The lament that follows was born of an essay I penned after re-reading The Iliad through the figure of Thersites: truth-speaker, scapegoat, silenced. Where the essay names the mechanisms—divine deceit, aristocratic coercion, popular complicity—the mythic poem strives to give breath to that silenced voice through Antipseudes of Elis, a fictive low-born warrior who speaks from within the wound of the epic itself. Against the degradations of later tradition—most starkly in Quintus Smyrnaeus’ Posthomerica, where Thersites is struck down in rage by his companion-in-arms Achilles, not in duel nor battle but unjustly, unarmed, unready, and unaware, and then buried in the earth rather than burned upon a pyre, in defiance of Achaean custom—the lament restores what Homer only intimates: that the truth-speaker saw clearly, and that to remember him, and the vision he bore, is the conscience of witness. Thersites’ voice, mocked in antiquity, is recognized belatedly by thinkers such as Hegel and Nietzsche.
The Lament of Antipseudes of Elis
After the Fall of Troy of the High Walls
“What glory is this, that tastes of ash and allotted fate?”
I. The Weight of Victory
Ten winters I carried this spear, ten summers I dreamed of home—
the olive grove behind my father’s house, the way morning light fell across my wife’s sleeping face.
Now Troy burns behind us, her towers cracked like broken teeth,
and the wind carries the smell of what the immortals and kings call victory: blood and smoke, the stench of the fallen.
They say we have victory. They say our names will echo through the halls of distant kings,
that singers will sing of this day when the world was young.
But we—nameless before kings and heroes, we who bore the spears, we who remember our companions—
we think of Phegaios, who fell at the Scaean Gate, beneath the shadow of the consecrated beech,
his shield-arm shattered, calling for his mother as the light left his eyes.
What song will remember that he loved to carve small birds from olive wood, that he wept the night before battle—
not from fear, but from beauty; the way starlight fell on the wine-dark sea, too lovely for a world that would end him tomorrow?
II. The Kings’ Glory
Agamemnon stands proud upon the battlements, his bronze breastplate catching the flame-light of the city.
He speaks of destiny, of honor served, of the gods’ will made manifest in spear-point and sword-edge.
But what did Helen know of our ten years’ dying? What did she dream in Priam’s halls
while we bled the earth black beneath Troy’s walls?
Was her face worth Patroklos, torn and broken? Worth Hector’s son, dashed against the stones? Worth the thousand nameless sons who will never see their fathers’ fields again?
The kings divide the spoils— gold and bronze, slaves and chariots, of a broken world.
But they cannot divide the weight that settles in a warrior’s chest
when men no longer fall, and the silence gapes like a wound across the blood-soaked plain.
III. What the Dead Know
In the grey hour before dawn we walked among the pyres where our companions burned.
Their smoke rose straight into the windless sky, and we thought: here is truth—
not in the golden masks of heroes, not in the songs that will outlive our bones, but in this.
Not only kings waged war at Troy, nor only the heroes whose names the singers will praise. These also bore the spear, or fell in dust:
Phegaios of the beech, who fell at the Scaean Gate beneath the sacred tree, calling for his mother as the bronze pierced his side.
Echelaos of Argos, new to war, who upheld the host but died clutching a lock of hair cut from his sister’s head— a pledge never delivered.
Lēthios the forgetful, the goatherd’s son, barely bearded, who drowned in his own blood until Thersites drew him forth, yet lived to forget the hand that saved him.
And I—Antipseudes of Elis, opposer of lies— who live to speak the lament of the nameless many.
What do the dead know that we, the living, have forgotten? What wisdom lies in their silence?
Perhaps this: that glory is a word spoken by those who were not there
when the bronze bit deep, when the earth drank its fill of young blood, when the horses screamed and would not be comforted.
Perhaps this: that a man’s worth is not measured in the length of his shadow cast by the pyre-flames,
but in the small kindnesses— the water shared, the wound bound, the hand held in the dark hour before the last battle where men meet their fate.
IV. The Voice We Silenced
I remember Thersites.
Not his name—no one speaks his name now, though once it rang across the ranks like bronze on bronze, clear and true and terrible.
He was ugly, yes— twisted-legged, sharp-voiced, the kind of man whom kings saw not, though he stood before them.
