>He bought into the Fagles meme
Vernacular? In my epic Greek poem?
Who cares
>>7681298
The fact that you're memeing about this speaks more about you than it does Fagels. These ballads were heavily improvised by poets/bards using certain repetitive anchors so they would all communicate the same story in their own way. Fagels is doing the same thing here, continuing that very tradition by translating the epic poem in his own way. A lot of people will say Pope did not translate the homeric poems but wrote his own poem. In a sense though, he did the greatest tribute to the epic by doing it his own way. These poems are unique in that the adaptations and translations do not corrupt the essence of the poem. This is why translations, prose and poetic are equally acceptable.