The Fifth Word: On the Art of Translation and the First Lines of the Odyssey

Preface: A Debt to Alchemists

I am a debtor to alchemists.

Over decades of reading, I have traveled through worlds made accessible only by the alchemy of translation. I have wandered with Gilgamesh through Akkadian laments, pondered existence through German philosophy, felt the passionate dialectics of Danish thought, traced the monetary history of Chinese civilization, and followed the angular syntax of Old Norse sagas. I have encountered the theological precision of Medieval Latin, the passionate arguments of French existentialism, the compressed intensity of Hebrew psalms, and the illuminating insights of Spanish mysticism. From Sumerian creation myths to Aramaic scripture to Polish modernist fiction, from the heroic verse of Old English epics to classical Russian realist literature—and doubtless I have forgotten others, to my shame—an entire lifetime of reading has been built on the labors of those who possess what seems to me a kind of supernatural skill.

These translators are linguistic engineers and lexical lyricists working in multiple masteries simultaneously. They must command not just two languages but two literary traditions, two ways of organizing thought, two sets of cultural assumptions about how meaning moves through words. They must be scholars, poets, acoustic artisans, and cultural ambassadors all at once. The precision required is staggering: a single word choice can shift the moral center of a character, the rhythm of a line can determine whether a passage soars or stumbles, and the decision to preserve or adapt a cultural reference can make a text feel ancient or immediate.

What astonishes me most is not just the technical virtuosity required—though that alone would command respect—but the creative courage these practitioners demonstrate. They must make countless decisions in the space between languages where no perfect answers exist, where every choice involves both gain and loss. They work in the knowledge that their efforts will be scrutinized, compared, and inevitably found wanting in some dimension, yet they persist in attempting the impossible: carrying not just words but worlds across the vast spaces between human languages.

I approach translation not as a scholar of the field but as a reader acutely conscious of this debt. The essays that follow examine moments where translators face their greatest challenges—words, phrases, and passages that resist transfer from one language to another, or that demonstrate remarkable ingenuity when confronting texts where even the original language contains indwelling ambiguities. These are the places where translation reveals itself not as mechanical substitution but as interpretive art, where the impossibility of perfect equivalence becomes the very condition for creative meaning-making.

My perspective is that of someone who has been repeatedly astonished by what translators manage to accomplish, someone grateful for the cultural wandering their work has made possible. If these essays contribute anything to the ongoing conversation about translation, I hope it is a deepened appreciation for the miraculous ordinariness of the translator’s task: taking what is said in one language, whether with clarity, ambiguity, or poetic force, and seeking ways to let it speak, however imperfectly, in another.

The debt is vast. The gratitude is boundless. And now the conversation begins.

The Fifth Word: An Introduction

Or: How One Greek Word Launched Four Centuries of πολύτροποι

Ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ πλάγχθη, ἐπεὶ Τροίης ἱερὸν πτολίεθρον ἔπερσε· πολλῶν δ’ ἀνθρώπων ἴδεν ἄστεα καὶ νόον ἔγνω

Homer, Odyssey 1.1-3¹

There exists, in the fifth position of the opening line of Homer’s Odyssey, a single Greek word that has tormented, delighted, and obsessed translators for centuries. To most readers, the opening line flows effortlessly: “Tell me, Muse, of the man….” And every translation affixes a descriptive word or several words to the man based on Homer’s fifth Greek word. But for the translator, the fifth word halts progress like a boulder in the stream of translation. The word is πολύτροπον (polytropon), the accusative case of πολύτροπος (polytropos), a descriptor so rich, so layered, so fundamentally untranslatable in any simple sense, that it has spawned not just a multiplicity of different English renderings, but an entire cottage industry of scholarly exploration.

This is where our series begins—not because polytropos is necessarily the most important word in the Odyssey, but because it perfectly embodies the central mystery of translation: the gap between what words mean and what they are made to mean in another tongue. Every choice a translator makes in approaching polytropos reveals something fundamental about how they understand not just Odysseus, not just Homer, but the very art and alchemy of translation itself.

Translation’s Creative Challenge

Polytropos is deceptively simple in construction. The prefix poly- means “many” or “much.” The root tropos means “turn,” “way,” or “manner.” Put them together and you get, quite literally, “many-turning” or “of many ways.” The construction appears straightforward.

But herein lies the difficulty: tropos carries within it a fundamental ambiguity about agency. As Emily Wilson, the translator of the latest English-language translation of The Odyssey that I have acquired has explained, the word presents a choice between describing someone who turns many ways (actively, cunningly, by choice) or someone who is turned many ways (passively, by fate, by the gods, by circumstance). Is this a man who manipulates his path through the world, or one whose path has been manipulated by forces beyond his control? Or, perhaps, by some combination of both active and passive turns?

The Greek does not resolve this ambiguity—it embraces it. And therein lies the translator’s dilemma.

A Plenitude of Solutions

Consider how various translators across four centuries have approached this single word:

George Chapman (1614): “that many a way / Wound with his wisdom to his wished stay”
John Ogilby (1669): “Prudent”
Thomas Hobbes (1674): “the man”
Alexander Pope (1725): “The Man, for Wisdom’s various arts renown’d”
William Cowper (1802): “For shrewdness famed/And genius versatile”
Samuel Butler (1900): “that ingenious hero”
T.E. Shaw (1932): “the various-minded man”
W.H.D. Rouse (1937): “the man who was never at a loss”
E.V. Rieu (1946): “that resourceful man”
Robert Fitzgerald (1961): “that man skilled in all ways of contending”
Richmond Lattimore (1967): “the man of many ways”
Allen Mandelbaum (1990): “of many wiles”
Robert Fagles (1996): “the man of twists and turns”
Stanley Lombardo (2000): “the cunning hero”
Emily Wilson (2017): “the complicated man”

The range is remarkable—from Chapman’s elaborate wordplay to Hobbes’s complete evasion, from Pope’s ornate expansion to Wilson’s stark modernity, each choice reflects not just linguistic preference but philosophical commitment about what translation should and can accomplish.

