The musings began as I started my morning routine. Roused out of bed and heading to the shower, I found myself uttering, almost involuntarily: yet ever more. The words rose without prompting—perhaps because the task before me was ordinary, repetitive, and required no conscious thought. In such moments, the mind drifts, half-idle and half-aware, allowing stray phrases to surface without clear origin. But these three words arrested me. I repeated them aloud and wondered: three simple words, and yet they carried weight, rhythm, and an unexpected poetic resonance. Why?
After completing my morning ablutions, I returned to contemplate the phrase further and determined that some research was in order. Accordingly, I sought poetry and prose in which these words appear in succession—or in meaningful proximity—with appreciable effect. Once identified, I sought to understand the source of their force: the reason they ring with a power far exceeding their lexical modesty.
What emerged almost immediately was that the phrase yet ever more is no fixed formula of the poetic canon—no Miltonic thunder, no Dantesque refrain, no Eliotian motif. Rather, it appears sporadically—in seventeenth-century lyrics, Victorian nature poetry, and occasional elegiac verse—where poets employ it whenever they require a compact expression of endurance, paradox, or lingering emotional intensification. Its power lies precisely in this: three ordinary words capturing experiences that refuse ordinariness.
Early Instances: Paradox and Persistence
Consider William Strode’s seventeenth-century poem On Jealousie:
There is a thing that nothing is, A foolish wanton, sober wise; It hath noe wings, noe eyes, noe eares, And yet it flies, it sees, it heares; It lives by losse, it feeds on smart, It joyes in woe, it liveth not; Yet evermore this hungry elfe Doth feed on nothing but itselfe.1
The concessive yet introduces contradiction: jealousy ought to consume itself and die out. Yet—contrary to all reason—it persists. Evermore extends that persistence beyond temporal boundaries, transforming a human passion into an almost metaphysical condition.
A similar pattern appears in Archibald Lampman’s Hope and Fear (1883):
As when the sunless face of winter fills The earth—a moment misty bright— The sun streams forth in powdery light, A silver glory over silent hills;
And all the rolling glooms that lie below That sudden splendour of the sun, With shivered feet and mantles dun, In stricken columns skim the gleaming snow;
Yet far away, beyond utmost range Of sun-drowned heights, pine-skirted, dim, That fringe the white waste’s frozen rim, Hang ever ghost-like waiting for the change:
So often to the blank world-sobered heart Comes hope, with swift unbidden eye, And bids the weary life-glooms fly With shaken feet, and for a space depart;
Yet evermore, still known of eye and ear, With sullen, unforgotten surge, Hang ever on the waste heart’s verge, Time’s hovering ghosts of restless change and fear.2
Here the phrase marks memories that, though logically expected to fade, remain vivid—“still known of eye and ear.” Memory becomes not a fading echo but an enduring presence, resisting dissolution. The poem’s natural imagery—sunlight briefly breaking through winter gloom only for shadows to persist at the horizon—mirrors consciousness itself: fleeting solace does not erase deeper, lurking fears.
Structural analogues—but not direct antecedents—appear elsewhere in the tradition: George Herbert’s The Search (1633) repeatedly opens with “Yet can I mark…,” enacting concessive-persistence, while Christina Rossetti’s A Better Resurrectiondeploys yet as a pivot from desolation to expectation in the line “Yet rise it shall—the sap of Spring,” generating a concessive-and-intensifying movement even without a full triadic form.
Tennyson and the Deepening of Grief
The pattern appears with particular frequency and force in Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850), where it becomes almost a structural signature for the poem’s central paradox: grief that does not diminish with time but deepens and transforms. Tennyson varies the pattern—substituting but for yet, altering the position of ever and more—while retaining its concessive–durational–intensifying logic.
In Canto XLI, contemplating his deceased friend’s spiritual ascent, he writes:
For tho’ my nature rarely yields To that vague fear implied in death; Nor shudders at the gulfs beneath, The howlings from forgotten fields;
Yet oft when sundown skirts the moor An inner trouble I behold, A spectral doubt which makes me cold. That I shall be thy mate no more,
Tho’ following with an upward mind The wonders that have come to thee, Thro’ all the secular to-be, But evermore a life behind.3
The phrase captures the poet’s fear that he will perpetually lag behind Hallam’s transfigured state—not merely left behind but evermore behind, the temporal gulf widening rather than closing. The concession is double: though he claims not to fear death itself, and though he strives to follow Hallam’s ascent, the doubt persists and intensifies.
Yet the most remarkable deployment appears in Canto CXXXI, where the pattern shifts from lamentation to affirmation:
And yet is love not less, but more;
No longer caring to embalm In dying songs a dead regret, But like a statue solid-set, And moulded in colossal calm.
Regret is dead, but love is more Than in the summers that are flown, For I myself with these have grown To something greater than before.4
Here yet introduces not mere continuation but transfiguration. Love persists and intensifies—”not less, but more”—becoming something greater. What began as lamentation has, through time’s pressure, become an enlargement of the heart.
Later Variations
Geoffrey Bache Smith, whose A Spring Harvest was published posthumously under J.R.R. Tolkien’s editorship, employs the phrase to capture beauty and grace in his Glastonbury:
The Queen that was, whom now a convent’s shade Imprisons, and a dark and tristful veil Enwraps those brows, that in old days were seen Most puissant proud of all that ever made The traitor honest, and the valorous frail.
