It's All Greek To Me

ITS ALL GREEK TO ME

One night in October 1816, Charles Cowden Clarke showed his old schoolfriend John Keats translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey by George Chapman—the first versions in English of Homer’s epic poems, published in 1611 and 1615 respectively. Keats, whose Greek was very patchy, knew Homer via translations by John Dryden and Alexander Pope, but Chapman’s earthy, vigorous, yompingly pacey verse was a world away from Pope’s neatly polished, rather mincing heroic couplets. The two friends plunged into the book, reading it together, unable to drag themselves away till dawn: it was an experience
of “teeming wonderment,” Cowden Clarke remembered. At ten o’clock that morning, as he came downstairs after snatching a few hours’ sleep, Cowden Clarke found an envelope on his breakfast table. Inside was a sheet of paper, and on it was scrawled Keats’s famous
sonnet, “on First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer.”

In the almost 3,000 years since the Iliad and the Odyssey were composed, readers have been responding to these poems just as Keats did: with the excitement, awe, and sense of revelation “some watcher of the skies” might feel when “a new planet swims into his ken.”

If you haven’t read them, you have an enriching experience in store: you will be handed the key to a world of incredible storytelling, and profoundly beautiful poetry. The great writers of today, of course, are still learning from Homer: Philip Pullman, author of the
His Dark Materials trilogy, and former schoolteacher, says this: “I was allowed to tell the Iliad and the Odyssey to my classes simply because I thought it would be a good idea, and I told both those stories to three classes each year for twelve years. I learned more about storytelling from that than from anything else; I mean about how to time the cliffhangers, how to slow down and speed up, exactly how much detail you need to give in order to let them see the scene in their minds. And it was vital to tell them in my own words rather than read out someone else’s version.”

Furthermore, the world of Homer is also a world in which the big questions are explored, with extraordinary humanity and compassion: the appalling tragedy of dying young; the effects of war; how one can feel pity and empathy toward one’s greatest enemies; what
is heroism; what it means to grow up; what is the nature of true love and marriage; what is a home. Homer is a rip-roaring read, he makes you laugh and he makes you weep like a child. Homer’s poems are (probably) the earliest surviving works of European literature: and they remain, to many people’s minds, the greatest. You just can’t do without them.

IT'S ALL GREEK TO ME. Copyright © 2010 by Charlotte Higgins. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.