Wilson’s Innovation

The most recent translation in my library is Emily Wilson’s Odyssey. Wilson’s rendering for polytropon—“complicated”—offers an interesting approach to preserving the word’s semantic ambiguity while signaling moral and psychological depth, though scholarly reception has been mixed.² Its Latin root complicare, “to fold together,” aptly captures a figure whose facets—cunning, suffering, manipulation, endurance—are not easily separated, suggesting as Wilson notes, “someone whose multiple aspects are folded into a single identity, difficult to unravel or understand completely.” This translation does not resolve ambiguity; it revels in it. Where earlier translators sought precision through lexical equivalence, Wilson embraces complexity through conceptual resonance.

The Sound of Meaning

Translation, however, is not just about semantic equivalence—it is also about music, rhythm, and the physical experience of language in the mouth and ear. In the original Greek, polytropos participates in a complex pattern of sound and rhythm:

ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ πλάγχθη…

The repetition of the poly- sound connects polytropos to polla (“many”) in the same line and to planchthe (“wandered”) in the next, creating a sonic unity that reinforces the semantic connection between Odysseus’s many-sidedness and his many wanderings. This musical dimension is almost impossible to preserve in English, forcing translators to choose between acoustic and semantic fidelity.

The varied renderings of πολύτροπον by translators across centuries reflect not only aesthetic and lexical choices, but also deeper assumptions about the nature and purpose of translation itself—assumptions that resonate with and are interrogated by major theoretical frameworks.

Translation as Theory, Translation as Politics

Each translator’s approach to polytropos reveals their fundamental assumptions about what translation should accomplish, assumptions that echo through the major theoretical debates of the past century. Should translation prioritize:

Lexical fidelity to source structures?
Preservation of aesthetic complexity?
Contemporary accessibility and clear interpretation?
Resistance to reductive meaning-making?
Cultural and political responsibility?

The impossible thing is that these goals often conflict. Wilson’s “complicated” is perhaps more accessible to contemporary ears and possibly more interpretively rich than Lattimore’s “of many ways,” but it sacrifices literal connection to its Greek roots. Fagles’s “twists and turns” preserves ambiguity through metaphor, capturing both the active dimension (Odysseus creating twists through his cunning) and the passive dimension (being turned by forces beyond his control), while also preserving the literal sense of physical wandering and the metaphorical sense of mental agility. Notably, among the dozens of English translations preceding Fagles, only two others—T.S. Norgate’s “of many a turn” (1858) and Albert Cook’s “of many turns” (1967)—preserved the Greek roots as literally as Fagles’ “twists and turns.”³ Each translator joins rather than replaces the ongoing conversation about what this untranslatable word might mean.⁴

The challenge of polytropos connects to broader conversations about what translation is and what it should do—conversations that have produced some of the most influential theoretical writings of the past century.

Walter Benjamin’s 1923 essay “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers,” best known in English as “The Task of the Translator,” remains perhaps the most cited work in translation theory, arguing that translation should not aim for communication but for a kind of “pure language”—not found in either source or target, but revealed in their interplay—that emerges in the space between languages. For Benjamin, the translator’s task is not to convey meaning but to find the way languages complement each other, revealing what he calls their “kinship.” Applied to polytropos, Benjamin might advocate for something like “many-turned” or “much-turning”—preserving the German-like compound structure that reveals the kinship between Greek and English through their shared capacity for word-building. He would resist choosing between active and passive readings, instead creating a translation that holds both possibilities in tension, allowing the “pure language” that exists between Greek and English to emerge.

Susan Sontag’s 1966 “Against Interpretation” offers a different but related challenge to conventional approaches to meaning-making. Sontag argues that interpretation—which she sees as analogous to translation—often becomes “the revenge of the intellect upon art,” impoverishing works by reducing them to predetermined meanings. Her call for an “erotics of art” rather than a “hermeneutics of art” parallels the translator’s dilemma: how to preserve the sensual, immediate impact of a work while necessarily transforming it. Sontag might prefer leaving polytropos untranslated entirely, forcing readers to encounter the word’s irreducible foreignness, or choose the most literal rendering—”many-turning”—while resisting any footnotes that would “interpret” the ambiguity away. Her approach would preserve what she calls the work’s “sensuous surface,” letting readers experience the word’s mystery rather than having it explained into submission.

Vladimir Nabokov’s “Problems of Translation: Onegin in English” (1955) stakes out an extreme position in favor of literal fidelity. Nabokov argues that “the clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase,” advocating for translations with “footnotes reaching up like skyscrapers to the top of this or that page so as to leave only the gleam of one textual line between commentary and eternity” rather than the kind of elegant adaptation that sacrifices accuracy for readability. His approach to Eugene Onegin exemplifies this philosophy, creating what he called an “interlinear” translation that preserves every nuance at the cost of natural English. Nabokov would almost certainly render polytropos as “of many turnings” with extensive footnotes explaining every possible meaning: “1) having many devices/stratagems, 2) being turned in many directions by fate, 3) taking many paths, 4) being versatile in character, 5) cunning, 6) much-traveled…” His translation would sacrifice English fluency entirely for exhaustive accuracy, creating what he called “truthful ugliness” rather than “beautiful deception.”⁴

Gayatri Spivak’s “The Politics of Translation” (1992) brings postcolonial and feminist perspectives to bear on these questions. Spivak argues that translation is never neutral but always involves power dynamics, particularly when translating from “weaker” languages into English, the “language of power.” She advocates for what she calls “surrender” to the source text and criticizes translations that over-assimilate foreign works to make them accessible to Western readers, creating what she terms “translatese.” Spivak might choose something like “many-wayed” that preserves the Greek’s strangeness while questioning Western heroic ideals. She would resist translations that make Odysseus too familiar to English readers, warning against rendering polytropos as “resourceful” or “cunning”—words that domesticate Greek concepts of heroism into comfortable English categories. Her footnotes would address how translation choices reflect cultural power dynamics.