Yet evermore about her form there clings And evermore shall cling, the ancient grace, Like evening sunlight lingering on the mere: And till the end of all created things There shall be some one found, shall strive to trace The immortal loveliness of Guinevere.5
Guinevere’s beauty, though shadowed by sorrowful penitence, persists; the phrase conveys a grace that resists decay, lingering like light upon the waters. The doubled evermore—first descriptive, then prophetic—creates a temporal dilation: what persists now will persist “till the end of all created things.”
Perhaps this explains why the phrase surfaced unbidden during my morning routine—in that liminal state when the mind is neither fully engaged nor wholly at rest, and truths we do not seek present themselves. A simple, repetitive task; three ordinary words; and suddenly a glimpse of what all these poets knew.
The Shape and Sound of the Phrase
The power of yet ever more lies in the internal mechanics of the phrase itself. Yet, is adversative; it signals resistance, contradiction, persistence against expectation. Ever erases temporal boundaries and opens a vista without limit. More introduces escalation—a rising degree, an intensifying condition.
Thus the phrase embodies a miniature logic of concession → duration → escalation, a compressed rhetoric of persistence against expectation.
The sound reinforces the structure. The assonantal /ɛ/ shared by yet and ev-er binds the first two terms, while the deeper /ɔː/ of more provides rounded closure. Jakobson’s “poetic function” is precisely this intertwining of sound and meaning: language calling attention to itself through patterned echo.6 The triad exemplifies it.
Linguistically, the force of yet ever more can also be understood in light of Michael Israel’s account of scalar meaning. Ever is a degree-based intensifier, signaling movement along an ordered scale without natural upper bound; joined to more, it expresses not mere continuation but continuation that deepens.7 Geoffrey Leech’s observations on foregrounded repetition likewise illuminate why paired or tripled intensifiers resonate in poetic contexts.8
But lived experience precedes theory: some feelings—grief, longing, devotion—intensify through time rather than diminish.
The Lived Experience of Persistence
The rarity of the exact triad is telling. Poets have long used its components in various pairings, but the compact English formula appears only occasionally, and often at moments of emotional endurance or spiritual intensification. This scarcity sharpens its effect. Each verified instance crystallizes a paradox: what ought to subside instead deepens.
This explains the phrase’s particular force. In three ordinary words, it captures something we already know but rarely articulate: the heart’s deepest experiences follow a logic all their own. They do not fade; they deepen. They do not lessen; they grow. For grief, for love, for memory, for beauty glimpsed and lost, time does not heal so much as intensify. What we carry becomes heavier, more present, more itself.
Linguist Michael Israel notes that words such as ever function as degree-based intensifiers, signaling movement along a scale rather than a fixed quantity. In his discussion of polarity items, he explains that their force comes from the way they mark increasing degrees without a natural upper limit, a feature central to English expressions of ongoing growth or intensification. This helps clarify why phrases like “ever more” feel open-ended and expansive: they point not to a single amount but to a process that keeps rising. See Israel, “The Pragmatics of Polarity,” in The Handbook of Pragmatics (Horn & Ward, eds., 2004), discussion of scalar semantics and polarity items. ↩︎
Geoffrey N. Leech, A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry (London: Longman, 1969), chap. 6, “Patterns of Sound,” esp. §§6.1–6.4, where Leech discusses foregrounded repetition, sound patterning, and the poetic heightening of ordinary lexical items. ↩︎
Attic red-figure stamnos from Vulci c. 480-450 BC depicting the myth of Odysseus tied to his ship’s mast in order to resist the enchanting song of the Sirens.
When the ancient image of Odysseus[1] bound to the mast comes to mind—ears open to the Sirens’ song, body restrained by rope and loyalty, the ship cutting forward through perilous waters—it becomes a figure for how medieval Christendom conceived its relation to the classical past. Bound by faith’s restraint, the medieval mind sailed amid pagan wisdom’s dangerous beauty, listening but not surrendering, drawn forward yet always compassed toward the harbor of divine truth.[2]
It is a noble image. And yet.
What if the mast itself—the very bonds—were not divine protection but human construction? What if the Sirens sang not of destruction alone but of truths that authority feared we might comprehend? What if the rope that held Odysseus was tied not by wisdom but by terror—terror of what might be discovered in the listening, in the surrender, in the unrestrained voyage into mystery?
The Pattern Returns
In The First Why, I proffered that the doctrine of original sin emerged not from divine decree but from human fear—fear of questions too vast, of mysteries authority could neither command nor contain. Eden was not humanity’s fall but humanity’s awakening: the first trembling articulation of consciousness reaching beyond certainty into the perilous freedom of knowledge.
The prohibition against eating from the Tree was never divine. It was human anxiety projected backward onto the dawn of consciousness, then used across millennia to condemn the impulse to seek, to know, to ask why.
The pattern appears again, centuries after Eden’s invented fall, in one of Western literature’s most celebrated works. In Inferno XXVI, Dante presents Ulysses—not honored for cunning or for his journey home, but condemned—placed in the eighth circle, wrapped in flame, punished for what Dante calls the final voyage: a crossing of boundaries, a reaching beyond limits, a refusal to accept that the Pillars of Herakles marked the edge of permitted human striving.
And the question returns with urgency: whence does this “divine prohibition” truly come? Divine command—or human fear?
Dante’s Condemnation
The scene in Inferno XXVI is among the most powerful in all of Dante’s Comedy. Speaking from within a tongue of flame, Ulysses recounts his final voyage to Dante and Virgil. Old, having returned at last to Ithaca, he finds himself restless. Neither fondness for his son, nor reverence for his aged father, nor the love owed to Penelope “could overcome within me the desire I had to be experienced of the world, and of the vice and virtue of mankind.”