But when he spoke that day in the ninth year, when Agamemnon deceived us, pretending to release us only to test our hearts—
Thersites alone, voice of the low-born, truth-speaker, spoke what we all knew:
What share have we in Atreus’ son’s portion? Why must our bones bleach white on the Scamandrian plain, while he grows fat on Trojan plunder?
The words hung like loosed arrows trembling in the morning air.
For one bright moment we saw ourselves clearly: not heroes, not bearers of glory, but flesh offered up to feed another’s pride.
Then Odysseus rose— Odysseus the much-turning, whose counsels coiled like serpents in the dust, whose tongue bore honey and venom both—
and did not quarrel. He beat him. Beat him bloody with the royal scepter while we—gods forgive us— we laughed.
We laughed, but the gods had blinded us. We cast his voice into dust, and cheered the silencing of the truth-speaker, as fate compelled.
Had we listened, had we sailed that day— Hector would breathe still, Achilles would grow old in Phthia’s fields, Priam’s grandson would chase shadows through Troy’s unfallen towers.
But we chose laughter. We chose the war. We chose to die rather than hear what the ugly man dared to say:
that we were fools, that we were cattle, that our lives meant less to our kings than the bronze in their coffers.
But listen—Thersites died not as the coward Odysseus made him seem, not cowering in his tent or fleeing from the fray.
He died on the day Patroklos fell, that day of ruin when the Greeks were driven back to the ships, when bronze points flashed like lightning and the sand drank rivers of blood.
The field was chaos and screaming— chariots overturned, horses mad with terror, shields splintered, spears shivered, and men cried out for mothers no longer living.
In that storm of ruin, young Lēthios—barely bearded, homesick for his goats— took a spear through the lung and lay drowning in his blood.
No king was watching. No god took note.
The hour was desperate, the deed unheroic: Thersites crawling through the bodies, hauling the boy across the bloody sand while the clash of bronze roared about him.
The boy lived. Lives still, perhaps, somewhere in Argos, telling his young sons and daughters stories of the war, never speaking the name of the man who dragged him from the edge of death.
And Thersites? A Trojan blade found his heart as he shielded the boy’s retreat.
He made no sound— no cry for help, no call to glory, no final words for singers to polish into verses of bronze.
He simply fell, face-down in the bloody sand, his truth-telling mouth stopped with earth.
We burned him on a common pyre with a dozen others— companions-in-arms whose names the smoke carried skyward and scattered on the wind, whose deeds no singer will praise before kings.
But we remember:
the man who spoke against the war died saving a life, not for glory, not for honor, not for the gold of distant kingdoms, but because a boy was drowning in his blood and someone had to act.
What share have we in Atreus’ son’s portion?
The question follows us like a shade, unanswered still,
though half our number— Thersites among them— perished on the soil of Ilium some mourned, some forgotten, some remembered only by the wind.
V. The Long Road Home
Tomorrow we sail for the wine-dark waters of home.
Some speak of wives and children waiting at the harbor, of olive groves heavy with fruit, of wine that tastes of peace.
But we have seen too much to believe in simple homecomings.
The men who left for Troy ten years past lie buried somewhere beneath the walls we have torn down, buried with the voice of Thersites, buried with the truth we cast into dust.
What strangers wear their faces now? What shades return to sit at ancestral tables, to hold the hands we knew, to feign that time and blood and the weight of blood have not cut deep furrows in their hearts?
The ships wait, black-hulled against the morning light. The oars are ready, the sails hang slack as old skin.
But before we go, let me speak this truth into the ashes of the fallen city:
We came for glory. We found only that men die as simply as leaves fall in autumn—
and that we ourselves chose to silence the one voice that might have stopped the falling.
We came as heroes. We leave as vessels of sorrow— too burdened for song, too grievous for memory.
What is victory but the bitter wine pressed from the grapes of other men’s grief?
What is honor but a name we press upon our wounds to make them bearable?
And what are we— who cheered the beating of the truth-speaker, who chose war, who laughed as wisdom bled into the dust?
Epilogue: The Warrior’s Prayer
Hear me, immortals, who sent us forth to toil in war, who moved our hands to this dark work—
grant us this:
Not that our names be remembered in bronze and stone, not that singers will sing our deeds to unborn kings—
But that when we pass to Hades’ shadowed halls, where our fathers dwell, the dead will forgive us the price we laid upon their dying.