George Steiner’s monumental After Babel (1998) frames these concerns in terms of cultural encounter, arguing that translation is fundamentally an act of aggression where the translator “invades, extracts, and brings home” meaning from the foreign text—a conception that resonates deeply with postcolonial critiques of translation as cultural appropriation. Steiner might embrace a translation that acknowledges the “violence” of cultural appropriation—perhaps “man of manifold turnings” that sounds deliberately archaic, marking the temporal and cultural distance we must cross to reach Homer. He would want readers to feel they are encountering something genuinely foreign that has been “brought home” but not domesticated.

The Birth of a Series

These theoretical frameworks illuminate why polytropos serves as the perfect introduction to “The Fifth Word”—not just the series, but the concept. Every significant work of translated literature contains moments like this, words or phrases that crystallize the fundamental challenges of moving meaning between languages and cultures. These moments reveal translation not as a mechanical process of substitution, but as an art form in its own right, requiring creativity, interpretation, and impossible choices.

In each essay that follows, we will examine these crucial moments—the words that challenge translators and the art of translation, that force translators to become interpreters, that reveal the beautiful impossibility of perfect communication between languages. We will explore how different translators have approached these challenges, what their choices reveal about their understanding of the source text and target audience, and what these translation decisions mean for readers who encounter these works only in translation.

Some essays in this irregular series will focus on single words, like polytropos. Others will examine phrases, passages, or even entire approaches to a text. What unites them is the conviction that these moments of translation difficulty are not obstacles to be overcome, but windows into meaning itself—opportunities to understand not just what texts say, but how meaning moves through time, space, and the minds of readers separated by centuries and cultures.

Translation, at its best, does not just move words from one language to another—it creates critical access to intended meaning, oft revealing new ways of understanding both the source and target cultures. The history of translating polytropos is not just a record of different approaches; it is a map of how Western culture has understood heroism, character, and human complexity over the centuries.

Each new translation of The Odyssey does not replace its predecessors—it joins the conversation, adding another voice to an ongoing dialogue about what these ancient words might mean for contemporary readers. In this sense, translation is less like solving a puzzle than like composing music, with each translator adding their own interpretation to a theme that will never be definitively resolved.

This is what “The Fifth Word” will explore: the fertile space between languages, where meaning is not merely transferred but transformed—reborn, refracted, and made newly strange. Each essay will examine these crucial moments—the words that break translation, that force translators to become interpreters, that reveal the beautiful impossibility of perfect communication between languages.

Welcome to “The Fifth Word.” The journey begins here, but like the wanderings of Odysseus himself, who knows where it will lead us?

Notes

The Greek text is taken from Homer, Homer’s Odyssey, edited with English notes, appendices, etc. by W. Walter Merry and James Riddell, 2nd ed., rev. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1886), p. 1. The scholarly apparatus notes πολύτροπον as meaning “of many devices” (p. 1, fn. 8).
For mixed scholarly reception of Wilson’s translation, see Richard H. Armstrong, review of Homer: The Odyssey, by Emily Wilson, Museum Helveticum 75, no. 2 (2018): 225-226; and Richard Whitaker, “Homer’s Odyssey Three Ways: Recent Translations by Verity, Wilson, and Green,” Acta Classica 63 (2020): 241-254. For more positive mainstream reception, see Gregory Hays, “A Version of Homer That Dares to Match Him Line for Line,” New York Times Book Review, December 5, 2017; and Tim Parks, “The Visible Translator,” New York Review of Books, March 31, 2021. For Wilson’s own discussion of translating πολύτροπον, see Wyatt Mason, “The First Woman to Translate the ‘Odyssey’ Into English,” New York Times Magazine, November 2, 2017.
For the observation about Norgate and Cook being the only predecessors to preserve the Greek roots literally, see Wyatt Mason, “The First Woman to Translate the ‘Odyssey’ Into English,” New York Times Magazine, November 2, 2017.
Wilson implicitly rejects Nabokov’s approach, arguing that translations requiring footnotes reaching up like skyscrapers or dictionary-based translation represent “a simple and fundamental misunderstanding … of what any translation is doing.” See Mason, “The First Woman to Translate the ‘Odyssey’ Into English.”
The author’s preference would be Fagles’s “twists and turns” with annotation explaining that polytropos (πολύτροπος) contains an inherent grammatical ambiguity—tropos (τρόπος) can indicate either twists and turns inflicted by fate or the gods, or twists and turns of cunning and choice by Odysseus himself—that no English rendering can preserve without explanatory note.

Bibliography

Primary Sources: Homer Translations

Butler, Samuel. The Odyssey of Homer. London: A.C. Fifield, 1900.

Chapman, George. The Odysseys of Homer. 1614. Reprint, with introduction and notes by Richard Hooper, M.A., F.S.A. London: John Russell Smith, 1857.

Cowper, William. The Odyssey of Homer. 2nd ed., with copious alterations and notes. London: Bunney and Gold, 1802.

Fagles, Robert. The Odyssey. New York: Viking, 1996.

Fitzgerald, Robert. The Odyssey. New York: Doubleday, 1961.

Hobbes, Thomas. The Iliads and Odysses of Homer. 1st AMS ed. New York: AMS Press, 1979. Facsimile of: 2nd ed. London: W. Crook, 1677.

Lattimore, Richmond. The Odyssey of Homer. New York: Harper & Row, 1967.

Lombardo, Stanley. Odyssey. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2000.

Mandelbaum, Allen. The Odyssey. New York: Bantam Classics, 1990.

Ogilby, John. Homer His Odysses Translated. London: Printed by James Flesher, for the Authour, 1669.

Pope, Alexander. The Odyssey of Homer. A new edition, with additional notes, critical and illustrative by Gilbert Wakefield, B.A. London: Printed for J. Johnson, W. J. and J. Richardson, W. Otridge and Son, et al., 1806.

Rieu, E.V. The Odyssey. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1946.

Rouse, W.H.D. The Story of Odysseus. London: Thomas Nelson, 1937.

Shaw, T.E. The Odyssey of Homer. Introduction by John Finley. Norwood, Massachusetts: The Plimpton Press, 1932.

Wilson, Emily. The Odyssey. New York: W.W. Norton, 2017.