Thus moved, Ulysses gathers his aged companions and sails westward, past Sardinia and the Pillars of Herakles, “where Hercules his landmarks set as signals, that man no farther onward should adventure.” There he exhorts his crew:
“O brothers, who amid a hundred thousand Perils have come unto the West, To this so inconsiderable vigil Which is remaining of your senses still, Be ye unwilling to deny the knowledge, Following the sun, of the unpeopled world. Consider ye the seed from which ye sprang; Ye were not made to live like unto brutes, But for pursuit of virtue and of knowledge.”
Ulysses tells how he “did render my companions, with this brief exhortation, for the voyage, that then I hardly could have held them back. And having turned our stern toward morning, we of the oars made wings for our mad flight.” After many months, a mountain appears—distant, dark—“it seemed to me so high as I had never any one beheld.” Yet joy turns swiftly to despair: “For out of that new land a whirlwind rose, and smote upon the fore part of the ship. Three times it made her whirl with all the waters, at the fourth time it made the stern uplift, and the prow downward go, as pleased Another, until the sea above us closed again.”[3]
As pleased Another. As Divinity decreed.
Dante, ever precise in his moral architecture, places Ulysses among the evil counselors—those whose intellect and eloquence lead others astray. Virgil names the crimes: the deceit of the Trojan Horse, the theft of the Palladium, and the guile that brought about Achilles’ death (the latter bound in later traditions to stratagems shared with Diomedes). These are the ancient transgressions of cunning; yet the final voyage is Dante’s own invention, extending the sin of false counsel beyond the Homeric mythos and into the metaphysical.[4] In daring to pierce the boundary divinity had fixed—the western limit of human striving—Ulysses becomes not the exemplar of curiosity but of hubris: the brilliant mind mistaking unbounded knowledge for sovereignty.
Critics have long split on whether Dante admires or condemns Ulysses; the poem itself stages that ambiguity, withholding the name of this bolgia—false counsel—until the next canto, so that the rhetoric of heroic quest swells before the juridical label arrives. Barolini notes this “both/and” design: Dante’s style confers grandeur even as the setting is Hell, letting admiration and censure coexist in productive tension.[5]
The Search for the Prohibition
But searching for the source of this prohibition—where, precisely, the gods forbid passage beyond the Pillars—one meets an unexpected thing.
Silence.
Herakles, during the tenth labor, reaches the western edge to seize Geryon’s cattle, setting two pillars to mark the furthest point of achievement: a monument, not a ban. Yet older traditions recall that these were once called the Pillars of Cronus—boundaries of a world still ruled by Titans and Time. When Herakles raised his own in their place, the frontier passed from divine to heroic custody, from the cosmic to the human. The divine threshold became a human one: the boundary of the gods transformed into the horizon of mortal striving. The limit is capacity, not decree.
Roman writers—Pliny, Strabo—treat the Pillars as the edge of the known, beyond which lay Oceanus. Unknown, yes. Unknowable, no. Unexplored, not forbidden. Plato places Atlantis beyond the Pillars. Its destruction follows moral corruption and imperial tyranny, not navigation through a strait.[6] The boundary violated is ethical, not spatial. It is precisely the confusion of those two that allows authority to recast natural exploration as spiritual transgression.
Perhaps, one thinks, a classical voice does warn against the west. Pindar, writing nearly a millennium before Dante, seems a candidate in Olympian 3. Praising Theron of Akragas, Pindar writes that the victor “touch[es] the pillars of Herakles,” and adds: “Pathless the things beyond, pathless alike to the unwise and the wise. Here I will search no more; the quest were vain.”
At first glance, a prohibition. Look closer. The poet exalts Theron’s virtue by comparing it to Herakles’ reach: the victor’s deeds have touched the pillars themselves, but he dares no further. Beyond lies not sin but silence. The poet halts not for fear of divine censure, but from reverence for proportion—the stillness that follows the uttermost word.
Pindar returns to the same image elsewhere, in Isthmian 4, praising the Theban Melissus: “Through their manly deeds they reached from home to touch the farthest limit, the pillars of Heracles—do not pursue excellence any farther than that!” Again, the admonition is one of measure, not interdiction. The poet counsels proportion in achievement, not fear of divine wrath. The Pillars mark not punishment for trespass but the culmination of human excellence: the utmost reach of mortal aretē, beyond which praise, not perdition, would fall silent.
We read here little explicit theological weight, rather a poet’s choice to observe measure, not a divine command to halt forever. Yet I acknowledge this is itself an interpretation, one shaped by my conviction that human consciousness reaches naturally toward mystery rather than transgressing against sacred law. Ancient readers, steeped in traditions of divine order, may have heard prohibition where I hear proportion. The Greek μάταιον πέρα carries shades of meaning—“vain,” “futile,” but also potentially “reckless” or “transgressive.” The ambiguity is real—even a metaphor can accrue normative force within a sacramental worldview. What remains clear is that Pindar offers no explicit divine interdiction, no Zeus commanding sailors to turn back, no cosmic punishment awaiting those who venture west.[7]
The Transmutation
Observe what Dante has done. Between Pindar and the Inferno lies a revolution not of geography but of metaphysics: the rhetorical limit has become a theological one. Where Pindar’s vain was the futility of excess, Dante’s mad flight is the hubris of trespass. What for the Greek was decorum becomes, for the Christian, disobedience.