Grant that the shadows of Troy’s children will not follow us across the wine-dark sea.
Grant that the blood we spilled here will not cry out from every field we pass.
And if you must remember us, remember this:
that we learned too late the weight of bronze, the true cost of kingdoms, the sacrifice of war.
The ships call. The wind rises.
Troy burns behind us like a star falling into the dark.
Hear me, O boundless halls of shadow, where no lyre sounds save memory’s echo, where the voices of the upper world drift down like falling leaves, carrying my name—swift-footed, godlike, breaker of men— yet here, in this silence deeper than death’s first breath, I am but shade calling to shade across the voiceless deep.
Not as I was in life do I summon you, O dwellers in darkness, swift of foot upon Trojan soil, terrible in bronze and wrath, but as one among the countless dead who wander here, seeking not the glory that the living world still sings, but what no song can restore, no fame redeem.
By Acheron’s dark waters, by Cocytus’ wailing stream, if any shade remembers love, if any echo bears my grief, come forth from asphodel’s pale meadows, enter not Lethe’s merciful waters— let me embrace again what I have lost, not the glory I have won.
The Encounter with Odysseus
Through the mists of the unremembering came Odysseus, his words still honey-bright, his tongue still silver-edged:
“Achilles, no shade walks more blessed than you among the dead! In life, you were honored as a god among mortals; here, you are lord of the departed. Above, the poets crown you with undying flame— your name will never perish from the lips of men.”
But I answered him, bitter with the dust of ages: “Do not gild my shadow, son of Laertes. Better to be a hireling alive, a drudge to some poor man who scratches bread from stubborn earth, than king among these silent multitudes. For what is glory here, where no heart beats to hear it? Your songs reach my name but cannot touch my soul; they raise me to eternity yet leave me hollow as wind through bone.”
The Shade of Patroclus
Then—O mercy of the pitiless dark—I thought I heard you, Patroclus, soft as breath through withered leaves, faint as the last note of a dying lyre string:
“They did not forget me, Achilles… my name is bound to yours in bronze and grief. They sang my fall beneath the walls of Troy, they sang your wrath that shook the earth and sky. They knew… they knew I was beloved.”
“O Patroclus,” I cried across the gulf of silence, “O companion of my heart, O dearer than breath— yes, they sang you, but they knew only shadows. They praised my spear but not your steadying hand, they heard my wrath but not our laughter in the tents, they saw my grief but not the mornings when you woke and the world was whole because you breathed within it. Glory is one thing, beloved, but your nearness was another, greater than all the songs that mortals weave.”
Then darker came your voice, like distant thunder: “Yet had you not brooded, had you not nursed your wounded pride, I might have lived to see another dawn. I wore your armor, Achilles, and with it, your doom— my blood became the price of your great wrath, my grave the shadow of your choice. They sing your glory, but it is built upon ashes from my pyre.”
I reached through the darkness, but my hands closed only on emptiness, and you dissolved like mist before the merciless sun.
The Voice of Echo
Then from the depths where memory dwells eternal, Echo came, bearing fragments of what was, and in her broken voice I heard my mother’s prophecy, scattered like pearls upon the wine-dark deep:
“Two fates… two fates bear you toward death’s end… toward death’s end, my son… If here you remain… remain fighting the sons of Troy… brief is your life… brief… but your glory undying… undying through all the generations of men… If homeward you sail… you sail to Phthia’s shore… long life awaits… awaits… but your name dies with you… dies with you like smoke upon the wind…”
“Two roads… two roads I set before you… before you, child of my bitter grief… Choose… choose… but know that I will lose you… lose you in either path you take…”
Her voice faded like waves withdrawing from a distant shore, leaving me more orphaned than before, knowing now the weight of what I chose, the golden chain that binds my doom.
The Torment of the Fates
Then came the daughters of Necessity, Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos stern, their voices cold as iron, pitiless as winter stars:
“No thread is rewoven, son of Thetis; what is cut by our shears remains cut. You chose the song of men, and it is sung forever; you chose the path of wrath, and it is walked to its end. Dream not of other dawns, for the spindle turns not backward. The pattern is complete, the weaving done— you are bound within your own bright doom, remembered by all the world, and yet undone.”
