Homer Among the Penguins

New Zealand Listener, Volume 39, Issue 1006, 28 November 1958, Page 4

Homer Among the Penguins

| Be editor of Penguin Classics, Dr '" E. V. Rieu, has done more than most men to make ancient Greek into swift, modern and readable English. Like Matthew Arnold’s ideal translator, he has sensed the quality of Homer as eminently rapid, eminently plain and direct in words and thought, and as eminently noble. Homer never nods, he says, and with. this conviction has transmuted classics into racy best-sellers, his Odyssey alone selling no fewer than 900,000 copies. Success has borne with it only a single regret. "I wish" said Dr Rieu as he paused briefly in New Zealand during a recent world tour, "I wish that Homer in the Elysian Fields could know about it." Books are read almost wholly for pleasure, Dr Rieu considers, so that the only way the classics can survive in an increasingly Greekless society is to present them in a form that will not frighten people off. The Odyssey and the Iliad therefore were translated from Homer hexameters into English prose. "Nobody would have read them" he says, "If I’d translated them into verse." Dr Rieu, who gives a rhyming guide ("pleased to see you, Doctor Rieu’) to the pronunciation of his name, has no Personal objection to verse forms. Indeed he is one-fourth part of A Puffin Quartet of Poets, a forthcoming book of verses for children. But he is sure that Homer wrote in the accepted literary idiom of his day and that he is best translated into what is the corresponding idiom of our day, which is prose. He would not admit it, but gave the strongest impression that he thought Homer would support this view. "Prose," he reminded us, "was not yet invented in Homer’s day." Both in translating himself, and in editing the work of others, Dr Rieu says his aim is always to obtain the best possible English, avoiding the temptation to be too contemporary and colin.

quial. At least 50 years will pass, he hopes, before the changing use of English makes it necessary once more to bring Homer up to date. He is uncomfortably aware, however, that the huge vocabulary and mixed origins which make English such a flexible language are also the qualities which allow of rapid change. In the 18th century, he notes, English inclined to be. a little too Latin; nowadays it is tending toward Middle and Old English. : In choosing other scholars to translate for the Penguin Classics, Dr Rieu Says he judges mainly by the English they use. This is not to say that eminent writers of novels and the like are often chosen: they are not. Translation itself, he argues, is a creative art, where each translator must create a style to suit his original, and the stylistic habits of many writers would actually be a handicap. "Of course," adds Dr Rieu, "when I have chosen_a man for his English I also get other scholars to see that he is what I call scholar-proof as well." Writers and translators being what they are, Dr Rieu has sometimes found the editorial chair something of a hot seat. He recalls having returned a manu-

script of one of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to its translator, Neville Coghill, with a number of blue-pencilled comments, and that Coghill later admitted he had spent the remainder of that day in a state of white anger. Not till the following day, the writer admitted, had he been able to study the critical matter with any degree of objectivity and to conclude that "Perhaps this chap Rieu has something to him." "But I hope I haven’t made too many enemies," says Dr Rieu, "and at least I can say that I take the same medicine myself. I always tell writers: ‘Whatever you do, read your stuff aloud to a critical audience. Otherwise it is so easy to convey to readers something you didn’t intend.’" As an example, he mentioned a phrase from his translation of the Odyssey which originally referred to the River of Lamentation "which is a branch of Styx." The unfertunate coupling of "branch" and "styx" was only apparent in speech. The phrase in the published version now reads, "which is a branch of the Waters of Styx"-and even this contains the germs of an Americanism which escaped both Dr Rieu and his critical audience, Apart from its usefulness in revealing errors, Dr Rieu considers that reading aloud may be as good a test of the quality of prose as it is of poetry. And because, over the years, he has developed a discriminating ear, we asked what he thought of New Zealand usage of his beloved English language. His reply took us slightly aback. "As far as I’ve. read and heard New Zealand writing and speech," he said, "I think a very high level is being kept. I think the language is in far better hands here than it is for example in the United States or Australia. You’re in the tradition. Americanism is all right perhaps, but I resent its invasion of England and the Commonwealth. Perhaps you go to films less here than we -----K-[-[&$[-V-_-_-_-_____-.__._..

do in England, but the American influence is less pronounced. These things apart, I think English has for a long: time been, and will be, the best language in the world. It has a wonderful flexibility, and its mixed descent gives it great riches." As the one-time manager in India for Oxford University Press and later managing-director of Methuen’s, Dr Rieu’s judgment of business is no less penetrating than his judgment of books. When asked about his own methods of work, he observed that most businessmen, who attend an office actually work for not more than two hours daily. "Being one of Sir Allen Lane’s outside editors I don’t have to go to the office," he said, "but I do work for four hours -from nine o’clock to one-each day." In spite of this Dr Rieu professes to —

being a slow writer and to having once been held up over two lines of the Iliad for the best part of a week. The translation of the Odyssey took four. years-ex-cluding an interruption by war service, as a Home Guard major-but it was this which began the now-famous series of Penguin Classics. Three years each were required for The Four Gospels. and for The Voyage of the Argo, by Apollonius of Rhodes, which is to appear in January, Other works scheduled to appear next year are Huysman’s Against Nature, the Middle-English poems Piers Plowman and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, selections from Buddhist Classics, a second volume of Moliere’s plays, a full translation of Josephus’s The Jewish Wars, St Francis of Assisi’s The Little Flowers, the second part of Goethe’s Faust, Plato’s Gorgias, and the Maxims of La Rochefoucauld. Of all translation work, says Dr Rieu, the most difficult is humour. It is far too easy to give false impressions such as that the original author was writing only yesterday. In the main he confines his humorous ventures to his hobby of writing children’s verse. The following example from the forthcoming Puffin Quartet of Poets shows that here, at least, he writes in a fashion wholly English in tradition: Two people live in Rosamund, And one is very nice; The other is devoted To every kind of viceTo walking where the es are, And eating far too quick, And saying words she shouldn’t know, And wanting spoons to lick. Two people live in Rosamund, And ett sey it twice) ev good: other’s aie ox During his brief return visit to New Zealand-he was here 50 years ago when he "buzzed round the world" just after coming down from Oxford-Dr Rieu was interviewed for the NZBS by K. L. McKay, Lecturer in Classics at Victoria University, The resultant recording, entitled Translating the Classics, will be broadcast by all YC stations at 7.30 p.m. on Wednesday, December 3.