Lombardo begins with “Speak, Memory,” then gives us a cunning hero in clipped, strongly stressed lines. That opening is a good test. Some readers hear an invitation to performance. Others hear a modern poet stepping between Homer and the room. Neither response is a mistake. Lombardo wants us to notice the speaking voice.
The method was tested in front of listeners, not only at a desk. Emily Greenwood reports that Lombardo used a “fifty-year” rule: the diction should sound natural to imagined audiences fifty years before and after his own. She also explains that actual performances shaped the translation as it developed. The page is a score for a voice.
His translations of the Iliad and Odyssey were composed with an ear for performance …
That accounts for both the speed and the risk. “Don’t do it, man!” can make Odysseus’s crew suddenly present to us. A phrase that current can also date faster than a formal line. Lombardo is not trying to preserve one English equivalent every time a Homeric formula returns. He varies the language to make each event land in performance.
Christina Zwarg’s BMCR review is especially valuable because it refuses a simple verdict. She shows where Lombardo’s idiom restores a recurring pattern she missed in Fitzgerald, then shows where Fitzgerald’s freer poetry gives a scene more satisfaction or tension. She also traces how Lombardo sets similes apart on the page so they interrupt the narrative like distinct poetic events.
By displacing his similes throughout the poem, Lombardo allows them to resemble traumatic aftermath …
Our passages confirm that mixed effect. “Noman” is crisp and easy to speak in the Cyclops scene. At the reunion, “Penelope finally let go” moves straight into modern psychology and drops the knees-and-heart formula that Lattimore, Green, and Mendelsohn keep visible. The scene is immediate, but one piece of the poem’s repeated bodily language disappears.
One edition warning matters. The excerpts in our comparison come from The Essential Odyssey (2007), an abridgment of Lombardo’s complete 2000 translation. The quoted scenes are his text, but the book around them omits large parts of the poem. Choose the complete Hackett Odyssey if you want to read from beginning to end. Choose Lombardo at all if you want Homer to sound like an event happening in the room.
Read it if you want the poem to sound spoken, immediate, and physically alive, especially in a classroom or aloud.
Skip it if you find contemporary American idiom distracting or want formulas kept in a stable form.
Three passage previews
We took each excerpt from the cited source edition and tell you where to find it in the book.
SPEAK, MEMORY— Of the cunning hero, The wanderer, blown off course time and again After he plundered Troy’s sacred heights. Speak Of all the cities he saw, the minds he grasped, The suffering deep in his heart at sea As he struggled to survive and bring his men home But could not save them, hard as he tried— The fools—destroyed by their own recklessness When they ate the oxen of Hyperion the Sun, And that god snuffed out their day of return. Of these things, Speak, Immortal One, And tell the tale once more in our time.Hackett The Essential Odyssey ebook (2007), an abridgment of the 2000 translation · Book 1, opening invocation
‘Cyclops, You ask me my name, my glorious name, And I will tell it to you. Remember now, To give me the gift just as you promised. Noman is my name. They call me Noman— My mother, my father, and all my friends, too.’ He answered me from his pitiless heart: ‘Noman I will eat last after his friends. Friends first, him last. That’s my gift to you.’ He listed as he spoke and then fell flat on his back, His thick neck bent sideways. He was sound asleep, Belching out wine and bits of human flesh In his drunken stupor.Hackett The Essential Odyssey ebook (2007), an abridgment of the 2000 translation · Book 9, false-name exchange and aftermath
At this, Penelope finally let go. Odysseus had shown he knew their old secret. In tears, she ran straight to him, threw her arms Around him, kissed his face, and said: “Don’t be angry with me, Odysseus. You, Of all men, know how the world goes. It is the gods who gave us sorrow, the gods Who begrudged us a life together, enjoying Our youth and arriving side by side To the threshold of old age.Hackett The Essential Odyssey ebook (2007), an abridgment of the 2000 translation · Book 23, recognition and reunion after the bed test
Sources and further reading
These are the sources we used to test our own reading and understand each translator's method.
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Christina Zwarg. Review of Stanley Lombardo, Homer: Odyssey. Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 2000.
A detailed review of Lombardo's idiom, repeated patterns, similes, trauma, and departures from Fitzgerald and Lattimore. -
Emily Greenwood. Sounding Out Homer: Christopher Logue's Acoustic Homer. Oral Tradition 24.2, 2009.
Documents Lombardo's fifty-year rule and the way live performance fed back into the written translation. -
Stanley Lombardo. Translator's Postscript to Odyssey. Hackett, 2000.
Lombardo explains his aims for voice, speed, physicality, formula, and performance.