We first chose to compare Salomon Certon’s translation [Certon 1604] with the others. The immediate post-Renaissance period is a very rich time for Greek and Latin culture.

The idea that a cultural regeneration is deeply related to linguistic regeneration flourishes. That is to say that French poets tend to seek their own style within Ancient Epics. The general idea is that the skillful translator should not slavishly imitate the author’s genius, but enrich it by giving it his own skill and language (translatio studii). Translating appears therefore to be highly linked with imitation. The same tradition is tangible in Ronsard’s followers’ works, such as in Amadis Jamyn’s Iliad in hexameters. The Odyssey had only been partially translated before Salomon Certon, and his attempt is the first ever to translate the entire Odyssey. Although Certon translates the Odyssey at the beginning of the 17th century, he is clearly inspired by the methods and traditions of the 16th century. He specializes in Latin metrics that he tends to reproduce, and it is clearly visible that he has read Jamyn’s first three and Peletier’s first two books [Salel 1545], as he tends to imitate them, or even cite them pro verbo. Initially he did not want to translate the whole Odyssey, and it was Henri IV himself that asked for the complete translation. But Certon did acknowledge his affiliation with his predecessors, and did not count so much on innovation. Like Jamyn, he is not such a good Hellenist, and is forced to repeatedly use Volterra’s Latin translation, which was not even the latest and most accurate of his time. As a result, many times, when Certon misses parts of the Odyssey, it can be attributed to a Latin omission (while these parts are present in his Greek version). However, his translation, as we will see, seems to be nearer to the Greek than, for example, Jamyn’s. Certon tends to reproduce more proper nouns than Jamyn, and is much nearer to the Greek syntax and phonemes than his predecessor. As a result we could say that his translation is not innovative in his translating habits, but that being the first of its kind in terms of tackling the whole Odyssey in French, he had to rely more heavily than his predecessors on both Latin and Greek versions.

In this abstract we can see that the necessity of capturing Homer’s verses causes an expansion of the text, leading to the presence of many hapaxes or low frequency terms, that is to say words that are not present in any of the other translations at this point of the text. For example, in “Lorsque j’eus par mes voeux & supplications / Apaisé les esprits, fait mes oblations”, the second line is an expansion and cannot be justified by the Greek text. This suggests that Certon privileged maintaining the metre over strict accuracy.

Comparing Certon’s translation with the others it is apparent that he translates in “alexandrins”, and tends to drastically develop the Greek text (his is one of the longest texts in our corpus). The verb “λαβὼν” simply disappears. The word “κελαινεφές”, literally “in black smoke”, becomes “une rivière grosse et du coup une humeur noirastre distilloit” (“an enormous river and from the neck a black liquid ran”), which is a clarification and an amplification. Many of Certon’s connotations cannot be deduced from the Greek text, such as souls “qui volent” (“flying”), “vaines” (“empty”) (Christian heritage of the soul’s lightness). Death is personified, which is quite far from the traditional pagan belief of the souls’ peregrination. The tragic connotation is amplified. The “Ἐρέβευς”, like in Volterra’s Latin translation [Maffei 1523], is absent. In fact, in his whole translation, Certon tends to emphasize the gleam and shine of French. Therefore, we may say that, if there is a kind of imitation of the Greek text, it is more the imitation of a spirit rather than servile literal imitation. Certon’s goal, when translating the Odyssey is less a stylistic matter than a moral matter. For Certon, the Odyssey seems to have a moral function much more than a purely aesthetic one.

On the whole, we know very little about Achille de la Valterie. We know that he was a “jésuite”, but that he renounced his vows later on. He is also known to have published a translation of Juvenal’s and Perse’s Satires, and that he translated the Iliad as well as the Odyssey. His Homeric translations begin with an “épître”, from which we can deduce his way of translating. First, he states that there is no need to know about Homer’s life to translate Homer:

Quand on ne sait point toutes ces choses, on a du moins l’avantage de n’être point obligé de les oublier, après avoir perdu beaucoup de temps à les apprendre.[7]

There is therefore no documentary value in Homer’s epics. And although he states that strict proximity to the Greek text is one of his goals[8], he also states that Homer’s epics should not be left unattended and may need consistent changes:

