A Fitting Toast to the Teller of Tales

THERE'S ALWAYS SOMETHING REFRESHING about the idea of plunging a stake into the eye of the Cyclops. And when one hears this gory little episode read aloud, it only gets better, as was made duly clear by the epic's latest translator, Robert Fagles, and theater veterans Jason Robards and Kathryn Walker in "An Evening's 'Odyssey.'" The performance of this modern translation at once reinvigorated an already bracing classic and tapped into the ageless appeal of story-telling, of re-inventing the tale on the spot.

Classical topics have enjoyed somewhat of an upswing in popularity and attention recently in theater and print alike. Fagles's translation of The Odyssey has garnered not only widespread critical praise but also plaudits for its accessibility to the average reader. With Walker's production of another ancient classic, the play The Bacchae, to go up at the Agassiz this fall, a dramatic reading of the epic would seem natural enough.

But The Odyssey's appeal in performance lies somewhat deeper than just recent popularity, as Fagles, Walker and Robards explained in an interview with the Crimson: The text itself is already quite alive, in many ways.

"It's all in direct discourse, a play in a play already," observed Fagles. When ancient Greek rhapsodes performed dramatic recitals of epic poems from memory as their profession, the epic each time would be "performed by one person in a variety of voices." Presumably, such a virtuoso story teller could have "the talents of a ventriloquist" in playing all characters.

In the selections read from The Odyssey at the Agassiz, Fagles, Walker and Robards in essence distributed such a performance among three people, allowing a striking range of voice and style.

Reading Odysseus' lines, Robards drew upon a lower register, often dipping into gravely tones, giving a particularly strong impression of wise, weathered worldliness. Walker, facing several roles (including Penelope), inhabited each one by seeming to occupy a space beyond the table and chair that served for the reading.

Fagles himself did the bulk of narration (in mellifluous tones) with one telling detail: Some passages were read in the original language. Hearing beautiful, flowing ancient Greek resound off the walls of the Agassiz called up the usual fears: what gets lost in the translation and whether the language, even in translation, might sound unavoidably foreign to modern ears. What to tell those who remember with bemusement from school days legions of tripods, endless libations and the wine-dark sea?

"You need to learn a few ground rules," said Fagles of the phrases characteristic of epic, "but then you can get into it."

For Walker, the beauty of each scene and of the language shines through even when the action's technical details are unclear. "It can be impossible to understand what's going on," acknowledged Walker, referring to a confusing description of Odysseus' marksmanship demonstration--a passage that nonetheless easily reaches a high level of suspense and drama.

But the words are eminently accessible, even to the complete novice. Just take Robards's word for it: mentioning that he "never saw" his assigned passages before that day, he maintained that the most he should do was to let the words speak loudly and clearly for themselves.

Fagles made special effort in his translation to avoid the old-fashioned type of stilted, impenetrable rendering that forces the reader into saccadic conniptions in the search for a sentence's subject. With a smile he recognizes such age-old traps of translation in his book's postscript: "Not a line-by-line translation, my version of The Odyssey is, I hope, neither so literal in rendering Homer's language."

And Fagles certainly received no complaints from his fellow performers for the evening.

"A brilliant translation," said Walker. "It fits the human impulse, but doesn't lose a wonderful access to a higher style." Robards agreed, pointing to the effective expression of rich imagery. Not too shabby for just another story of a guy lost at sea as hundreds of suitors freeload off his estate back home.

Yet transcending the beauty of the fluid, modern translation, the lasting themes appeal quickly to our current sensibilities and terms. As Fagles explained, beyond being an intriguing anti-hero and simultaneously a good husband, Odysseus demonstrates along with his kin a push-and-pull between family values and "being irritated at each other." And on a more somber front, Odysseus' station in life reflects the read-justments inherent to a post-war epic and the idea that wars can be both fought and eventually ended.

It's not too half-baked, then, to say that such epics are reinvented each time they are performed, molded at the whim of the imagination of both performer and audience. For Robards, most of the reading's appeal lies in this process.

"You try to make contact," Robards said. "You try to get the page that's just black with the words and make it round with the words. Then the magic takes place."

The rhapsodes would be proud.