their - The University of Texas at Dallas

(second ellipsis mine)
Fagels lays out formally Elpenor’s response to
Odysseus’ how-did-you-get-here-so-fast. First, extra
white space on the page announces a paragraph
change for a change of speaker; then a full-length
almost perfectly regular iambic pentameter line (the
first line I quote) introduces Elpenor’s answer.
Elpenor’s first words are even more formal, a
perfectly balanced grandiloquent double salutation in
a single hexameter line. The rhythmically identical
proper nouns, Laertes and Odysseus (seus being one
syllable), divided by a strong caesura, pull all the
weight in the line to the center.
The next line, beginning Elpenor’s explanation, is
also a hexameter. Because Fagels is writing his
Odyssey in varied measures, not all hexameters, this
one noticeably echoes the previous hexameter, and
again the weight of the line is in the center, this time
with two identical monosyllables: god.
The first god translates Homer’s δαíμovos, but
being a single syllable before the caesura, it carries
more weight, and being more Olympian in its
meaning, points back toward the opening scene on
Mount Olympus. The second god is little more than an
expletive, but paired with the god that immediately
precedes it, it emphasizes the caesura between them
and this symmetrical six-foot line: half attributing a
man’s death to a god; the other half to the man’s folly,
doom and wine weighing against each other at
opposite ends of the line, theological determinism and
individual responsibility in comic balance before
Elpenor’s syntax breaks in confusion:
“— they were my ruin, captain.” His sentence, which
began with two epic, line-filling salutations, ends with
a simple sailor’s salute, captain, and trails off into
ellipses.
That’s poetry, the poet taking advantage of the
language and the language taking advantage of line,
rhythm, syntax, and vocabulary for a complex,
inimitable effect. It’s the kind of poetry that the best
poems deserve to be translated into. Because an
angry god is a little more Olympian than δαíμovos, the
line “the doom of an angry god, and god knows how
much wine” is more emphatically true to Homer’s
whole poem than even the original line.
Notes
¹Homer, The Odyssey, tr. Robert Fagels, New York: Viking
Penguin, 1996, p. 251. The Greek is ασε με δαíμovos αiσα
kαkή kαì αθεσφατos oivos. Homer, The Odyssey, ed.
Augustus Taber Murray and George E. Dimock,
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U. Press, 1995, p. 405.
²The Odyssey of Homer, New York: Oxford University
Press, 1932, p. 153.
³Chapman’s Homer: The Odyssey, ed. Allardyce Nicol,
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965, p. 189.
15