Translation Theory: Essential Essays

Benjamin, Walter. “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers.” 1923. In Translation as a Form: A Centennial Commentary on Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator,” edited by Douglas Robinson, 1st ed. London: Routledge, 2022.

Nabokov, Vladimir. “Problems of Translation: Onegin in English.” Partisan Review 22, no. 4 (1955): 496-512. Reprinted in Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida, edited by John Biguenet and Rainer Schulte, 127-143. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Sontag, Susan. “Against Interpretation.” 1966. In Against Interpretation and Other Essays, 3-14. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “The Politics of Translation.” 1992. In Living Translation, by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak et al. London: Seagull Books, 2022.

Steiner, George. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Secondary Sources

Armstrong, Richard H. “Homer for Scalawags: Emily Wilson’s ‘Odyssey.’” Los Angeles Review of Books, August 5, 2018.

Bär, Silvio. “Reviewing the Classics I: Richmond Lattimore’s Translations of Homer’s Epics.” April 29, 2020. https://www.silviobaer.com/post/reviewing-the-classics-i-richmond-lattimore-s-translations-of-homer-s-epics

Griffin, Jasper. Review of The Odyssey, by Homer, translated by Robert Fagles. The New York Times Book Review, 1996.

Higgins, Charlotte. Review of The Odyssey, by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson. The Guardian, December 8, 2017.

Johnston, Ian. “Review Comments on Translations of Homer.” http://johnstoniatexts.x10host.com/homer/

Mason, Wyatt. “The First Woman to Translate the ‘Odyssey’ Into English.” The New York Times Magazine, November 2, 2017.

Miller, Madeline. Review of The Odyssey, by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson. The Washington Post, December 7, 2017.

Stalnaker, Joanna. “An Epic New Journey for ‘The Odyssey.’” Columbia News, November 9, 2018.

Translation Station. “Odyssey: Opening Lines.” April 10, 2018. https://translationstation2018.wordpress.com/2018/04/02/odyssey-opening-lines/

Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2008.

Reading the Iliad Again: The Voice of Reason in an Age of Manipulation

After countless readings of various translations of Homer’s Iliad, certain passages can suddenly leap from the page with startling clarity. It can feel as if I am encountering them for the first time. Such was my experience with the incident regarding Thersites in Book 2, brought into sharp focus by Emily Wilson’s brilliant new translation—whose story had barely registered in previous readings, now revealed as perhaps the most penetrating political commentary in all of ancient literature.

A quick review of the scholarship revealed that while I was hardly alone in this recognition, the political interpretation of Thersites remains surprisingly contested. Some modern scholars have recognized in Homer’s portrayal a sophisticated critique of power that transcends the heroic framework, but many others continue to read the episode as simply affirming aristocratic values.¹ Yet there is something to be said for arriving at these insights through direct encounter with the text—Wilson’s translation made visible what a handful of careful readers have long debated.

The setup is masterful in its cynicism. Zeus, hungry for blood and bound by his promise to Thetis, sends a false dream to Agamemnon. The king, ever susceptible to flattery, believes the lie that, after nine years without success, Troy will fall easily if he attacks immediately. Divine deception exploits human vanity to ensure more carnage—the gods conspire to prolong suffering for their own purposes.

But first, Agamemnon decides to test his troops’ resolve by suggesting they abandon the siege and sail home. The test backfires spectacularly—war-weary soldiers leap up and race toward their ships, desperate to escape nine years of futile bloodshed. Only Odysseus’s violent intervention stops the mass exodus.

Into this moment of barely restored order steps Thersites, described by Homer with deliberate physical grotesquerie to ensure we see him through aristocratic eyes—bandy-legged, lame, with little hair and a shrill voice. In the ancient world, such deformity was viewed as suggesting mental or moral deficiency. But as scholar Panagiotis Stamatopoulos observes, “the ugly hero is the personification of the ugly truth.” Homer introduces an insolent and fearless figure who points out truths that both the soldiers and the kings dare not see. Thersites emerges as “the voice of the people, of demos“—a vox populi expressing the position of the lower social class and opposing the aristocratic consensus. Tellingly, Homer gives him no patronymic surname, no family lineage to establish elite status; he represents not an individual but a class.

Yet Thersites’ words cut through the manufactured crisis with devastating precision. He challenges Agamemnon directly: what is your grievance? You already have gold, women, first choice of everything. After nine years of pointless war, he asks the question that should be obvious—why should common soldiers continue dying for the personal honor of the elite who have already been richly compensated?

This is the voice of human reason emerging amid divine machination and aristocratic ego. Thersites offers what the epic desperately needs: an exit ramp from tragedy. Had the Greeks listened and sailed home, Troy would have stood, Hector would have lived, Achilles would have returned to Phthia, and Odysseus would never have wandered. The commoner alone sees the madness clearly.

More provocatively, Thersites points out the fundamental dependency that the heroic code obscures: “Let him consume his winnings here at Troy, so he can see if we helped him or not.” Without the common soldiers doing the actual fighting and dying, what would Agamemnon accomplish? He would be one man with his treasure, powerless before Troy’s walls. The entire war rests on the backs of those excluded from its real rewards.

But Homer’s brilliance lies in what follows. Odysseus—wily, eloquent, a master of persuasion—does not refute Thersites’ logic. He silences it. The master of cunning speech, the man who could talk his way out of any crisis, abandons rhetoric entirely when faced with reasonable dissent. Seizing the divine scepter, he beats the man bloody while the other soldiers—the very men whose interests Thersites defends—laugh and cheer. Yet Homer’s subtlety continues: even after this violent suppression, it takes two additional speeches by the army’s finest orators, Odysseus and Nestor, to convince the troops to resume fighting. The laughter was hollow; Thersites’ logic had found its mark. In this single scene, Homer offers a devastating triple indictment: the gods manipulate, the elite brutalize, and the masses collaborate in their own subjugation.

What makes this commentary so sophisticated is its recognition that the problem is not simply bad leadership or divine caprice—it is the entire system’s complicity in silencing rational dissent. Homer shows us a world where every level of authority, from Olympus to the ranks, conspires to suppress the voice that points toward sanity and survival.