In this metamorphosis of meaning, boundary becomes law, and poetic restraint is recast as divine architecture. He has taken Pindar’s rhetorical metaphor—a poet’s statement about the limits of praise—and transformed it into a cosmic prohibition about the limits of knowledge. He has taken “Here I will search no more; the quest were vain” (the poet’s restraint) and transmuted it into “None may pursue it; you will be damned” (the theologian’s absolute).[8]
The transmutation operates at every level:
Pindar: a metaphor about achievement. Dante: a literal geographical boundary.
Pindar: the poet’s personal choice. Dante: God’s universal command.
Dante has performed an alchemical transformation: he has taken the raw material of a poet’s metaphor and transmuted it into divine law. He has literalized what was figurative, universalized what was particular, divinized what was human, and weaponized what was wisdom.
And having manufactured the prohibition, he uses it to condemn Ulysses—and by extension, to condemn the impulse that drives all genuine seeking: the refusal to accept inherited boundaries, the courage to test whether limits are actual, the sacred audacity of the question why.[10]
The Pattern Exposed
The same alchemy appears in both Eden and at the Pillars:
Human limits. We are confused. We cannot sail farther.
Establishment of a marker. The Tree. The Pillars.
Sacralization of the marker. God commanded. God ordained.
Prohibition. Thou shalt not eat. Thou shalt not pass.
Damnation of transgressors. Original sin. Hellfire.
Who, then, says the boundary is divine?
Not God. No interdiction is carved into Atlantic stone; no oracle forbids the western sea.
Man does. Man, fearing the unknown, converts the edge of his knowledge into the edge of knowable reality, projects that fear onto the cosmos, and calls it Heaven’s will. Dante maps a theology onto ancient geography, then condemns the figure who reveals—by sailing—that the map was never the territory.
The Confusion of Boundaries
A distinction must now be made—one obscured by Dante’s condemnation and too often blurred by the weight of tradition. Not all boundaries are alike.
There are indeed limits that must hold: moral boundaries, ethical prohibitions, the restraints of justice and compassion that preserve the fragile order of human life. These are not inventions of fear but necessities of conscience. When Plato’s Atlanteans are destroyed, it is for crossing such limits—for turning power into tyranny, order into domination, knowledge into conquest.
But there are other boundaries—geographical, intellectual, imaginative—that exist only until courage or curiosity dissolves them. The confusion of the two, the moral and the cognitive, is the mechanism by which authority sanctifies its own caution. When fear disguises itself as wisdom, exploration becomes transgression, and inquiry is punished as sin.
To say “You shall not murder” is a moral imperative. To say “You shall not question” is a spiritual abdication. To say “You shall not seek beyond this sea” is fear pretending to be faith.
The first protects the sanctity of life; the second denies the dignity of mind. The danger lies not in reverence for limits, but in mistaking the boundary of understanding for the boundary of being.
What Dante Should Have Condemned
Yet acknowledge what Dante perceived, even if he misdiagnosed it. Ulysses does not merely sail west—he abandons. His own words convict him: neither “fondness for his son, nor reverence for his aged father, nor the love owed to Penelope could overcome within me the desire I had to be experienced of the world.”
This is not the voice of responsible inquiry. This is desertion dressed as aspiration.
More: he does not invite his companions to shared discovery. He compels them with wile. “I made them so eager for the voyage that I could hardly have held them back.” That is manipulation, not collaboration. He leads aged men—veterans who have survived “a hundred thousand perils”—not toward a harbor but toward drowning, chasing his private hunger for knowledge while calling it their collective destiny.
The crew never chose. They were moved by rhetoric, not conviction. And they died for his vision, his restlessness, not their own vision or desires.
This deserves condemnation. But this is not what Dante condemns.
Dante does not separate the ethics of the voyage from the fact of the voyage. He does not ask: “Should Ulysses have crossed while abandoning family and compelling his crew?” He seemingly declares: “No one should cross at all.”
The distinction collapses. The how becomes the whether. And in that collapse, all boundary-testing—however careful, however collaborative, however mindful of those we bring with us—becomes suspect. The reckless voyager poisons the well for the responsible one.
This conflation serves authority perfectly. For if seeking itself is the sin, then seeking carefully changes nothing. The prohibition need not distinguish between Ulysses’ abandonment and another’s care, between manipulation and genuine invitation, between private obsession and shared venture. All become folle volo—mad flight—equally damned.
What Dante should have condemned: voyaging that sacrifices others to one man’s will; that mistakes obsession for calling; that abandons the near for the distant without reckoning cost.
What Dante does condemn: voyaging at all past the Pillars, regardless of manner or motive.
The question is not: May we seek? The question is: How do we seek without becoming tyranny in the name of discovery?
That question remains open. It remains difficult. It is the question that matters—the one Dante forecloses by manufacturing a prohibition that makes the crossing itself, not the manner of crossing, the transgression. In doing so, he protects neither ethics nor truth. He protects only the boundary. Yet in condemning the voyager, Dante reveals himself as one.
The Poet’s Presumption
The irony deepens… Ulysses is punished for eloquence that led others past a supposed divine boundary. Yet what is the Comedy but an unauthorized exploration of realms beyond mortal knowing—Hell, Purgatory, Paradise—undertaken by the poet’s own authority?
When Dante the pilgrim expresses hesitation about his journey, saying “I am not Aeneas, I am not Paul,” the poem supplies him with divine sanction. Virgil assures him that Beatrice, sent from Heaven, has authorized the journey. The pilgrim goes with blessing, guidance, permission. In effect, Dante the poet does what Ulysses does: sails past accepted limits, trusting language and vision to bear him where, by his own logic, no living man may go.
