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| Poseidon holding a trident. Corinthian plaque, 550–525 BC. From Penteskouphia. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Going through Oswald's translation of
Alcathous' death scene line by line, the amazing thing is how much it retains of Homer, while giving us a very different version. It begins "Somebody's husband somebody's daughter's husband" - Homer's begins "
γαμβρὸς δ’ ἦν Ἀγχίσαο,/ πρεσβυτάτην δ’ ὤπυιε θυγατρῶν Ἱπποδάμειαν" "son-in-law of
Anchises, he married the eldest of his daughters, Hippodamia" - and throughout, Oswald retains most of the Greek version, but what she leaves out is instructive: first, leaves out the first line (that Alcathous was the dear son of Aisyetes - usually she does give the parents, especially the mother, but this is not the mother); and throughout, leaves out the names of his wife, his father-in-law, the man who killed him (
Idomeneus) and the god that charmed him so he couldn't move when Idomeneus attacked (
Poseidon).
In place of this, Oswald says rather he was frozen with fear. She then turns a simile into narrative: where Homer says he stood fixed "like a pillar or a high leafy tree", Oswald says
Like a pillar like a stunted tree
He couldn't bend his stones
He couldn't walk his roots
And so he dies, the spear swaying, ("tick tick tick" says Oswald), for a while, in his still-beating heart.
And then the simile, drawn from the beginning of book 13, where Poseidon enters the battle to ginger up the Greeks, and having given strength to the Aiantes he flies off "like a swift-winged hawk set out to fly, that having been raised up over a high rock destitute even of goats, rushes to pursue another bird of the plain" - to go ginger up some more Greeks. And the next one he comes to is Idomeneus, who is the one who kills Alcathous, explicitly with Poseidon's help.
Oswald's version:
Like a knife-winged hawk
Balanced on a cliff with no foothold
Not even a goat can climb there
Like when he lifts his blades and begins
That faultless fall
Through the birds of the valley
And here as elsewhere it's perfectly clear she's going from the Greek, because no translation mentions goats; that comes from the Greek "αἰγίλιπος", "destitute even of goats" is what it actually means but it's usually translated as "sheer"; and "knife-winged and 'lifts his blades"" where translations have "swift-winged", because Oswald is not reading ὠκύπτερος, the Oxford text, but the variant ὀξύπτερος.
This simile is wonderfully used: it is Poseidon who has fallen like a hawk knife-winged on poor Alcathous; at the same time it is Alcathous who is poised, about ("tick tick tick") to begin his fall.