We live in an age of algorithmic manipulation designed to amplify division for profit. Our elites meet dissent with derision and suppression, while the public, misled or weary, often rallies to their side, cheering policies that erode their own dignity and livelihood. The machinery Homer diagnosed—divine deceit, aristocratic coercion, popular compliance—still grinds forward, indifferent to time.

Thersites asks the eternal question that every society must confront: “Why should we suffer and die for the vanity and greed of our leaders?” That his voice is not merely ignored but mocked—laughed into silence by those he would save—remains one of the most chilling recognitions in all of literature. Homer understood what many modern narratives refuse to admit: that exploitation and oppression do not come from above alone. It comes when the oppressed celebrate it themselves. And the greatest tragedy may not be the fall of Troy, nor the deaths of elite heroes, but the silencing of the one voice that might have stopped the tragedy before it began.

¹ See, for example, Panagiotis G. M. Stamatopoulos, “The episode of Thersites in the Iliad as an ideological and literary construction of Homer,” 28th Seminar of Homeric Philology, Ithaca Island, Greece (2014); and Siep Stuurman, “The Voice of Thersites: Reflections on the Origins of the Idea of Equality,” Journal of the History of Ideas 65.2 (2004): 171-89.

The Last Witness: Unity, Confusion, and the Misreading of Babel

Donald S. Yarab

“Now the whole earth had one language and the same words… And they said to one another, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower… lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.'”
— Genesis 11:1-4

“Look, they are one people, and they have all one language… nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.”
— Genesis 11:6

Escher's Tower of Babel (1928) — *Tower of Babel* by M.C. Escher. Woodcut, 1928.
Escher, commenting on the work, stated: “Some of the builders are white and others black. The work is at a standstill because they are no longer able to understand one another. Seeing as the climax of the drama takes place at the summit of the tower which is under construction, the building has been shown from above as though from a bird’s eye view.”

The last man to descend from the Tower of Babel after language was confounded carried with him a memory that the theologians would spend centuries trying to erase. Dust-covered and thirsty, standing bewildered among companions now made strangers, he remembered what it had been like to build together. He remembered the shared mortar, the common purpose, the simple joy of raising something greater than any one of them could accomplish alone.

He remembered their fear—not pride, but fear. The fear of being scattered, of losing one another, of becoming strangers in a vast and empty world. And he remembered their response: “Come, let us build.” Not “Come, let us conquer heaven,” but “Come, let us remain together.”

Yet somehow, in the millennia that followed, their unity would be called sin. Their cooperation would be named rebellion. Their fear of scattering would be recast as prideful ambition. The very virtues that had bound them—brotherhood, shared purpose, mutual aid—would be transformed by interpreters into vices deserving divine punishment.

But the last man remembered. And his memory betrays the tradition we were taught.

A child, gathering stones with siblings to build a fort in the backyard, does not think of rebellion. The impulse to create together, to make something shared and lasting, springs from the deepest wells of human nature. It is the sacred reaching toward we that lifts us beyond the isolation of I. When children say “Let’s build something,” they echo the first and purest impulse of community itself.

How then can it be imagined that the Divine—source of all communion, all love—would greet humanity’s first great act of cooperation not with blessing but with violence? How could the natural longing to remain together, to build something lasting, to resist the entropy of scattering, be met not with approval but with the very scattering they feared?

It cannot be so. It is not the divine who pronounced guilt over unity; it is man.

The doctrine that Babel represents sinful pride emerges not from the text itself but from human artifice. It is born of fear—fear of unity that cannot be controlled, fear of cooperation that bypasses authority, fear of communities that dare to build without permission from those who claim dominion over building.

For what is the story of Babel if not the story of the first We? The natural longing to remain together, to resist isolation, to create something greater than the sum of individual parts—this was not the rebellion of prideful beings but the organic unfolding of community itself. To portray this reaching as disobedience is to misread the very nature of human fellowship.

The Genesis narrative itself frames the matter plainly. The builders are not described as wicked. They are not blasphemers or tyrants. They are simply people who share a language and a purpose. Their stated aim is modest and moving: to build a city and tower “lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.”

This is not hubris. This is the cry of community itself—the recognition that separation means death, that scattering means the end of the shared life they have known. They build not to reach heaven but to remain earthbound together. Not to transcend the human condition but to honor it through cooperation.

When the divine voice observes, “Look, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them,” there is no anger in the words. There is something else—perhaps apprehension, perhaps wonder, perhaps even a kind of sorrow. The tone is not of wrath but of recognition: unity makes all things possible.

But perhaps this “divine voice” is not divine at all. Perhaps it is the voice of the writer, generations later, trying to make theological sense of a catastrophe that was entirely human in origin. Perhaps the real Babel was not a moment when God intervened, but when human beings—through political fracture, resource conflict, or the machinations of those who feared unified peoples—engineered their own scattering. Perhaps the “confusion of tongues” was not miraculous punishment but the natural result of division, distrust, and the deliberate sowing of misunderstanding.

The Last Man would have known the difference. He would have remembered not divine intervention, but human failure. Not the voice of judgment from heaven, but the whispers of those who benefited from division. He would have seen how cooperation became suspect, how shared purpose was undermined, how the fear of remaining together was replaced by the greater fear of those who might control them if they remained apart.

Later theological traditions, particularly within Christianity, would recast this moment as divine judgment against human pride. Augustine, in The City of God (Book XVI), framed Babel as the archetype of the earthly city, writing that the builders “erected this tower against the Lord, and so gave expression to their impious pride; and justly was their wicked intention punished by God.” He further interpreted their motive as believing “they could avoid a future flood (as if anything could be too high for God!)” (Tractates on John 6.10.2). Augustine thought that ‘babel’ meant ‘confusion’: it is characteristic of the earthly city, he said, that there is no consistent moral or religious teaching, only a babble of conflicting voices. Medieval theologians deepened this interpretation, with Isidore of Seville’s influential Etymologies helping to establish the framework where the confusion of languages was seen as divinely designed punishment for human arrogance. Augustine had already helped establish the tradition that 72 languages resulted from Babel’s confusion (The City of God XVI 6), and this numerical framework became standard in medieval interpretations. Bede the Venerable employed allegorical interpretation methods that turned Babel into a moral allegory, while later Reformation thinkers would see scattered tongues as evidence of human fallenness.