Hence the canto’s peculiar power. Dante is drawn to the mariner he condemns, troubled by him, unable to treat him as simple villain. In Ulysses’ folle volo, he glimpses his own presumption mirrored; in the crew-stirring rhetoric, he hears the echo of his own ingenium poeticum; in the final overturning “as pleased Another,” he contemplates the judgment he too might face for like transgression.
He virtually admits as much in Paradiso II, where the skiff that once was “the little vessel of my genius” in Purgatorio I grows into a vessel fit for the open, uncharted sea. “O ye, who in some pretty little boat, / eager to listen, have been following / behind my ship, that singing sails along, / turn back to look again upon your shores; / do not put out to sea, lest peradventure, / in losing me, you might yourselves be lost.”[11] The imagery reprises the condemned voyage of Inferno XXVI, but now under divine auspices: “Minerva breathes, and pilots me Apollo, / and Muses nine point out to me the Bears.” The difference is authorization, not direction. Dante transforms the mad flight into a sanctified one—but his caution betrays awareness of the danger. The admonition to “turn back to look again upon your shores” acknowledges that the line between revelation and presumption remains perilously thin. His journey too might founder “as pleased Another.”
The poem clears the pilgrim of presumption within its fiction, while the poet remains exposed outside it. This is the poet using poetry—that ancient art of mythical theology where truth and falsehood intermingle—to enforce a prohibition while simultaneously transgressing it. Dante wields the dangerous power of poetic invention to declare what is divine and what is forbidden, all while demonstrating that such declarations rest on nothing firmer than the poet’s own creative authority.[12]
The Vindication of History
One date suffices: 1492. Columbus sails west into the Atlantic from the coast of Spain—not literally through the strait at Gibraltar, but past the conceptual boundary the Pillars represented. No whirlwind. No mountain issuing wrath. Land. The “pathless beyond” proves unexplored, not forbidden; unknown, not unknowable. Yet the same civilization that vindicated Ulysses also cloaked conquest in new sanctities, confusing discovery with dominion. The moral ambiguity remains. History vindicates the crossing, not every consequence of the crossing.
The truth endures nonetheless: the boundary was human limitation—of ships, of courage, of knowledge—dressed in borrowed sanctity. Each voyage, each map, each act of inquiry refutes Inferno XXVI’s decree. History does not wholly vindicate Ulysses, but it exposes the fiction of divine interdiction.
The question of who may sail is answered: all may. The question of how we sail—ethically, justly, without turning discovery into domination—remains open.
Where Falsehood and Truth Intermingle
Ernst Robert Curtius reminds us that medieval poetry was mythical theology: a sacred art in which truth and falsehood coexisted, and the boundary between invention and revelation was porous. The poet was not a chronicler of fact but a mediator between visible and invisible worlds, speaking through symbols that both conceal and disclose.
Dante knew this inheritance. His Commedia stands at the summit of that tradition, where poetic creation becomes theological architecture. Yet it is also within this architecture that the seeds of prohibition germinate. For once poetry begins to impersonate revelation, its metaphors may acquire the weight of law. What begins as symbol can harden into creed; imagination becomes instrument.
This is poetry’s two-edged majesty: it reveals and it binds. The same creative power that illuminates hidden truth can also consecrate human invention as sacred limit. Thus Dante’s genius, which mirrors divine creation in its ordering of chaos into cosmos, risks sanctifying the very boundaries it imagines.
Mythical theology is a realm where poetry contemplates itself as revelation. Within that realm, Ulysses’ voice—his call to seek, to know, to pass beyond the Pillars—cannot be silenced entirely. Condemned in theology, he endures in poetry. Even wrapped in flame, he speaks the human truth that divine law cannot wholly suppress: curiosity, though punished, remains indestructible.
The Gates Swing Forward
The gates of Eden swing but one way—forward. There is no return to innocence, only passage through mystery into understanding. The Pillars of Herakles, like Eden’s gate, were never meant to bar humanity’s path but to mark its progress. They stand not as barriers but as thresholds: what one age feared to cross, another calls the beginning of wisdom.
The boundary moves because we do. What once signified the edge of the world becomes the center of a new map. Description becomes prescription only when fear mistakes ignorance for law. The theology of limit—whether spoken at Eden’s tree or the western sea—was never divine decree but human hesitation draped in sanctity.
When Ulysses sailed beyond the Pillars, he did not violate divine order; he fulfilled the order implicit in consciousness—the law that bids the mind test its own horizon. Dante condemns this as hubris, yet his own poem enacts it, proving that imagination cannot be confined by its own prohibitions. Even in Hell, wrapped in flame, Ulysses speaks words that outlive the sentence: “Ye were not made to live like unto brutes.”
Poetry, in condemning him, exalts him. It cannot extinguish what it illuminates. The forbidden voyage becomes the necessary one; the mad flight becomes the first step of reason; the flame of punishment becomes the light of revelation.
Thus the gates, like the Pillars, stand not immovable but ever-receding horizons—each one marking the reach of human comprehension, and beyond it, mystery. Every passage enlarges not merely the world, but the human possibility within it.
The Answer
From whence, then, the Divine Prohibition? From man.
From man, who meets the edge of knowledge and mistakes it for the edge of knowable reality.
From man, whose faltering courage becomes Heaven’s boundary in his telling.
From man, who fears the unknown and projects that fear upon the cosmos.
From man, who must have limits and thus declares them divine.