Pour prévenir (...) le dégoût que la délicatesse du temps aurait peut-être donné de ma traduction, j’ai rapproché les moeurs des Anciens autant qu’il m’a été permis (...) [et] je n’ai osé faire paraître Achille, Patrocle, Ulysse et Ajax dans la cuisine, et dire toutes les choses que le Poète ne fait point de difficulté de représenter (...) je me suis servi de termes généraux dont notre langue s’accomode mieux que de tout ce détail.[9]

La Valterie has no real philological ambition. Indeed, from what we can get studying his translations, La Valterie is an extremely poor Hellenist (it is almost doubtful that he read any Greek at all) and mainly translated from Latin, but also from existing translations (this is quite visible in our program when you compare La Valterie’s translation [de la Valterie 1709] to Boitel’s [Boitel 1638], as they have very rare terms in common in the same places and follow the same syntactic structure, almost amounting to plagiarism).

Our program does help us to see immediately that La Valterie’s translation is extremely far from the original text, and even contradictory with its supposed source. A frequency study shows that the whole (or at least the majority) of La Valterie’s translation is sewed with hapaxes (it is both far from the Greek text and never used in any of the French translations), which made it the most difficult text to align. We can also see that, although most translators tend to reproduce important syntactic marks in Greek (full stops, etc), La Valterie’s translation is the only one with no resemblance whatsoever to the Greek syntax. This is visible in our example. Sentences are long, there are frequent clarifications, tangible modalisations, and, of course, many mistakes. It is also clear in this example that La Valterie tends to avoid what he considers as trivial words and expressions, which need to be either modernized or deleted. The word “cérémonies” may be justified (though it erases the polysemic “εὐχωλῇσι” and “λιτῇσί”, both supplications and liturgical prayers), “se rebutter des incommodités de leur vieillesse” (“grieving about the harshness of old age”) is a complex manner of defining a much simpler down to earth single word in Greek, “πολύτλητος” (then again this whole expression is an hapax, as no other translator will bother to be so disdainful of a simple practical term). The word “Capitaines” is a condensation of war heroes adapted to the 17th century.

Therefore, La Valterie’s translation is both very far from being accurate or even faithful to the Greek. In later critical essays on Homeric translations, especially in Madame Dacier’s work, which is discussed below, La Valterie is seen as someone who has been left behind by the progress of translation. His translation has been edited, reprinted, but there are still no serious critics who say anything positive about it, quite the opposite in fact. A few years late, La Valterie becomes the paragon of a moralist translator; fit to feebly teach some moral values, but clearly unfit to reveal Homer’s beauty. From the 17th century onward, practising translation as a mere imitation is no longer an unquestionable principle.

Figures 9 and 10 show an alignment around La Valterie’s text and a small part of the same text tokenized in blocks in the interface.

Madame Dacier’s note on this part:

Les six vers qui suivent celuici : Parce, disaient-ils, qu’il n’est pas encore temps que ces Ames viennent, & que d’ailleurs il n’est pas possible que les blessures paraissent sur les Ames. Mais cette critique me parait trèsfausse. Pourquoi n’est-il pas temps que ces Ames viennent, Homere ne dit-il pas que les ombres des morts viennent de tous côtez du fond de l’Erebe ? & ne reçoivent-ils pas ce vers ? Les six qui le suivent n’en font que l’explication. Quant aux blessures, il est bien vrai qu’elles ne peuvent paroître sur la partie spirituelle de l’Ame, aussi n’est-ce pas de celle-là dont Homere parle, puisque les Morts ne l’avaient plus ; il parle du corps subtil de l’Ame, & tout ce qui avait blessé le corps terrestre, avait aussi blessé le corps subtil, & y avait laissé sa marque. Voilà pourquoi il est dit que dans les songes on voit les Ames dans le même état où sont les corps, & voilà aussi d’où vient la difference qu’Ulysse remarque dans ces ombres. Ce qui me parait le plus surprenant ici, c’est ce qu’Ulysse ajoute, que ces Ames avaient encore leurs armes, & que ces armes étaient encore teintes de sang. Comment ces Ames, ces Ombres, qui n’étaient que le corps subtil de l’Ame, pouvaient-elles conserver leurs armes ? Je crois que c’est un point nouveau qu’Ulysse ajoute ici à la Theologie reçue, & qu’il ajoute, parce qu’il parle aux Pheaciens, peuple peu instruit.

