The Odyssey

The Odyssey was composed in Greek, in dactylic hexameter, probably in the eighth or seventh century BC, at the end of a long tradition of oral performance about which almost everything is disputed except that it existed. It runs to twenty-four books, and it begins late: ten years after the fall of Troy and twenty after Odysseus left home, with the hero absent from his own poem for four books while his son goes looking for news of him.

The English here is Samuel Butler’s. Butler — the author of Erewhon and of The Way of All Flesh, a painter, a sheep farmer in New Zealand and an amateur of most things — came to Homer in middle age, published a prose Iliad in 1898 and this Odyssey in 1900, “rendered into English prose”, as his title page has it, “for the use of those who cannot read the original”. He also believed that the poem had been written entirely at the place now called Trapani, on the west coast of Sicily, by a very young woman who introduced herself into it under the name of Nausicaa; he had argued this at length in The Authoress of the Odyssey in 1897, and he restates both propositions, without apology, in the preface to the first edition printed here. No scholar has accepted them, and there is no reason to expect that any will.

The eccentricity is nevertheless the reason to read this version. Butler approached the Odyssey as a novelist approaches a novel: he wanted to know who ran the household, what was for dinner, how the furniture stood, who was related to whom and who was lying. His prose is plain, quick and without poetic ambition of any kind, and it carries a reader through the whole poem at something like the speed of a story, which no verse translation does. What it surrenders is everything that makes the Odyssey a poem — the metre, the fixed epithets, the formulaic lines a listening audience leaned on. Readers should also be warned that Butler uses the Roman names throughout: Ulysses, Jove, Minerva, Neptune.

Notice the shape. Four books of Telemachus; Odysseus discovered in the fifth, weeping on Calypso’s island; the Phaeacians; then the famous adventures — the Cyclops, Circe, the dead, the Sirens — told by Odysseus himself to a dinner table in books nine to twelve, so that the least believable part of the poem is the part with the most interested narrator. Everything after the thirteenth book happens on Ithaca, and the second half is not adventure but patience, disguise and recognition: the scar the nurse finds, the dog, the bow, and the bed that cannot be moved.

This edition gives all twenty-four books complete, with Butler’s own notes, and follows the second edition of 1921, seen through the press after Butler’s death by his executor and biographer Henry Festing Jones. The preface Jones wrote for it, dated 4 December 1921, sets out exactly what was corrected and what was left alone, and is printed here alongside Butler’s own.