Their laughter rang like bronze on bronze, a sound to crack the pillars of the world, and in that cruel music I heard the truth: I am the hero of my own destruction, the author of my endless, empty fame.
Epilogue: The Wisdom of Shadows
So here I abide, Achilles famed beyond forgetting, yet hollow as the caves where no wind stirs. From Lethe’s bank to Styx’s binding waters, the shades whisper my name with reverence, but reverence is cold comfort to the dead.
O Patroclus, my brother, my breath made flesh— they remember our names twined in bronze and sorrow, but none recall the quiet mornings when you woke and smiled, and the world was made new. The poets crown me with eternal fire, but eternity burns cold without you near.
Learn this, you who still draw breath beneath the sun: choose not wrath over love, nor fame over the hand beside you. One dawn with the beloved, one moment’s grace when heart speaks truly unto heart, is worth more than all the ages of song. Better to be forgotten with love’s warmth upon you than to blaze forever in the cold halls of memory, alone.
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
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:
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.
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.
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.
Night is the time for vagabond thoughts—those unbidden travelers who step lightly into the study, pull books from shelves, and whisper paradoxes. Last night, one such thought came cloaked in the deep hues of Homeric sea-mist. I opened Robert Fagles’ translation of the Iliad—a beloved companion—and there it was: “the blue-haired god Poseidon.”1
Blue-haired? Homer, who never knew the color blue? Homer, whose “wine-dark sea” has puzzled and delighted classicists and poets for generations? What does it mean to be “blue” in a world that never named the sky’s hue?
In Homer’s Greek, Poseidon is called κυανοχαίτης (kyanochaitēs)—literally “dark-haired” or “dark-maned”—a word that evokes depth, darkness, perhaps the shimmer of polished lapis, but not “blue” as we know it.2 The root kyanos gestures toward something darker, more elusive, tied to the sea’s unfathomable depths and the glossy mane of a wild horse. When the earliest Latin translators, like Andreas Divus, rendered this as caeruleis crinibus, they preserved the ambiguity: sea-dark, storm-shadowed, ancient.3
Fagles, however, chooses “blue.” Not sea-dark. Not dark-maned. But blue, direct and modern, emotive and luminous. It is a poetic choice, not a philological one. It is also a deeply modern one—for blue in English is not just a color. It is a feeling, a state of mind, a synonym for longing, for absence, for twilight thoughts and aching depths.4
And so I wonder: is Poseidon feeling blue? Or am I, reading him across three millennia, transposing my own midnight melancholy onto his immortal form?
Translation, after all, is never a mere transmission of words—it is a voyage of interpretation, laden with the cargo of culture and the ballast of the translator’s imagination. In choosing “blue,” Fagles draws a line not just from kyanos to blue, but from epic time to our own: where gods feel, and we, perhaps, are gods remade in language.
What is blue, then, but the poetry of absence? A color that Homer never named, yet whose shadowy presence haunts his lines like a dusk-lit horizon, always just out of reach.5
Homer. The Iliad. Trans. Robert Fagles, with Introduction and Notes by Bernard Knox. New York: Viking Penguin, 1990, p. 359, line 651. Poseidon is described as “the blue-haired god,” a poetic rendering of the Greek epithet kyanochaitēs (κυανοχαίτης).
Liddell, H. G., and Scott, R. A Greek-English Lexicon. Revised ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996, s.v. “κυανός.” The word can mean dark blue, glossy blue-black, or lapis-colored, often evoking depth or obscurity.
Divus, Andreas. Homeri poetae clarissimi Odyssea et Ilias Latine redditae. Venice: 1537. Poseidon’s epithet is rendered as “caeruleis crinibus,” preserving the sea-dark imagery. See also Lewis, C. T., and Short, C. A Latin Dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879, s.v. “caeruleus.”
Berlin, Brent, and Paul Kay. Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. See especially their discussion of the absence of “blue” in early Indo-European languages.
Gladstone, W. E. Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1858, vol. 3, pp. 457–468. Gladstone first drew scholarly attention to the limited Homeric color vocabulary and the curious case of the “wine-dark sea” (p. 490).
Northcoast Antiquarian 