The first turning point in contrast with this tendency seems to appear with Madame Dacier’s translations (from what we gathered from the program, studying the texts diachronically). Anne Lefebvre Dacier (known as “Madame Dacier”), wrote her translations as a reaction to Homeric imitations. Many translators had followed the same principles as La Vallterie for at least a century. The Iliade by La Motte [Houdart de La Motte 1714] is one of the many examples of a tendency to transform the epics into an “up-to-date” version. In this general atmosphere, Madame Dacier is an exception. She was very fond of Greek and Latin from a very young age, and was given the chance to grow up with just as much education as a man thanks to her father. Though small and, above all, a woman, her strong character and her excellent knowledge of Greek forced her peers to acknowledge the quality of her many publications[10]. She is a paragon of scientific, archaeological and philanthropic knowledge of Homer’s works. As she says herself in her Iliade:

Je n’écris pas pour les savants qui lisent Homère en sa langue (...) j’écris pour ceux qui ne le connaissent point, c’est à dire pour le plus grand nombre, à l’égard desquels ce poète est comme mort. [Dacier 1712]

Although she states that her work is not made to be a philological translation, it is clear that the amount of research and stylistic work in her translations is enormous[11]. The Odyssey [Dacier 1717] is heavily annotated (the notes generally take three quarters of a single page). She wants her readers to see Homer as he is, not as he should be in a contemporary world. Therefore, she has to explain many of the incoherences and cultural gaps that would make Homer incompatible with the modern world. She tends to justify shocking descriptions or attitudes in the Odyssey by saying that those were acceptable because they were different, and justifies her assertions both philologically and archaeologically. She also tends to erase most of Homer’s stylistic specificities, as they have no scientific purpose.

Dacier uses common terms for the society she lives in, uses simplified syntax, and above all annotates her text enormously. We included the notes and explanations directly in the text but did not align them. What is most visible in this abstract is that Dacier tends to respect the length and syntax of the Greek text, much more than her predecessors. It is also visible that she initiates this tendency for the following translators such as Bitaubé (for more details on syntactic proximity after Madame Dacier, see our website). She erases the polysemy of the Greek word “κελαινεφές”, interpreting it in a logical and clarified way (leaving aside both the smoky effect and its blackness). She just translates the expression “νεκύων κατατεθνηώτων” by “les ombres”, erasing the redundancy like “the dead that have lived”. Dacier definitely wants to imitate the Greek syntax, keeping the paratactic “τε”: this is quite visible in the important similarity to the Greek throughout the text (see greyer colums). She also chooses to clarify the polysemous word “νεοπενθέα”, with the images of both sorrow and flowers. She adapts the deity Ares into Mars who would be more familiar to her audience, and she is one of the rare translators (along with Bitaubé) to use this adaptation. We decided to add the footnote we included, as it shows Dacier’s desire to explain the war heroes’ death in terms of Christian beliefs. There is no phonetic proximity to the Greek whatsoever. She does not simply want to imitate Homer but to make him understandable for her readers and so phonetic imitation, which is seen later in Leconte de Lisle, would be counter-productive. It is also noticeable that this abstract contains a large amount of green words, while earlier translations do not.This means that many of the words she uses were then imitated and reproduced by her followers. From the imitative flowery pomp we got from the previous century, we now get a form of puritanism from this erudite translator.

Figures 11 and 12 show an alignment around Dacier’s text and a small part of the same text tokenized in blocks in the interface.

