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.
