On Complicated...

On the one translation choice I have been asked about a gazillion times, as if it were the only translation choice I’ve ever had to make…

Most Homeric characters have a small number of standard epithets, which can fit metrically with the name in different positions in the line.  Achilles is "swift-footed" and "son of Peleus".  Agamemnon is "lord of men" and "son of Atreus".   Odysseus has more formulaic epithets than most, and a great many of his epithets have to do with his multiplicity.  He is a man of "many strategems" (polymechanos), "much wiliness" (polymetis), "much-enduring" (polytlas), "much-smarts" (polyphron).  He's also "city-sacker" (ptoliporthos), an epithet shared with several other warriors, "resplendent/ glorious" (dios), "related to Zeus" (diogenes), "godlike" (theoeides, theoeikelos) and "son of Laertes", and more.

So the poet of the Odyssey had a choice about how to describe the protagonist of the poem in the first line. Why choose a relatively unusual epithet, "much-turny" (polytropos / πολύτροπο[ν])?  Why not choose one of the ones that focus on Odysseus' intimacy with the gods, or one of those that focus on his famous strategic intelligence, or his capacity for patience and endurance, all of which will be essential in the poem?  These sets of epithets are far more common in the poem as a whole, but they're not what we get in line 1.

I'm very far from the first reader to think that the choice of this unusual epithet must be marked, and that it is likely programmatic, in the sense that the poet is inviting us to think not only about the central protagonist himself, but also about his journey and the poem, both of which will also feature numerous turns.

In later Greek, the word can be applied to situations as well as to people.  Thucydides uses the word for multiplicity of situations in life, in the Periclean Funeral Oration (2.44):   ἐν πολυτρόποις γὰρ ξυμφοραῖς ἐπίστανται τραφέντες ("You know you were brought up in manifold/ changeable/ varied circumstances"). It's used of changeable diseases (Plutarch Num. 24) and of war.  So a rendering that could only apply to the man and not the poem or the trip did not seem adequate.  A man can be "crafty".  A poem or a journey can't. A trip or a poem (or a war, a disease or a circumstance) cannot be "wily", which is a fine rendering of polymetis, but not of polytropos. 

Polytropos isn't necessarily positive, at least in later uses. Plutarch applies it to the notorious turn-coat, Alcibiades (Alcibiades 24). Plato's discussion (in Hipp. Min. 364e) contrasts the "very simple and very truthful" Achilles (ἁπλούστατος καὶ ἀληθέστατος) with Odysseus as πολύτροπος. Plato's usage suggests that to him at least, it definitely doesn't mean "wise", because it's distinct from Nestor's quality of sophia. Of course Plato's values aren't Homer's, and there's no reason to project these later prose authors back onto the original Odyssey. But these later uses do give some inkling of how at least some ancient readers might have taken that epithet, and how famous it clearly was.

It's also important that tropos, τρόπος, suggests way of life, custom, habit, guise, manner or character, as well as literally, "turn". Arguably, the epithet anticipates the ways Odysseus will appear in many disguises, will tell numerous false autobiographies, and will succeed in code-switching, transforming himself to fit in with numerous entirely different social worlds and environments. He can be and act as many people, or nobody. That's an extraordinary and essential element of his heroic excellence, and it's not the same as his other extraordinary qualities.  You could be great at solving problems and coming up with solutions to transform your environment for survival, as with the Wooden Horse or the Bed or the Raft (polymechania), and great at sticking out hard things for a really long time without giving up (polytlas), without also having the quality of being able to transform YOURSELF into multiple guises and roles (which is his polytropia). I needed to think through those connotations and distinctions, in considering possible translations.

As a translator, I had some core principles that I was hoping to adhere to.  I wanted to use regular meter, because the original is not free verse or prose, and that matters a great deal for the experience. I chose iambic pentameter, because it's the most traditional meter for narrative and dramatic verse in English, just as dactylic hexameter is the traditional verse form for narrative verse in archaic Greek.  So I needed something that could scan properly in regular iambic meter when justaposed with "man" (so not "complex" or "disguised" or "much-turned", none of those could scan – and none of them are any good anyway).

Another core principle was to try to honor the pacing of the original.  I confined myself to the same number of lines as the Greek.  I didn't want to produce a translation that was longer and wordier (and potentially flabbier) than the original.  For that reason, I was reluctant to do what many translators have done, to render this single four-syllable word by a subordinate clause or a phase – although I played around with ways of doing it like that.  "A man who was turning and turned".  "A man of many turns".  But those options have real costs, because the gripping pace and drive of the opening is lost as soon as you start shoving an extra subordinate clause or many-word phrase into the first sentence, and I wanted to translate a whole poetic and narrative experience, not write the explanatory footnotes as if they were the text.  None of the options using explanatory phrases or clauses seemed to me to echo the impact of the original, with the startling arrival of this powerful, unusual epithet in the middle of the line, after we've already had the noun. I also felt "a man of many turns" was more or less incomprehensible, certainly not vivid – and there's no reason to think that the original was difficult to understand.  "Turns", unfortunately, doesn't carry the implications of many disguises or habits or characters.  It's literal but unfaithful in the sense that it doesn't make clear what is complex but clear in the original. There’s also potential for an unfortunate echo of Austin Powers, International Man of Mystery. I also didn’t want to introduce syntactical repetitiveness where the original is varied: so I don’t want to do, “a man who turned/ was turned a lot, who also wandered a lot” – when the original has only one relative clause and distinguishes between the primary quality of the polytropia, introduced in the main clause, and the subordinate clause account of the numerous wanderings.

