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The "Terrible Beauty" of Translation: Fagles's Iliad and Yeats's Helen

ROBERT FAGLES'S AWARD-WINNING TRANSLATIONS of the Homeric epic poems have been received almost universally in the English-speaking world as the favored versions for "modern Greekless readers" to experience the power of Homer; countless reviews of his translation of The Iliad in particular praise the translation for such qualities as its "energy" and its "fluidity," its capability to "restore ... the Greeks vividness and immediacy." (1) Robert Fagles, too, notes in his preface the qualities that render the poem a "performance": the "speed, directness and simplicity that Matthew Arnold heard--and his nobility too, elusive yet undeniable, that Arnold chased but never really caught ... a major source of Homer's energy, the loft and carry of his imagination that sweeps along the listener together with the performer." (2) The translator goes on to explain his object to construct "a modern English Homer." How Fagles accomplishes this and what this accomplishment means both theoretically and practically is the general concern of this essay, occasioned by a curious passage in Book 3: Here the old men of Troy have gathered to witness the swelling armies preparing for battle below the city walls. While their fighting days are behind them, we read, "they are eloquent speakers still, clear as cicadas," and they relive their own glory days. As they do so, however, they see Helen, the source of all their trouble as well as a representation of their highest aims. And catching sight of Helen moving along the ramparts, They murmured one to another, gentle, winged words: "Who on earth could blame them? Ah, no wonder The men of Troy and Argives under arms have suffered Years of agony all for her, for such a woman. Beauty, terrible beauty! A deathless goddess--so she strikes our eyes! (3) This is a crucial passage in the poem because it brings into focus a sense of the values that drive the action of the epic, embodied in a figure that, like Achilles, is half-human, half-divine, and whose influence, power, and beauty bring destruction to the wholly human world which attempts to redeem itself by achieving on the battlefield something of the "terrible beauty" embodied in Helen. But what stops me in my tracks as I read this passage is the echo I hear in "terrible beauty" from William Butler Yeats's "Easter, 1916," a poem that also examines the relation between human violence and beauty. This is how the Irish poet characterizes the transformation of common men and women into fierce revolutionaries: I have met them at close of day Coming with vivid faces From counter or desk among grey Eighteenth-century houses. I have passed with a nod of the head Or polite meaningless words, Or have lingered awhile and said Polite meaningless words, And thought before I had done Of a mocking tale or a gibe To please a companion Around the fire at the club, Being certain that they and I But lived where motley is worn: All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born. (4) What is the meaning of "terrible beauty," and how does this phrase from a W. B. Yeats poem function as a translation of Homer's words? What does it mean for a translator to quote a modern poet in his rendering of an ancient one? Whose words are "terrible beauty"? Is there an original source? They are not Homer's words obviously, but perhaps something like them, since Fagles uses the phrase as a translation of Homer's Greek words. They are not strictly of Fagles's making, since the translator is borrowing a phrase, quite conspicuously, from a famous twentieth-century poem. Certainly, Yeats wrote them in his poem, "Easter, 1916," but could he have written these words without a notion of the Homeric sense of the sublime, embodied in the figure of Helen, to which this poem and others allude? An investigation of these questions as they relate to "terrible beauty" will reveal a fascinating intertextuality, where access to a critical passage in a translation of an ancient poem lies through the language of a modern poem. …