My friend and excellent Classicist Joel Christensen seems to have a bottomless well of good analogies for framing various aspects of Homeric epic. He's written about them at length over at his website Sententiae Antiquae as well as on Twitter/X. As Homer is very much in the news (yes!) around Emily Wilson's new translation of the Iliad (hooray!) I've been thinking about an analogy of my own.
Much of the discussion around translations centers around faithfulness to the original text. N.B. this is of course often just a way for critics to assail a translator they don't like for, let's just say, “reasons” with a veneer of objectivity.
When I read criticisms of translations (with any motivation) I'm always struck by the fact that as different as, say, an English language translation is from an Ancient Greek text (how could it not be?), the two are more similar than a text is to a performance. So the text we have today is less faithful to the “original” world of Homeric epic than two texts separated by 2700 years.
My analogy is that of a river to an aquarium. Let's say Homeric epic in performance was a river: always changing and in motion (to borrow some overused ancient imagery), both constant in its existence as a river but never the same river twice. The text of the epics we have today is like scooping out a sample of a river. The sample contains a lot of river-things: water, plants, fish, rocks. Put it in an aquarium and you have a picture of what was in one part of the river at a particular time, maybe even a decently accurate picture.
But an aquarium is not a river just like a text is not a performance.
This is related to something I emphasized at my Odyssey show at UIC on a Monday afternoon for a myth class: the epics were created in a culture that did not have definitive versions. Even after thinking about this pre-literate world for almost three decades and performing its stories for over two, I could sooner imagine a world without fire than I can a world without writing. And in our current moment of everyone being able to document the most trivial parts of their existence, that wild and ephemeral world of the river seems even farther away.
So I sang my “translation” of the Odyssey for 30 students in that myth class. The music flowed like a river and we in that room were all witness to it. And then it was gone.
And I told the students if they wanted to see an aquarium, check out the recorded version of my Odyssey on Spotify.