Hail

The sun is shining beautifully this morning. What a different story it was at three and four in the morning. That had to be the worst hailstorm I have witnessed. It sounded as though baseballs were being slammed into our house. The cats were terrified, and I was feeling pretty insecure myself. The house no longer felt so solid and strong. I was sure that the cracked kitchen window was going to give way and shatter. I was actually worried about the possibility of the cats rushing out that broken window before I could block it up. However, in the light of day, it does not look like any material damage occurred. But all that water! It is going to take days just for all that top water to be absorbed by the ground and the heat. The ground is so saturated already. We have gone well beyond April showers.

Robert Fagles

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

INTERVIEWER

For me that’s been one of the freshest and most daring elements of your translation—the refracting of Homer through American voices and, in some ways, the jettisoning of Shakespeare, whose echoes are so strong in other translations, especially Fitzgerald’s.

FAGLES

I tried, in fact, to stay away from Shakespeare. The Shakespearean gesture might be too literary, stilted, too “poetic.” Homer is more down-to-earth than that. I’d like to persuade a reader that Homer is not a writer, strange as that may sound. There’s something paradoxical about reading Homer in a book. He’s meant to be heard — performed, not savored in your brown study, where you can mull over the same passage time and again. Nothing should get in the way of Homer’s immediacy, his headlong pace.

-- Robert Fagles at The Paris Review

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>