Bitaubé’s works show similar tendencies as Dacier’s. Bitaubé’s native language was German. When he decided to learn French, he saw it as a scholarly language, a language that tends towards excellence. Thanks to his first publication of the Odyssey [Bitaubé 1764], he became an academic in Berlin. He decided for a scholarly style that he calls “prose cadencée” (“prose in rythm”):

Il n’est pas aisé d’écrire dans une prose cadencée, harmonieuse, qui s’élève (elle le peut), au ton de la poésie ; et je soutiens que la gêne d’une grande fidélité, lorsqu’on s’y assujettit scrupuleusement, n’est pas si éloignée qu’on le pense de celle de traduire en vers.[12]

To assert this scientific ambition, Bitaubé is one of the first to explicitly mention any translator before him. What is more, not only does Bitaubé want to be exact in the meaning, he also aims at accuracy concerning style, imitating, as much as possible, Homer’s brevitas. As a result, in only one century, the reader goes from imitative flowery pomp to scholarly puritanism. In our text, Bitaubé tries to maintain both the Greek syntax (just as Dacier did), but also its polysemous terms. For example, where Dacier used two coordinates, for “λαβὼν” and “ἐλλισάμην”, Bitaubé chooses juxtaposition, maintaining the Greek hypotyposis. The blackness and the liquid aspect of the “κελαινεφές” is now explicit (“les noirs torrents”). Bitaubé also attempts, as much as possible, to reproduce the Greek redundancy “νεκύων κατατεθνηώτων”. Finally, he strictly imitates the Greek syntax, maintaining the paratactic syntax and the adjectives describing the dead.

After Bitaubé, the 19th century flourishes with many translations of Homer’s epics. The French Revolution, and especially the Terror has given a new gleam to the ancient poets, supposed to be the witnesses of a higher moral value, lost in modern times, both aesthetically and politically. Bitaubé is in an in-between conception of the Greek literature as the “Dictionnaire bibliographique à l’usage des collèges” will say about him,

Il s’applique à conserver la marche et les formes de la phrase grecque, il imite assez bien l’abondance et la rondeur de l’original, et sa traduction a un air antique, et ne manque pas d’un certain charme ; mais l’audace, la majesté, l’éloquence variée d’Homère, la richesse de ses couleurs, le mouvement rapide de son style, la hardiesse et l’impétuosité du langage, on les cherche en vain ; on lui demanderait plus vainement encore la mollesse et la grâce, l’harmonie générale du style homérique, les expressions touchantes, cette mélodie suave[13]

A major evolution can be noticed here; a greater attention is given to Homer’s style rather than moral teachings, and Bitaubé, although frequently reprinted at the time, especially in school books, is not criticized for the possible rashness of his translation, but on the contrary for his lack of Homeric style.

Figures 13 and 14 show an alignment around Bitaubé’s text and a small part of the same text tokenized in blocks in the interface.

The thermidorian reaction to this way of perceiving the Classics puts to an end the cult of a lost Antique virtue. Volney, for example, will say:

Ce sont ces livres classiques si vantés, ces poètes, ces orateurs, ces historiens, qui, mis sans discernement aux mains de la jeunesse, l’ont imbue de leurs principes ou de leurs sentiments. Ils ont oublié que cette prétendue république, diverse selon les époques, fut toujours une oligarchie composée d’un ordre de noblesse et de sacerdoce, maître presque exclusif des terres et des emplois, et d’une masse plébéinne grevée d’usures, n’ayant pas quatre arpents par tête, et ne différant de ses propres esclaves que par le droit de les fustiger, de vendre son suffrage, et d’aller vieillir ou périr sous le sarment des centurions, dans l’esclavage des camps et les rapines militaires.[14]

As a result of this violent reaction, the Greek will again be given to the youth of the time, but not as a moral model, but much more as a potential source of erudition and scientific knowledge. Le Prince Lebrun is one of the heirs of such teachings.

Le Prince Lebrun is, above all, a homo publicus. He escapes many of the massacres from the French Revolution, avoids death during the final period of Napoleon’s reign, and holds many public offices. His Iliad, translated when he was young, was an exercise to make himself famous among the erudite society. His Odyssey [Lebrun 1819], however, is the work of a man that has already achieved social fame. He is one of the many men of power to demonstrate, by publishing poorly translated works, his ability to be both an important man and a scholar. His works, as a result, though very well known at the time and republished many times, were completely forgotten thirty years after his death.

In our text, we can see that he tends to strictly imitate the Greek, often in a clumsy way, and sometimes with great inaccuracy. This entire translation has no footnotes, no preface, no post-face. He has none of Dacier’s or Bitaubé’s ethnographic care, although it is clear that he has read Bitaubé, as we can see from our program, as he reuses many words that had previously only be used by Bitaubé. This translation is the direct result of the educative principles initiated by Dacier and Bitaubé.