But this interpretive tradition serves power more than truth. For if the scattering was actually human-engineered—the result of political manipulation, resource conflicts, or the deliberate sowing of division by those who feared unified peoples—then claiming it was divinely ordained becomes a theological cover-up. If unity without proper authority is called sinful, then those who claim to speak for proper authority become indispensable. If human fellowship is made suspect, then mediated fellowship—through church, through state, through hierarchy—becomes the only legitimate path to community.

Thus the interpreters of tradition did not just sanctify separation—they concealed its human origins. They made peace with estrangement by calling it divine will. They turned a human tragedy into a divine necessity, a wound into a cure.

The last man at Babel would not have recognized this version of his story. He would have remembered the morning when work began, when neighbors called to neighbors across the plain of Shinar: “Come, let us make bricks. Come, let us build.” He would have remembered the satisfaction of shared labor, the jokes passed from hand to hand with the mortar, the songs that rose from many voices into one.

He would have remembered their dream: not to storm heaven, but to remain together. Not to challenge the divine, but to honor the human bonds that felt, themselves, like gifts from beyond.

And he would have remembered how it ended. Not with divine fire or celestial intervention, but with human scheming. The whispered warnings about “those people” over there. The rumors of resource hoarding. The gradual erosion of trust. The political calculations of those who saw more advantage in a scattered people than a unified one. The slow poison of suspicion that made neighbor distrust neighbor, until the common language itself began to fracture—not by miracle, but by design.

The misreading of Babel has shaped our politics, our theology, our imagination for millennia. It has made us suspicious of cooperation, fearful of unity, comfortable with division. It has taught us that coming together is dangerous, that shared purpose is prideful, that the stranger—created not by divine decree but by human manipulation—is properly strange.

But more than that, it has concealed the human responsibility for our fractures. It has allowed us to blame God for what we did to ourselves. It has made us forget that Babel was not divine judgment but human failure—and that the story was written to make the perpetrators seem like agents of divine will.

Under the weight of this interpretation, we have learned to distrust the very impulses that might heal our brokenness. We have been taught that our longing for true community is suspect, that our desire to build together is rebellious, that our resistance to scattering is sinful.

But the text itself whispers another truth: that the builders were afraid of becoming strangers to one another. That their tower was not an assault on heaven but an anchor against forgetting. That what was lost at Babel was not obedience, but fellowship—and that the loss was engineered by human hands, then sanctified by human interpreters who found it useful to claim that God wanted division.

And perhaps what was broken by human manipulation might yet be mended by human recognition—by refusing to let the theological cover story stand unchallenged.

Man is not innately proud. Man is innately communal. Born into a world too vast for any individual to comprehend or inhabit alone, humanity’s first impulse is not toward dominion but toward fellowship—the need to share the burden and wonder of existence, to say “we” in a cosmos that otherwise echoes only “I.”

Community, then, is not a luxury; it is the ground of survival. It is the blessed recognition that no one person contains enough wisdom, strength, or love to make full sense of being human. Without it, there would be no shared labor, no common song, no building of anything that might outlast the brief span of individual life.

The theologians, in their haste to impose hierarchy where partnership had flourished, mistook cooperation for conspiracy. They mistook the reaching toward “we” for rebellion against divine order. But community is not sin; it is the evidence of our created nature, the signature of beings made not for isolation but for fellowship.

To say “Come, let us build” is to live as we were made to live: together, sharing the work, sharing the dream, sharing the hope that what we make together might matter more than what any of us could make alone.

The first great act of building was not a crime against the divine. It was the first true expression of humanity: the confused, hopeful, vulnerable community daring to create something lasting in a world of scattering.

In our cooperation, then, we find not our fall but our calling. Not our sin but our salvation. For to say “Come, let us build” is to begin the work of home—not a tower reaching toward heaven, but a community reaching toward one another.

The sacred path is not upward but inward—into fellowship, into shared purpose, into the endless possibility of what human beings might accomplish when they refuse to remain strangers.

The last man at Babel, climbing down from the ruins, carried with him more than dust and disappointment. He carried the memory of what it felt like to build together. And that memory, fragile as it was, held within it the seed of every community that would ever rise again from the ashes of confusion.

For the impulse to build together, like the impulse to question, is indestructible. Scattered, perhaps. Confused, certainly. But never finally lost.

The tower was abandoned. But the dream of building together endures.

And the question remains: who broke us apart, and who benefits from keeping us scattered? The Last Man knows. His memory threatens not just bad theology, but the very structures of power that require our division to survive.

Perhaps that is why his voice has been so carefully silenced for so long.

The Poet’s Apparatus: On Method, Reflection, and the Gift of Context

“The poem is the cry of its occasion, / Part of the res itself and not about it.” — Wallace Stevens, “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven”

Lacrimae Sanguinis 2025: A Lamentation in Four Movements

By Donald S. Yarab

I.

Lacrimae sanguinis,
Animae nigrae hominum terram maculant.
They walk not as men, but as shadows unshriven,
Each step a silence, each breath a wound.
The ground groans beneath the weight of the fallen,
And justice, long buried, forgets her name.
No trumpet sounds for the guiltless slain,
Only the whisper of blood in the dust.¹

Lacrimae sanguinis—
The blackened souls of men stain the earth.

II.

Hate kindles fires no rain can quell,
Greed carves its name in the marrow of kings.
Fear is a vulture, circling unborn hopes,
Its wings beating lies into trembling hearts.
These three—unholy trinity—march undenied,²
And temples crack beneath their tread.
Where once stood gardens, now only ash—
And the breath of God withdraws in sorrow.³

Lacrimae sanguinis—
The blackened souls of men stain the earth.

III.

