this firm bosom, but my fate; and fate, whose wings can fly?
Noble, ignoble, fate controls. Once born, the best must die,
Go home, and set thy housewif’ry on these extremes of thought;
And drive war from them with thy maids; keep them from doing nought.
These will be nothing; leave the cares of war to men, and me
In whom, of all the Ilion race, they take their high’st degree.”
On went his helm; his princess home, half cold with kindly fears;
When ev’ry fear turn’d back her looks, and ev’ry look shed tears.
Alexander Pope (1715)
Pope’s translation, into elegant rhyming pentameter couplets, was a best seller in the 18th century and remains a classic. Pope adds a great many details entirely of his own invention, inserting anachronistic notions of marriage (“my soul’s far better part”), and explaining emotional responses that are unstated or ambiguous in the original: For example, Homer does not explain why Andromache is crying, but Pope clarifies that it is from “fear.” Pope invents some wonderful aphorisms that have no basis in the original but add zing to the couplet, such as “the first in danger as the first in fame.”
He spoke, and fondly gazing on her charms,
Restored the pleasing burden to her arms;
Soft on her fragrant breast the babe she laid,
Hush’d to repose, and with a smile survey’d.
The troubled pleasure soon chastised by fear,
She mingled with a smile a tender tear.
The soften’d chief with kind compassion view’d,
And dried the falling drops, and thus pursued:
”Andromache! my soul’s far better part,
Why with untimely sorrows heaves thy heart?
No hostile hand can antedate my doom,
Till fate condemns me to the silent tomb.
Fix’d is the term to all the race of earth;
And such the hard condition of our birth:
No force can then resist, no flight can save,
All sink alike, the fearful and the brave.
No more — but hasten to thy tasks at home,
There guide the spindle, and direct the loom:
Me glory summons to the martial scene,
The field of combat is the sphere for men.
Where heroes war, the foremost place I claim,
The first in danger as the first in fame.”
Thus having said, the glorious chief resumes
His towery helmet, black with shading plumes.
His princess parts with a prophetic sigh,
Unwilling parts, and oft reverts her eye
That stream’d at every look; then, moving slow,
Sought her own palace, and indulged her woe.
Samuel Butler (1898)
The prose version by the 19th-century novelist and satirist Butler — a lifelong bachelor — suggests a very different set of assumptions about women, metaphysics, emotions (“his heart yearned towards her” for eleēse, “pitied”) and even time management (“daily duties” for erga, “tasks”). Butler treats Homer’s repeated epithets as skippable, so that phaidimos Hector (“glorious Hector”) becomes simply “he.”
With this he laid the child again in the arms of his wife, who took him to her own soft bosom, smiling through her tears. As her husband watched her his heart yearned towards her and he caressed her fondly, saying, “My own wife, do not take these things too bitterly to heart. No one can hurry me down to Hades before my time, but if a man’s hour is come, be he brave or be he coward, there is no escape for him when he has once been born. Go, then, within the house, and busy yourself with your daily duties, your loom, your distaff, and the ordering of your servants; for war is man’s matter, and mine above all others of them that have been born in Ilion.” He took his plumed helmet from the ground, and his wife went back again to her house, weeping bitterly and often looking back towards him.
Robert Fagles (1990)
Fagles’s best-selling translation, in unmetrical free verse, uses many familiar American idioms and clichés (such as “smiling through her tears,” or “filled with pity,” a metaphor absent from the original). He softens the brusqueness of Hector’s final speech to his wife by rendering daimonie as the gentle “dear one,” and adding “trying to reassure her” and “please,” neither of which appears in the Greek.
Fagles makes Hector’s most iconic phrase, that men must be warriors, sound much chattier and wordier than the original, spreading it over two lines: “as for the fighting / men…”
… So Hector prayed
and placed his son in the arms of his loving wife.
Andromache pressed the child to her scented breast,
smiling through her tears. Her husband noticed,
and filled with pity now, Hector stroked her gently,
trying to reassure her, repeating her name: “Andromache,
dear one, why so desperate? Why so much grief for me?
No man will hurl me down to Death, against my fate.
And fate? No man alive has ever escaped it,
neither brave man nor coward, I tell you —
it’s born with us the day that we are born.
So please go home and tend to your own tasks,
the distaff and the loom, and keep the women
working hard as well. As for the fighting,men will see to that, all who were born in Troy
but I most of all.”Hector aflash in arms
took up his horsehair-crested helmet once again.
And his loving wife went home, turning, glancing
back again and again and weeping live warm tears.
Emily Wilson (2023)
In my own translation of the “Iliad,” I echo the metrical regularity of the original by using unrhyming iambic pentameter. I thought long and hard about the multiple narrative perspectives suggested by the original poem, and its resonant ambiguities; in this passage, for example, I use both “beloved” and “loving” for phile — a word that could suggest either, or both — because the feelings of both the wife and the husband are at stake.
The rhetorically punchy qualities of Hector’s speech seemed essential, as well as Hector’s insistent focus on his own defining identity as a warrior. Hector is a deeply loving father and husband who makes the choice to leave his family to almost-certain enslavement and death.
As I read the Greek, we feel heartbroken for all three members of the family (or for all four, counting the silent nurse) — and all the more so because there is no hint of sentimentality in the language, no softness in Hector’s final words. The emotions are sketched with extraordinary concision: The only explicit feeling is Hector’s pity for Andromache’s tears (eleēse), but a world of other emotions is evoked through gesture.
…With these words,
he gave his son to his beloved wife.
She let him snuggle in her perfumed dress,
and tearfully she smiled. Her husband noticed
and pitied her. He took her by the hand
and said to her,
“Strange woman! Come on now,
you must not be too sad on my account.
No man can send me to the house of Hades
before my time. No man can get away
from destiny, first set for us at birth,
however cowardly or brave he is.
Go home and do the things you have to do.
Work on your loom and spindle and instruct
the slaves to do their household work as well.
War is a task for men — for every man
born here in Troy, but most especially, me.”
When he had finished speaking, glorious Hector
picked up his helmet with its horsehair plume.
His loving wife set off for home, but kept
twisting and turning back to look at him.
More and more tears kept flooding down her face.
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