Lebrun’s translation is an echo of the way Greek was taught at the time. Indeed, an enormous amount of partial scholarly translations appear during the second half of the 19th century that clearly tend to privilege the strict accuracy to the Greek text, without the help of Latin. The Greek Classics have become a source of linguistic benefits (the necessity to learn Greek at the time is often justified by the ability it should give to students to enhance their intellectual capabilities as well as their analytic skills, reasoning, and logic) and ethnological information (the Greek text should be perceived as a literary testimony).

Figures 15 and 16 show an alignment around Lebrun’s text and a small part of the same text tokenized in blocks in the interface.

From the second half of the 19th century, many juxtalinear translations are published. For the first time, the aim is to publish a large amount of abridged translations, and if a certain abstract has more success than others, publish the entire translation. These translations are typographically recognizable; the first page is a word-to-word translation, unreadable and not supposed to be fluent, and the second page is a linguistically acceptable translation. This practical use of translation reveals two essential points in the evolution of translation practices. Firstly, in order for a translation to be judged adequate, it must show that the translator perfectly understood the syntactic problems of the Greek text and secondly, that Greek and Latin studies have never been more important in general education.

However, Sommer’s many translations [Sommer 1854] do not aim at being original or stylistically distinguishable, but mainly tend to explain Greek syntactic problems. In our text, Sommer never omits a single word, keeping each redundancy, without seeking poetic effects (e.g.: the “ψυχαὶ νεκύων κατατεθνηώτων” is simply translated by “les âmes des morts”). What is more, Sommer tends to maintain Greek temporality: he keeps aorists and imperfects, not considering French habits (“la pâle crainte s’emparait de moi”, “the pale dread was getting to me”). Sommer’s translation is clearly and without any doubt the nearest text to the Greek syntax. The syntactic similarities are at their highest points throughout the text. What is more, the text displays an enormous amount of green and blue words, that is to say extremely frequent words. He does not aim at originality, but at reproducing the meaning word by word. Finally he is one of the rare 19th century translators (along with Leconte de Lisle) who share such a close proximity to the Greek at this precise point.

Both Latin and Greek Classics seem at this time to have regained a certain prestige. Many of the abridged translations are made for school use, and their notes and parallel analysis show a new grammatical perception of both languages. Almost paradoxically, the extreme accuracy asked for from the students will sometimes generate much bolder translations such as Leconte de Lisle’s.

Figures 17 and 18 show an alignment around Sommer’s text and a small part of the same text tokenized in blocks in the interface.

In this period translators stop adapting the text to their own language and culture, but enrich their own style with the contact of strangeness. The climax of this tendency seems to be reached with Leconte de Lisle [Leconte de Lisle 1867]. Not only does he use rare terms or even hapaxes, but he also creates neologisms, and imitates the Greek itself as a sound. Leconte de Lisle was one of the reasons we used the Greek text as pivot as he is often quite literal in his phonetic imitations (he is without doubt the author that has the more italics in his text); this means it tends to be very different from traditional syntax. Indeed, the goal might have been first to disassociate the reader from his own hic et nunc, for lost and far away realities, but also to create a form of poetic hermetism. As a result, the program points out that in Leconte de Lisle’s translation there are many hapaxes and many word similarities with the Greek, which is to say archaisms[15]. The goal is clearly to recreate a complete work of art, poetic and independent from its source for a renewed modern language. In our text, what is most noticeable is that Leconte de Lisle maintains most of the Greek syntax and uses an enormous amount of hapaxes (the first in our whole corpus to use so many hapaxes). In the first sentence, he strictly imitates Greek temporality, and he is the first to explicitly keep the perfect participle κατατεθνηώτων (accomplished fact) with “les morts qui ne sont plus” (“the dead that are no more”). The Ἐρέβευς is also phonetically imitated, as shown with the italics, translated as “Erebos”. The following sentence exactly maintains the Greek syntax (nominative juxtapositions, demonstrative pronoun “οἳ”). But what is more, Leconte de Lisle maintains, as much as possible, every assonance and alliteration present in the Greek text (“θεσπεσίῃ ἰαχῇ”, with three and two syllables: “frémissement immense”, with three and two syllables). Even the books themselves are not books anymore but “rhapsodies”. This tendency illustrated by Leconte de Lisle is clearly seen at the time as an emancipation. Translating means working not only on a source language, but on French itself. The fact that a new kind of French is needed is visible in the way translators deliberately skew common meanings and usage. Translation is not perceived only as a symbolic means of understanding ideas and culture, but also as a new way to express impression and sound. Translation itself is a new work of art.