From man, who damns those who cross and return with news that the gates were never locked.
What is divine is not the prohibition but its contrary: the impulse to question, the courage to seek, the will to sail beyond every human-erected pillar into the waters where truth awaits those who leave the harbor.
Pindar said he would search no more—his quest were vain—in praise. Dante hears “no more” and renders it sin—to go further—in knowledge. History has judged between them.
Eden’s gate and Herakles’ pillars were never barred by divine hands—though human fear has kept them closed in consciousness for millennia. The truth they conceal is simpler and more radical: they were never legitimately closed at all.
Coda: Bound by Reason, Not by Fear
Consciousness asks why. To condemn the asking is to condemn consciousness. To prohibit the reaching is to prohibit our humanity. To damn the voyage is to damn the very quality that makes us more than “mindless brutes.”
The first why rose in Eden. Another why at the Pillars. The whys continue—each a small rebellion against inherited certainty, each a voyage into the unknown, each a test of whether the boundary was ever real.
It was not real. It never was. The “pathless” was merely unwalked. The “forbidden” was only unlived. The “mad flight” was simply the first—until repetition made the forbidden familiar.
We were born to ask, to seek, to reach, to voyage. We were born to test boundaries and find them crossable. We were born to stand at every pillar authority declares ultimate and ask:
Who says we must not pass—the Divine, or man in his fear, in his need for control, in his terror that we might return with news that the prohibition was always empty?
Return, then, to the image with which we began: Odysseus bound to the mast, sailing through waters thick with song. The proper binding is not the rope of fear, which holds us rigid against all that we might learn, but the rope of reason—supple, strong, deliberately chosen. We tie ourselves to the mast not to prevent the hearing but to survive it; not to silence the Sirens but to pass through their song transformed rather than destroyed.
This is the wisdom the medieval image hints at but does not fully speak: we must indeed be bound, but by discernment, not deference. The Sirens sing truths as well as dangers, and the task of consciousness is neither deaf submission nor reckless surrender, but the perilous passage between—listening, testing, reaching forward with eyes open to wonder and consequence alike.
Without asking permission, claiming no sanction but the native authority of consciousness, we sail.
The sacred path is forward—into uncertainty, into wonder, into the endless unfolding of mystery. Each passage widens the horizon; each voyage enlarges not merely the world, but the human possibility within it.
[1] The essay uses Odysseus and Ulysses interchangeably—the Greek and Latin names of the same figure—since the change of name mirrors the change of cultural frame examined.
[2] The image of Odysseus bound to the mast occurred to me while reading Ernst Robert Curtius’s European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 1983; first published 1953), particularly Chapter XII, “Poetry and Theology,” which examines the relationship between Aristotle, Aquinas, and Albertino Mussato in defining poetry’s place within medieval Christian thought. Although the image was often used by medieval writers as a moral emblem—the anima rationalis bound by reason and faith to resist the sirens of sensual pleasure or deceptive wisdom—it struck me differently. For the scholastic mind, the figure of Odysseus symbolized the proper relation to pagan learning: the faithful scholar tied to the mast of doctrine, able to hear the beauty of Homer, Ovid, and Virgil without being lured from the safe course of orthodoxy. This reading coheres with the Aristotelian-Thomistic framework described by Curtius, in which poetry, though ranked low for its use of sensible image, retained dignity as a vessel of mythical theology—the first and most natural attempt to speak of the divine through story. My own use of the image reverses the traditional emphasis: the mast, once a symbol of protection, becomes a symbol of constraint; the rope, once virtue’s safeguard, becomes fear’s instrument. The voyage through pagan beauty, for me, represents not perilous flirtation with error, but the necessary passage of consciousness through mystery, risk, and discovery toward the harbor of truth.
[4] On Dante’s Christian reinterpretation of Ulysses, see Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983; first published 1953), esp. ch. 12, “Poetry and Theology.” Medieval commentators such as Benvenuto da Imola and Boccaccio read Dante’s Ulysses as a moral exemplum: the pagan seeker whose insatiable intellect leads to spiritual ruin. For Curtius, this transformation marks the medieval synthesis of classical myth with Christian teleology—where the Greek hero’s transgressive voyage becomes a cautionary allegory of the limits of human reason before divine order.
[5]Teodolinda Barolini, “Inferno 26: The Epic Hero,” Commento Baroliniano, Digital Dante (Columbia University Libraries), 2018. Barolini shows why readers might feel both awe and censure here. Dante inherits a split Ulysses—Virgil’s trickster versus Cicero’s lover of knowledge—and he writes the canto so that both currents run strong. The style is spare and elevated, granting Ulysses real grandeur (“we made wings of our oars”), yet the moral frame is still Hell. Crucially, Dante delays naming the sin—fraudulent counsel—until the end of Inferno 27, letting the thrill of the quest speak before the verdict falls. In Barolini’s terms, Dante’s pedagogy is “upside down”: Ulysses becomes a classical stand-in for Biblical trespass (what Paradiso 26 calls the “going beyond the mark”), even as his eloquence and ardor unmistakably stirs admiration, both the reader’s and Dante’s.