No voice comes forth from the cloud or flame,
The heavens are sealed in unyielding hush.⁴
The stars avert their gaze, and time forgets its course—
Even the winds have ceased to speak His name.
Altars stand cold, their offerings stale,
And the priest no longer lifts his hands.
The silence is not peace, but exile—
A stillness too vast for prayer to fill.⁵

Lacrimae sanguinis—
The blackened souls of men stain the earth.

IV.

He turned His face—and we, our backs.⁶
Not in wrath, but in weary disdain.
The mirror cracked, the image lost,
And we wander, eyes open yet unseeing.⁷
We build our Babels in crumbling dust,
Raise thrones upon bones, call ruin law.
Light knocks, but we bolt the gate from within—
And call the silence proof He never was.⁸

Lacrimae sanguinis—
The blackened souls of men stain the earth.

Footnotes:

“Shadows unshriven” / “Justice… forgets her name” — Cf. Psalm 82:6–7 and Isaiah 59:14–15. Echoes of prophetic lament over moral collapse and unreconciled souls.
“Unholy trinity” — An inverted image of Augustine’s De Trinitate: hate, greed, and fear form a perverse sacred order.
“Gardens turned to ash” — Evokes Eden undone. The breath of God (Genesis 2:7) has withdrawn.
“The heavens are sealed” — Amos 8:11–12; Lamentations 3:8. Divine silence as the most damning judgment.
“Silence… not peace, but exile” — Apophatic void, not luminous unknowability. Cf. Isaiah 45:15: Deus absconditus.
“He turned His face” — Inverts the Aaronic blessing (Numbers 6:24–26). A divine turning not in anger, but in sorrowful withdrawal.
“Mirror cracked” — A fall from incomplete vision (1 Corinthians 13:12) into permanent distortion.
“Call the silence proof He never was” — Resonates with Nietzsche’s “God is dead,” here framed as mutual estrangement, not denial.

Note: The image of the soul as stained through inordinate attachment finds classical expression in Summa Theologica I–II, Q.86, Art.1, where Aquinas defines sin’s stain not as a substance, but as a privation of the soul’s brightness—a metaphorical shadow cast when the soul cleaves inordinately to created things, against reason and divine order. In this lamentation, the stain is projected outward: what is blackened within stains the world without.ain is projected outward—what is blackened within stains the world without.

It is easy to imagine the critical response already. Some heir to Harold Bloom’s anxiety-of-influence throne would ascertain that I, the creator, am anxious, insecure, prone to nail-biting—that I found it necessary to express my anxiety in more apparatus than poem, drowning the verse in scholarly scaffolding because I lack confidence in the work’s ability to stand alone.

Such banal criticism would miss the point entirely. If I were anxious about critical reception, if I were truly insecure about the poem’s merits, I would have foregone apparatus altogether in sure foreknowledge of such harsh rebuke. The apparatus exists precisely because I am secure in my intent, my method, and my purpose. I am not writing for elite pedantics and pedagogues who jealously guard their interpretive privileges, but for myself and any who wish to partake of poetry’s riches, whatever their opportunity to swim in the canon’s depths.

The truth is, those who argue against apparatus are those who would have poems essentially confined to an elite club, complete with secret handshakes, symbols, and degrees of membership. Like Skull and Bones or the Masonic lodges, traditional poetry criticism has long functioned as an initiatory society where full membership requires years of study, the right mentors, and familiarity with increasingly obscure reference points. The “let the poem stand on its own” argument sounds democratically pure but functions as cultural gatekeeping, preserving poetry as the domain of those who already possess the cultural capital to decode allusions, recognize forms, and trace influences.

When critics rail against apparatus, they defend a system where interpretive authority belongs to those with the “right” education, the proper literary pedigree. The poem becomes a kind of shibboleth—if you do not immediately recognize the echoes of Job, the inversions of Augustine, the liturgical cadences, well, perhaps serious poetry isn’t for you.

My apparatus dismantles that exclusivity. It offers initial guideposts to anyone willing to engage, no secret handshakes required. This is cultural hospitality, not anxiety—a deliberate act of democratization that makes visible the materials from which the poem emerged.

The Method: Nexus, Interaction, Reflection

A poem does not emerge from nothing. It rises from what might be called a nexus—a convergence of memory, reading, experience, and the particular urgency that calls forth language. In composing Lacrimae Sanguinis, this nexus became especially visible: biblical lament tradition, Thomistic theology, contemporary spiritual desolation, and liturgical rhythms that have shaped both prayer and protest for centuries. But rather than hide this genealogy, I choose to make it visible as part of the poem’s offering.

The nexus is not a conscious construction—it cannot be willed into being. Rather, it emerges when conditions are right, when reading and experience have prepared a space where seemingly unrelated elements suddenly reveal their hidden kinship. The Latin refrain lacrimae sanguinis did not arise from scholarly deliberation but from convergence, where liturgical memory met contemporary anguish.

Within this nexus, meaning arises through interaction—the dynamic tension between elements that resist easy synthesis. The “unholy trinity” of hate, greed, and fear stands in deliberate tension with Augustine’s conception of divine Trinity, not as simple inversion but as recognition of how spiritual language can be perverted by the very forces it seeks to name and resist. The line “He turned His face—and we, our backs” emerges from interplay between the Aaronic blessing and the lived experience of mutual estrangement.

The apparatus participates in this interaction by creating dialogue between poem and source. When I note that “silence is not peace, but exile” resonates with Isaiah’s Deus absconditus, I do not suggest the poem merely illustrates the biblical text. Rather, I propose that ancient prophetic cry and modern spiritual dislocation illuminate one another—that meaning arises in their interaction, not in either alone.

The apparatus reveals process without explaining away mystery. When I show that “He turned His face—and we, our backs” emerges from tension between Aaronic blessing and contemporary estrangement, I do not solve the line’s meaning—I multiply its resonances. The reader now encounters not just the line’s immediate emotional impact but also its dialogue with liturgical tradition, its inversion of expectation, its theological implications. The apparatus does not reduce mystery to mechanism; it shows how many mysteries converge in a single moment of language.

This transparency serves poetry’s deepest purpose: not to mystify through obscurity but to reveal the actual complexity of experience. When sources remain hidden, readers may sense depths they cannot fathom and mistake inaccessibility for profundity. When sources become visible, the true marvel emerges—not that the poet knows obscure references, but that these disparate materials can achieve such unity, that ancient texts still speak to contemporary anguish.