I also did not want to coin a word that doesn't exist already in English, like "much-turny" or "twisty-turny".  The original is a real, legitimate Greek word (see above on its usage in later Greek).

 So I spent many hours, days and weeks searching around for alternatives. I ruled out "twisty", which is great for an airport novel or a corkscrew, but not plausible for a person (and "twisted" would be unfortunate, as would "kinky" or "perverted" – those are all the right metaphor, but the wrong connotations). "Topsy-turvy" seems appropriate for a children's TV show, not an epic. "Circuitous", or "zigzag", or "meandering" might work for a journey, but not so well for a person, and "meandering", a lovely word, runs into the alliteration problem ­– there is already too much inevitable alliteration ("man... me.. Muse"), so that also rules out all cognates of "movable" or "mobile", which also fail to connote that the directionality of movement is not straight; where Achilles runs fast in a single direction (to the enemy and to his own swift death), Odysseus' movements are far more varied. "Roundabout" suggests a traffic circle. "Flexible" suggests yoga. "Turned" sounds like spoiled milk.  "Versatile" seemed like an option for a while, but it is a bit boring and doesn't suggest much about the actual travel or the poetics of poem, as opposed to the character.  Moreover, "a versatile man" doesn't scan in an iambic line, so it would have required some syntactical contortions ("a man of versatility" -- ugh, that's clunky).

It would be fun to use "translated", like Shakespeare's Bottom.  It would have made for a nice piece of homage to the Latin translator, Livius Andronicus, who used versutus for his mostly-lost Latin verse translation of the Odyssey (which was also the foundational moment of Roman literature).  I was tempted by that option for a while, because I liked the idea of those layers of allusion and homage, and I liked the idea of echoing the metapoetic connotations of the original, using a word that could apply to protagonist, journey, poem, and translation.  But it's a solution that most readers would find more confusing than illuminating, and I didn't want to suggest anywhere, let alone in the first line, that the Odyssey is a cleverly allusive, literary text.  The Homeric poems are based on an oral tradition, they are not difficult Greek, and layered, self-consciously clever literary allusions, lovely though they are, seem to me completely alien to Homeric quasi-oral poetics; allusions like this depend on the pre-existence of a written literary tradition. As a translator of Homer, it isn't my job to show off or try to be clever; that was certainly part of my job as a translator of Euripides or Seneca, but not Homer.  Homeric poetry needs to sound traditional and in a sense entirely artificial – which I aim to suggest by using very regular and very traditional meter – but not cleverly allusive. In keeping with the original, I wanted the translation to be both entirely metrical and traditional in verse form (in contrast to all the dozens of free verse and prose modern translations), with some elements of grandeur or majesty, able to mutate for a range of different registers and moods, but also to feel fresh, as if it sprung from the spoken language of the people, whatever that means in contemporary English.  So, no "translated", and nothing too fancy.  It needs to be a real word, in regular speech – and yet somehow surprising.

So I went with "complicated", which suggests something of the imagery (folding or layers, which are analogous to turns) and has the same syllable count as the original, and is a real, not made up English word, conveys immediate meaning, as the original does, but the meaning is appropriately multiple, and hints at truths to come, about the character, the poem and the trip. It's direct and comprehensible, as the original is, but it's an injunction to watch out for complexity in unexpected places, as the original also is.  And it's potentially a shock, not quite what you expect at the start of an epic poem – which feels right, given that the original is an unusual and potentially surprising word choice.

I like the concept of complexity as a positive quality in the world of this poem and this protagonist, in contrast to the directness of Achilles, and as a programmatic invitation to the poem and the translation.  In teaching Homer to undergraduates in many and various translations, I've felt that students frequently assume that these poems and their "heroes" will be simple, because they are very old. I liked the word as a way of reminding the reader right away to reconsider that assumption. The word "complicated" is itself ostensibly simple, like the narrative of the Odyssey, like Homeric syntax and poetics. It's a story of a man going home.  But there are many layers and disguises within. 

I have sometimes been scolded for this choice. Sometimes it's by people who have read only the first line, and none of the rest of the translation. Sometimes it's people who say they like everything about the translation except "complicated".  Bless them.

I commonly hear two objections. 