[7] Pindar, Olympian 3.43–46 andIsthmian 4.19–21. In Olympian 3, Pindar closes: ἐνταῦθα παύσομαι· μάταιον πέρα (“Here I will stop; beyond is vain”). Ernest Myers, The Extant Odes of Pindar: Translated into English with an Introduction and Short Notes (London: Macmillan and Co., 1874), 13: “Now if Water be the Best, and of possessions Gold be the most precious, so now to the furthest bound doth Theron by his fair deeds attain, and from his own home touch the pillars of Herakles. Pathless the things beyond, pathless alike to the unwise and the wise. Here I will search no more; the quest were vain.” Compare Andrew M. Miller, Pindar: The Odes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019), 43: “If water is supreme, and of possessions gold inspires the greatest reverence, now Theron to the utmost bounds has made his way through deeds of worth and grasps, from his own home, the pillars of Heracles. What lies beyond is closed to sage and fool alike. I shall not seek it out; to do so would be futile.” Miller observes that Theron’s “victory at Olympia has carried him, metaphorically speaking, to the uttermost limits of the earth.”
The same motif reappears in Isthmian 4, where Pindar praises Melissus: ἀνορέαις δ᾽ ἐσχάταισιν οἴκοθεν στάλαισιν ἅπτονθ᾽ Ἡρακλείαις· καὶ μηκέτι μακροτέραν σπεύδειν ἀρετάν — “Through their manly deeds they reached from home to touch the farthest limit, the pillars of Heracles—do not pursue excellence any farther than that!” [Diane Arnson Svarlien, trans., Pindar: Odes (1990).] Here, too, the Greek speaks not of interdiction but of proportion: μηκέτι (no longer) and σπεύδειν (to hasten, to strive eagerly) suggest sufficiency, not prohibition. The admonition is one of measure — aretē fulfilled, not forbidden. In both odes, the Pillars of Herakles mark the end of proportionate praise, the poet’s own horizon of utterance, rather than a divinely sanctioned frontier of trespass.
[8] Dante’s transformation of Pindar’s poetic self-limitation into divine proscription marks a philosophical shift that Curtius characterizes as the theologization of classical form. See Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983; first published 1953). In the medieval synthesis, metaphor becomes architecture: the rhetorical limit hardens into ontological structure. What had been decorum in antiquity becomes ordo under theology—a transmutation of aesthetic proportion into moral law. This process reflects the scholastic habit of reading all boundaries as mirrors of divine order. The result, as the essay observes, is the elevation of poetic restraint into cosmic prohibition: a passage from the measured silence of the poet to the juridical silence of the theologian.
[9] Dante quotations from Inferno XXVI follow Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s translation in The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, vol. 1 (Inferno) (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867), 278–83. Longfellow’s rendering preserves the elevated archaism and moral gravity of Dante’s diction—particularly in phrases such as “O brothers,” “mad flight,” and “as pleased Another”—which later translators often soften. The choice of Longfellow aligns with the essay’s argument, for it retains the language that best reflects Dante’s conception of Ulysses’ daring as folle volo (mad flight) and the moment of divine retribution, “as pleased Another,” that seals his fate.
[10] Medieval commentators often reinterpreted Odysseus within a Christian moral framework, reading him not as the Homeric hero of cunning endurance but as an emblem of human intellect overreaching its divinely appointed bounds. As Ernst Robert Curtius observes, the Middle Ages transformed classical figures into moral exempla: pagan virtue became the testing ground of Christian humility. The Odyssean voyage, once the image of homecoming through adversity, became for scholastic and allegorical readers a warning against curiosity unrestrained by faith. See Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages; also Dante’s Epistola XIII, where he explicitly links poetic audacity to theological order, framing the poet’s vision as divinely sanctioned where Ulysses’ was not.
[11]Paradiso II.1–15, in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Paradiso (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867), 13–14. Nautical tropes of the navis animae (ship of the soul) and the iter mentis ad Deum (voyage of the intellect) were commonplaces of medieval allegory; see Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1983; first published 1953), 129–130. Dante consciously develops this traditional image across his poem. At the opening of Purgatorio (“To run o’er better waters hoists its sail / The little vessel of my genius now, / that leaves behind itself a sea so cruel,” I.1–3), his craft is still the modest bark of poetic endeavor. By Paradiso, it has become a great ship fit for uncharted seas. The metaphor thus mirrors his ascent: from the cautious voyage of intellect to the audacious navigation of revelation. The passage recalls Ulysses’ “mad flight” yet recasts it under divine command—“Minerva breathes, Apollo pilots me, / and Muses nine point out to me the Bears.” The poet’s self-awareness is unmistakable: his Commedia itself is the vessel that dares the deep, sailing the perilous waters between revelation and presumption.
[12] Dante’s assumption of the right to speak divine architecture into being belongs to a long and ambivalent lineage of the poeta vates—the poet as prophet, divinely inspired seer, or “maker” whose word partakes of creative authority. The Roman poets had already blurred the boundary between artistry and revelation: Vergil’s Aeneid opens with invocation to the Muse as a divine source of vision (Arma virumque cano… Musa, mihi causas memora), and Ovid identifies poets as vates Pieridum (‘prophets of the Muses,’ Amores 1.1.5). Cicero in De divinatione (1.34) describes those who prophesy (vates) as being inspired by divine impulse (divino afflatu), operating in a state of mental excitement. The Christian Middle Ages inherited and transformed this conception. Augustine (De doctrina Christiana 2.40) appropriates pagan learning as the Israelites took gold from Egypt—valuable truths embedded in error, useful when rightly directed toward God. By the twelfth century, poets such as Alan of Lille and Bernard Silvestris (on whom see Wetherbee, Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth Century [1972]) employed allegory and mythic language to express theological truths, with Bernard seeing himself as divinely inspired to reveal God’s plan through poetic creation (Cosmographia). Yet both remained within the framework of philosophical theology, subordinating poetic vision to revealed doctrine. Dante advances a bolder claim: he does not merely allegorize theology but constructs the cosmic order through poetic authority, fusing inspiration with auctoritas. In this, Dante absorbs the classical vates ideal into Christian prophecy, theologizing poetic form itself and claiming for the poet a quasi-prophetic role that his twelfth-century predecessors carefully avoided.(Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, Chapters XII & XVII especially). Thus Dante’s Comedy becomes not commentary upon divine order but its imaginative enactment. He does what no theologian could—uses the poetic voice to legislate the unseen, transforming the inspired seer into the architect of the cosmos itself. In this sense, Dante’s poeta vates completes the very pattern the essay describes: the human word assuming divine prerogative, the maker creating not merely song but structure.