Finally, reflection—not as conclusion but as ongoing process. The apparatus serves this reflective function, helping both creator and reader recall not just sources but the quality of attention that makes encounter possible. By showing rather than hiding the poem’s genealogy, it acknowledges that interpretation is always collaborative, that meaning emerges from ongoing conversation between text and reader.

Confidence, Not Anxiety

This method emerges from confidence rather than defensiveness. When apparatus functions generously, it says to readers: here are some materials that were present when this poem emerged, but you are free to make of them—and of the poem itself—what you will. This represents confidence in both the work’s integrity and the reader’s capacity for independent meaning-making.

Critics will object that apparatus risks over-determining meaning, that by naming sources I constrain interpretation. This objection misunderstands how meaning actually works in poetry. The apparatus does not tell readers what to think about the convergence of Nietzschean pronouncement and prophetic lament—it simply makes that convergence visible as one layer among many.

Consider the reader who recognizes the Aaronic blessing inversion without consulting footnotes, discovers resonances I never anticipated or intended, and finds connections to their own liturgical memory. The apparatus does not prevent this encounter—it enriches the conversation by adding another voice. Meaning multiplies rather than contracts when more materials become available for interaction.

The real constraint on interpretation comes from ignorance, not knowledge. When readers miss allusions entirely, they are trapped in partial understanding. When sources become visible, readers gain freedom to accept, reject, or build upon the connections offered. The apparatus functions as invitation, not limitation.

We live in an age where what was once common cultural knowledge—biblical narratives, classical philosophy, liturgical traditions—can no longer be assumed as shared reference points. This is not a failure of readers or education but a consequence of cultural acceleration. Neither poets nor readers can be expected to carry the full weight of cultural memory. When canonical works become unfamiliar, when classical allusions require explanation, apparatus serves not as condescension but as courtesy.

The apparatus preserves a record of one moment’s convergence—the nexus as it appeared when the poem emerged—but it cannot and should not constrain future encounters. It functions as invitation rather than explanation, creating conditions for ongoing dialogue rather than settling interpretive questions once and for all.

Method as Cultural Hospitality

What emerges is method as interpretive generosity rather than critical control. The apparatus offers tools for encounter while acknowledging that even the creator does not exhaust the poem’s meaning. The poem, once written, becomes available for encounter rather than possession, even by the one who wrote it.

This hospitality extends to readers at all levels of familiarity with the sources. Those who recognize the allusions immediately may find additional layers in seeing them made explicit. Those encountering Augustine or Isaiah for the first time receive invitations to explore further. Those who prefer immediate encounter may ignore the scholarly apparatus entirely. All approaches are welcome.

In this way, creative method and interpretive philosophy align. Both resist the fantasy of complete control or final understanding. Both acknowledge that meaning emerges in relationship. Both find fulfillment not in closure but in the ongoing conversation they make possible.

The apparatus, properly understood, serves this conversation. It is not the last word on the poem’s meaning but an invitation to the kind of careful attention that allows meaning to emerge. Like the poem itself, it creates conditions for encounter rather than commanding specific responses.

This is method in poetry as in interpretation: not a tool of conquest but a lens through which the materials of experience might reveal some of their hidden connections. The nexus forms, interactions unfold, reflection deepens—and occasionally, if conditions are right, something emerges that was not there before. Something worth sharing with anyone willing to receive it.

Of Goose and Grin: When Tales Step Off the Page

What happens when the characters tumble from their tales? When rhyme stumbles, and the Goose remembers? In this playful and poignant poem, nursery rhymes unravel, fairy tales awaken, and the stories themselves walk past their plots. “Once Upon Askew” is a whimsical reflection on the lives of stories—and those who dwell within them.

child reading book in front of shelves of books — Photo by RDNE Stock project on Pexels.com

Once Upon Askew

or, The Story That Would Not Sit Still
by Donald S. Yarab

Listen, child—I am the Old Grey Goose,
And I was there when books came loose,
When volumes tumbled, pages flew,
And all the stories mixed like stew.

It started with a mighty thud—
Books falling open, words like mud,
All swirling, mingling, line by line,
Till Alice’s world came mixing into mine.

“Curiouser and curiouser!” she cried,
Right into Cow’s green pasture-side,
Where “Hey Diddle Diddle” used to play—
Now Cow asks questions all the day.

The Spoon caught Alice’s strange delight,
Abandoned dishes, fled by night,
Beneath a moon from whose bright story—
From Carroll’s tale or Goose’s glory?

I squawked from my own tumbled page—
Which book? What tale? What ancient age?
While Cat’s grin stretched across our scene,
Belonging nowhere, everywhere seen.

We passed the wall where once he sat—
Poor Humpty, puzzled, round, and flat.
Though patched, he watches, cracked but clear,
And murmurs, “Not all ends end in fear.”

But one lay still beyond the swirl—
A slumbering, untouched young girl.
The tales all passed; she did not wake,
No prince, no plot her trance to break.
Yet in her stillness, something stirred—
A dream not shaped by spoken word.

We found Red Riding Hood alone,
Her basket lost, her sure path gone.
The Wolf came next—not sly, but stunned,
As if unsure what he had done.
They walked apart, then side by side,
Two stories stripped of fear and pride,
Each wondering if what they knew
Was ever really, wholly true.

So off we walked, this mixed-up crew:
Alice with questions, Cow with moo
That carried wisdom, Spoon with light
From every moon and every night.

Behind us trailed the broken bits—
Half-rhymes and verbs that sought their fits,
Metaphors in mismatched dancing shoes,
Still seeking out their missing clues.

No longer bound by story’s rules,
We’d become something new, no fools—
Not quite the characters we’d been,
Not free of them—but in between.

And hovering above our band,
That smile from Cheshire’s distant land—
A grin that needs no cat to hold,
A question that will not be told.

This is what happens, child, you see,
When stories tumble, wild and free—
They find they’re more alike than not,
And walk together past their plot.