Translation Comparison: The Odyssey Bed

In Odyssey book 23, Penelope tells Eurycleia, the old enslaved nurse, to pull out the bed from the bedroom so her guest, the ostensible old beggar (who is actually her husband Odysseus in disguise), can sleep. She has not yetacknowledged him as husband. Penelope's instructions to the nurse are a test of her husband, as the narrator tells us explicitly – because Odysseus built the bed from an olive tree that grows all through the house.

The olive wood bed, manufactured by cunning, crafty Odysseus himself (as he declares insistently, repeatedly using the first person singular), represents his control over his own household, and his ability to construct an extraordinary technical marvel from his found environment. The bed symbolizes the marriage, and Odysseus insists that it belongs to him ("my" bed, not "our" bed: the use of first person singulars in his discussion of the bed is striking, as is her use of the dual, to describe the marriage she wishes she’d had).

Penelope's trick is a (to Odysseus) infuriating reminder that another man might be able to cut the trunk and move the bed, and implicitly also that Penelope could sleep with someone else, and that the marriage, and the home, might not be permanent.

Here is the Greek original, Odyssey 23. 181-184, in regular dactylic hexameter:

ὣς ἄρ᾽ ἔφη πόσιος πειρωμένη: αὐτὰρ Ὀδυσσεὺς
ὀχθήσας ἄλοχον προσεφώνεε κεδνὰ ἰδυῖαν:
‘ὦ γύναι, ἦ μάλα τοῦτο ἔπος θυμαλγὲς ἔειπες:
τίς δέ μοι ἄλλοσε θῆκε λέχος;...'

Here is the Richmond Lattimore translation (1967), which uses long, unmetrical lines (not, as is sometimes said, any version of hexameter, and nor did Lattimore think it was):

       So she spoke to her husband, trying him out, but Odysseus

          spoke in anger to his virtuous­ minded lady:

          "What you have said, dear lady, has hurt my heart deeply.

          What man has put my bed in another place?..."

The original uses two words: alochos (ἄλοχον), "wife", and gunai (γύναι), "woman" or, "wife", to describe Penelope in relationship to Odysseus. The use of these two words emphasizes the central question of the scene: whether Penelope is permanently Odysseus' wife, or not (and what it means for her to be his wife, rather than just a woman that he used to know).Lattimore translates both words with "lady", which arguably obscures something important in the exchange. He adds "dear" (perhaps to create a kinder or more polite Odysseus – there is no term of affection in the original). "Virtuous" (forκεδνὰ ἰδυῖαν, "knowing careful/ loyal things") is arguably anachronistic, suggesting that the narrator has a Roman or Christian idea of wifely loyalty as identical with womanly "virtue".  There's an interestingly wordy feel to the language in Lattimore that isn't paralleled by the original: for instance, "in another place" – a notably wordy phrase – renders a single word in Greek, ἄλλοσε.

Here is Robert Fitzgerald (1961), with a largely iambic verse translation:

With this she tried him to the breaking point,

and he turned on her now in a flash raging:

"Woman, by heaven you've stung me now!

Who dared to move my bed?"

Fitzgerald adds the metaphors "breaking point" and "in a flash" and "stung" (there are no such metaphors in the Greek). The translation goes much further than the original in presenting Odysseus as a person driven beyond what any man could endure.  "He turned on her" adds movement or dramatic choreography that again is not in the Greek.  He also adds "dared" and the lively "by heaven", as if the Odysseus of the original were a bit too under-stated in his fury at this infuriating woman. Arguably, "by heaven" is a translation of ἦ μάλα , which adds emphasis to the speaker's utterance, but doesn't actually mean "by heaven". Fitzgerald gets rid of the Homeric narrator'sinsistence on Penelope's affection/ loyalty (in that he does not translate κεδνὰ ἰδυῖαν at all), and instead, suggeststhat Penelope is going too far.

Here is Robert Fagles (1996), in unmetrical, more colloquial free verse:

               Putting her husband to the proof -- but Odysseus

          blazed up in fury, lashing out at his loyal wife:

          "Woman -- your words, they cut me to the core!

          Who could move my bed?"

Fagles adds several conventional metaphors and idioms, presumably to make it closer to conversational American English, including "Blazed up"(there's no blaze in the Greek), "lashing" (no lashing in the Greek), "core" (for a word meaning heart/ chest/ spirit/ self, thymos). It's an extremely expansive and interpretative rendering, leaning into the emotional intensity and moving it towards melodrama.  The broken syntax ("your words – they've cut") doesn't correspond to the Greek, but creates a portrait of Odysseus as a broken man. Also note the addition of "could". This Odysseus apparently thinks it's really impossible to move the bed.

Here is Stanley Lombardo, 2000, with an even more domesticizing American free verse version:

She was testing her husband. Odysseus

could bear no more and he cried out to his wife:

"By God, woman, now you've cut deep.

Who moved my bed?"

Like Fitzgerald, Lombardo skips Penelope's loyalty or love (kedna iduian). The participle ὀχθήσας, from ὀχθέω, suggests "being very angry/ resentful".  The verb is probably cognate with ἔχθος, hatred, resentment; Lombardo seems to be relying on a different and, according to recent scholars (see e.g. Brill Etymological Dictionary of Greek s.v.) very unlikely connection with a different verb, ἄχθομαι, "to be burdened". Instead of makingOdysseus definitely angry (as the original, with ὀχθήσας ), Lombardo presents him as overburdened by his suffering, caused by a provoking woman. "By God" is obviously anachronistic, and corresponds to nothing exactly in the original, though maybe Lombardo borrowed it from Fitzgerald's "by heaven" as a way of dealing with the Greek intensifying particles.

Here is my translation, in regular iambic pentameter:

She spoke to test him and Odysseus

was furious, and told his loyal wife,

"Woman! Your words have cut my heart! Who moved

my bed?"

The others render αὐτὰρ as "but", but it can also mean "and": I used "and", because Odysseus' touchy fury is exactly what Penelope has been aiming to achieve, so it seems to me just as likely to be connective as adversative. I juxtaposed "wife/ Woman!" to underline the central question of which she is, and because it seems to me crucial that the original includes those two distinct words for her role (ἄλοχον ...
γύναι). I enjambed, to move that bed... The original doesn't enjamb "moved/ bed" as such, but it does create a linguistic gap in the line between Odysseus himself (μοι) and the bed (λέχος), which seems to me important in evoking his state of mind – the intertwining of anxiety and grief along with the explicit anger, which come from a horror at an all-too-possible loss of a piece of furniture that is intimately entwined with the speaker’s sense of his own identity. In general, I tried not to add too much; I felt the emphatic particles ἦ μάλα could be conveyed just by the exclamation mark, such that I didn't need to add "By God" or equivalents – which would also risk making the pacing feel slower than the original. I hoped to convey both the emotional intensity and the emotional complexity of this wonderful moment in the poem, without doing too much to ham it up.

To me, the point of this and of any little exercise in looking at multiple translations is not to suggest that any one of them is "right" or "wrong", or that one is better than the others.  I could have looked at dozens of others, and will in future posts on other passages.  All of them have their merits.  But it's endlessly fascinating to see the differences, and to realize how tiny points of detail can be intertwined with much larger sets of interpretative choices and assumptions.