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.
“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.
The article argues that the inclusion of scholarly apparatus in poetry should not be seen as an act of insecurity but as a moral imperative to enhance accessibility and understanding. Providing notes and allusions demonstrates trust in the reader’s intellect and invites deeper engagement with complex literary traditions, enriching the overall poetic experience.
Dante and Virgil in Hell by William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1850). Oil on canvas, 281 × 225 cm. Housed in the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Depicting a scene from The Divine Comedy, the painting shows Dante guided by the poet Virgil through the torments of the Inferno. This work reflects the enduring need for guidance through complex moral and literary landscapes—much like the role of scholarly apparatus in contemporary poetry.
In certain corners of literary criticism—particularly those shaped by the Bloomian anxiety of influence—the inclusion of scholarly notes in a poem is often regarded with suspicion. To annotate a poetic work, especially with theological or classical references, is, for some, a mark of insecurity or defensiveness. One does not footnote inspiration, the critic suggests, but cloaks inadequacy. This reading, however, reveals more about the critic’s own posture than the poet’s intent. It mistakes generosity for uncertainty, and accessibility for anxiety. In truth, the use of poetic apparatus is not a gesture of retreat but an act of moral clarity.
We no longer inhabit a culture rooted in shared canonical memory. The contemporary reader cannot be presumed to recognize the traces of Augustine or the subtleties of Pauline inversion, nor even the resonances of Lamentations or Miltonic cadence. These once-communal touchstones have grown faint in our fragmented intellectual landscape.
To scatter phrases drawn from such traditions across the page without interpretive aid would not constitute noble restraint—it would be fundamentally exclusionary. One does not prove a poem’s strength by ensuring its opacity to all but the initiated few.
The poet who situates their work within a sacred, historical, or theological lineage and yet withholds the keys to that lineage commits a kind of aesthetic pride. This is the true arrogance: to assume that those who do not immediately perceive are unworthy to understand. In contrast, the provision of notes, allusions, and apparatus is a statement of trust in the reader’s intellectual capacity. It affirms that the reader, though perhaps unfamiliar with particular traditions, is capable of knowing, and thus worthy of invitation into deeper engagement.
Poetic apparatus, when thoughtfully deployed, functions as both guide and companion. It allows the reader to move through layered landscapes without stumbling in darkness. Notes illuminate without overwhelming; they offer pathways, not prescriptions. Just as Dante needed Vergil to navigate the underworld in The Divine Comedy, the modern reader may need scaffolding to ascend the difficult terrain of a theologically-inflected poem. That scaffolding supports not the poem’s inadequacy, but the reader’s journey—and facilitating such journeys is a moral imperative in cultural stewardship.
This approach is not a concession to mediocrity, but a rejection of unnecessary elitism. It demonstrates a commitment to write in full fidelity to tradition without surrendering one’s audience to the assumptions of a forgotten world. When T.S. Eliot appended notes to The Waste Land, he was not performing obscurantist affectation, but rather acknowledging the changing literacy of his readership. His doing so sparked considerable controversy, suspicion, and derision. However, the changing literacy of readership since his day has only deepened and accelerated. Thus, the poet who provides apparatus performs not an act of scholarly vanity but of intellectual hospitality.
Indeed, there is a didactic purpose inherent in such practices: poetry can instruct, not through reductive simplicity, but through guided complexity. The notes, like glosses or scholia in ancient texts, become part of the total work—a parallel conversation between poet and reader. They remind us that poetry is a learned art—not reducible to mere sentiment, nor severed from thought. To annotate is to take seriously both the lineage of one’s words and the intellectual capacity of one’s reader.
In our digital age, we have expanded possibilities for such apparatus—hyperlinks, separate commentary documents, and layered presentations that neither overwhelm the poem’s aesthetic integrity nor abandon readers to unnecessary confusion. These technologies allow for graduated engagement: the poem stands complete for those prepared to receive it directly, while additional resources await those seeking deeper understanding.
Crucially, providing scholarly apparatus never constrains the reader’s interpretive freedom. Each reader brings their own experience and knowledge to a text, often discovering meanings the author never intended or foresaw. The best annotations create access without dictating understanding—they open doors without determining which path the reader must take once inside. This dynamic relationship between authorial context and reader interpretation is not a liability but one of literature’s most profound gifts.
The poet may still be misunderstood. There will be those who persist in reading apparatus as apology, footnotes as armor against criticism. But the deeper truth is that to offer one’s learning as aid is not to retreat from art, but to expand its possibility. It is an act of humility, yes—but also of instruction, of preservation, and above all, of invitation.
Poetic footnotes, then, are not defensive gestures. They are moral acts. They widen the gate; they refuse the cloister. In an age of forgetting, they are essential—if tradition is to live not as relic, but as inheritance: vital, vivid, and available to all who would receive it.
Northcoast Antiquarian 