One is that some readers seem to think it's negative.  I'm fairly baffled by that. There's nothing wrong with being complicated!  We all are! I am, for sure, and I don’t see it as a bad thing. It's far less negative than Plato's usage of polytropos would suggest – I’d be much more convinced by an argument that it’s not negative enough. But I didn’t want to go all out negative, because I don’t think the original justifies that. Complexity, in a poem or narrative or a poetic / mythical character, is surely all to the good. I see the original, and my translation, as a promise, or even an enticement, in the first line: Dear Listener, stay with me, because you won't be bored by this character or this poem.  Who doesn't love disguises and schemes? Who doesn't love a long con, at least in narrative? The narrator is promising us, implicitly, that we’ll get an inside scoop on a character whose many layers, turns, names and disguises won’t be visible to everyone he encounters. Uncomplicated characters are a hard sell, if you want the adult listener to stay with you for many hours of story. Complexity, sign me up. I am not the least bit original in seeing the Homeric Odysseus as a complex and multi-layered character, who arouses our intense interest and intense empathy – and who is viewed in very different ways by different characters within the poem, because he contains multitudes. Homeric Odysseus is a very different and far more appealing character compared to the often simpler and often more purely evil Odysseus we find in some other ancient sources (like the scheming sophist of Sophocles' Philoctetes, or the cruel Ulysses of the Aeneid). To me, “complicated” doesn’t suggest either “good guy” or “bad guy”: it’s a promise that this poem doesn’t stoop to those implausible simplifications.

Some people seem to be awfully touchy about ancient characters.  If people want "heroes" who are entirely sympathetic, or ethically uncomplicated, and would never let anyone die under their command – well, day-time soap operas may be a better bet than Homer.

The second issue, I think, is that for some readers, "complicated" sounds "too modern". The word "complicated" isn't particularly modern in English (OED cites 1656 as the first known instance of the modern meaning).  But maybe "complicated man" has been on the rise (Google ngram tells me that phrase, and "complicated relationship", have risen in popularity since the turn of this century).  Maybe for some people it has resonances of Facebook (which I don't use or recommend to you), or, better, Avril Lavigne. But I actually like the Lavigne lyrics for “Complicated” as a text with a kind of resonance with the Odyssey: “acting like you’re somebody else” is a central feature of Odysseus’ polytropia, and it’s essential to how and why he survives – so if you do hear the song in the line, maybe it helps suggest the connotations of “many guises” that are there in the original word. Sometimes you do have to make everything so complicated, sometimes you gotta wear your preppy clothes and strike a pose (or at least get your multiple goddess makeovers), if you want to survive as the warrior king of Ithaca.

For full disclosure: I tried to rewrite the whole passage at a very late stage, once I learned about the opening of the film Shaft, which I had not seen: the theme song, by Isaac Hayes, includes the line, "He's a complicated man/ but no one understands him but his woman".  I thought maybe the possibility of that unintended allusion meant I had to throw out my draft.  After weeks of attempting to rewrite, needing to rewrite everything else once that word was different, and making the whole proem flabbier, less vivid, more awkward, and all around worse every time, I decided that, as above, I didn't have a better option – and actually I quite like the Shaft intertext, if it's there for a few readers or listeners. Samuel L. Jackson would make a great Odysseus, and even if the line isn't explicitly about the protagonist's complicated marriage, it's not a bad thing to be thinking about that, along with the many other elements of the nostos to come.

I sometimes worry that “complicated man” suggests something too internal, too psychological. But I also know that one can’t avoid anachronistic connotations, in the inherently anachronistic process of translating from Homeric Greek to a language, English, that never existed at the same time as any version of Ancient Greek. It’s a compromise, as is every translation choice ever. The question is how to choose the least bad compromise.

A further issue is that “complicated” is a passive past participle, although it may have more of the feel of an adjective. The original polytropos could suggest that the great man is turning, or is turned, or, presumably most likely, both. Within the poem, he is both the active creator of his many disguises and digressions, and also turned off course by circumstances and the gods, as when he’s shipwrecked by Poseidon, or disguised/ transformed by Athena. No single word in English is going to be able to suggest both active and passive turn-y-ness. So I injected something of that double-ness a little later in the sentence, translating a single (passive) Greek verb twice – “wandered and was lost” – so that the listener or reader can understand the ambiguities about the degree to which Odysseus is and isn’t in charge of the many turns. [I’ll write a future post about other choices in the proem, including this]. Sometimes it’s impossible to create exact equivalence all in the same syntactical place, and the translator may need to honor an essential feature of the original by somewhat different means.

On balance, I think a translation choice that feels marked and notable and memorable – as this one clearly is for many readers – is a good way of echoing the effect of an original that uses a marked, memorable, unusual epithet.  I'm also happy if this single word, with its perceived "controversy", can provide a way into thinking about the complexities of translating ALL words.  This word was tough – but it wasn't more difficult than any other word in the poem.  No word has an exact equivalent from one language to another, whether it's a marked word like polytropos or a common word like aner ("man", but also "husband").  If "complicated" gets some people annoyed, I hope that can be a productive kind of irritation that can inspire more conversations and debates about language. Even better would be if readers get angry enough at me to learn to read Homeric Greek for themselves. You’re welcome!

Is “complicated” exactly the same as polytropon? No, of course not. Does it correspond in a lot of important ways, and perform many of the same functions in the sentence and the verse paragraph? Yes. Can I think of a way to improve on it? After years of pondering the question, I’d still say: No.

If I live another twenty years, and retain the capacity to read, and if the world is still habitable by humans, I hope to see younger people come up with much better solutions than mine.  I also suspect that we will have more important things to worry about by then.