there are so many bad translations, and it is so profoundly not her epic, that i rarely go directly to homer to satisfy my helen of troy feelings; nevertheless i landed in the lattimore translation last night, and.
the thing about homerâs helen (aside âsheâs mostly not thereâ) is that sheâs all self-recrimination, dramatic self-recrimination. and people get tied up in that; older translations have her basically offering to fling herself off the parapets because sheâs so guilty and ashamed. but itâs such careful recrimination, is the thing. homer doesnât give her much text, and while thatâs partly just because his priorities are elsewhere, the text that is there is parsimonious and deliberative and careful. homerâs helen is difficult and elusive and at least in part that is on purpose.
sheâs talking to king priam and what she says, the very first thing we get from her after she gives him his honorifics, is:
I wish bitter death had been what I wanted, when I came hither
following your son, forsaking my chamber, my kinsmen
my grown child, and the loveliness of girls my own age.
It did not happen that way.
which isâso vastly different than the slick, maudlin âi wish iâd killed myself rather than comeâ lavinia successor we usually get in that translation? (i picked up an older translation to double check and, yeah. victorians and their heirs decide she wished sheâd killed herself. unsurprisingly. who likes lavinia like victorians?) what she actually says is careful, that is nuanced, that is helen talking about what she wishes she felt, rather than what she feels. not that she wants to dieâthat she wishes she wanted that. she gets to wear the mask of shame, her unhappiness with the duration and fatalities of the war are treated as genuine. she calls herself the most awful thingsâa bitch, a slut, whatever. and she says, later, to hektor:
I wish that on that day when mother my first bore me
the foul whirlwind of the storm had caught me away and swept me
to the mountain, or into the wash of the sea, deep-thundering
where the waves would have swept me away before all these things had happened.
again, she wishes she could unmake the war, and she knows the words for wishing an honorable death. knows death is more honorable than the life. but doesnât call it down upon herself now. and again, implicitly, calls back to the choice: to choose something other than what led her to troy, she wouldâve had to be swept into the sea at birth. thinking breathing sensible adult helen hasnât any other option. she offers to take back her whole life, but she doesnât take back what she did.
basically, she doesnât say she wants to die for it now, and she doesnât offer her own present death as punishment. and she knows the right words, so plainly! with priam, she outright wishes she could say that she deserved to die for this. but she never has, she never did. it did not happen that way.
homer doesnât give us a good grasp on helen before the war, because thatâs not where the poem is. but while the war is happening, we get this much out of our narrow window into her heart: whatever her situation in troyâ she stands by it. picked this. even as it can make her profoundly unhappy, even though paris is a languid idiot and sheâs in thrall to a thoughtless goddess, itâs hers. and she takes the culpability for its happening and cannot wholly condemn herself for it, even though she knows the right words to do so inside and out.
snowghoul
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andulkaphoto
pixelskylines
vaporwave
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