However popular Greek studies might have been during the second half of the 19th century, their descent is quite tangible throughout the 20th, and so is a drop in interest for literary Greek translation, especially in the first twenty years of the century. This descent goes hand in hand with the increasing specialization of scientific and documentary matter. Knowing Greek means more and more that one should be familiar with a precise contextualized Greek reality and history. The study of Greek becomes the study of Greek history and archaeological value, not so much as purely developing a stylistic and grammatical ability.

Figures 19 and 20 show an alignment around Leconte de Lisle’s text and a small part of the same text tokenized in blocks in the interface.

Victor Bérard considered Homer’s Odyssey both as a literary masterpiece and a considerable source of archaeological information; he saw the epics as both a poem and a document. As a result, Bérard’s translation [Bérard 1924] was paradoxically easy and challenging to align. It was easy because Bérard tends, writing in hexameters, to reproduce the syntactic movement of the Greek verse. He also tends to keep the polysemous aspects of each particular word as well as keeping in mind the principle of brevitas. As a result, if we compare the syntax of each aligned chunk with its Greek correspondent, we find an extraordinary proximity of length and syntax, almost as high as Sommer’s. However, it was also, in some parts, difficult to align. This is because because, being an archaeologist, Bérard tends to force the original text into his own present reality. For example, he tends to change toponyms so that they match real places in modern Greece. This characteristic found in many of Bérard’s translations and works on Antiquity has been qualified as the “complexe de Victor Bérard”  [Montalbetti 1997]. Bérard wanted to locate every single topos described in the Odyssey in the modern world. To do so, from 1902 to 1912, he travelled throughout the Mediterranean sea, and wrote four volumes of 400 pages each entitled Les Navigations d’Ulysse [Bérard 1927]. These Navigations follow Ulysses’ path throughout the Odyssey. Later in the Sillage d’Ulysse [Bérard 1933], Bérard collects all the photographs Fred Boissonnas, who accompanied him on his trips, took in Greece and identified each one as a specific Homeric topos. This is symbolic of what Bérard thinks about the art of translation, that it is as much archaeological research as it is a poetic activity. He views it as a way of combining past and present into a single universal reality. In our text, Bérard mainly imitates the natural movement of the Greek line, using the hexameter. For the first time, every Greek word is translated, this time in the iconic brevitas style, which makes this translation a true masterpiece, being both poetic and precise. For example, “κελαινεφές” is translated by “les sombres vapeurs” which is the shortest and yet the most literal translation we have. The same thing can be noticed about the word “θύμος”, erased from so many translations before, literally maintained without awkwardness, by “portant au coeur” (“bearing in their heart”). Let us also notice that the dread does not have a clarity, but a color, a characteristic that he will be the first one to use, and the nearest to the Greek so far. What is more, Bérard is the first since Certon to fully express Odysseus’ fear with the hypotyposis present throughout the description of the dead, and keeping the paratactic asyndeton. We can notice a true evolution with Bérard’s translation, initiated, we may suppose, by Leconte de Lisle. The strangeness of Greek must be assumed both as a philologic information for the Hellenist and an aesthetic novelty for the poet. We can therefore also see Bérard, apart from Leconte de Lisle, as one of the first to assume fully Greek proper nouns, many of which are in italics. We can also see that his translation, still one of the most well known in France today, has been reused and changed (in very different ways), both by Philippe Jaccottet and Frédéric Mugler. Indeed, Frédéric Mugler is often seen to reuse Bérard’s translations without citing him, which we can see in our program as he uses expressions that have a very low frequency and that are only present in Bérard’s translation. For example, just like in Bérard, the invocation is made to the “peuple des défunts”, the animal’s throat is “tranchée” (just as in, and only in, Bérard and Jaccottet), the old men are “chargés d’épreuves”, and finally the dread is described with exactly the same words, “je verdissais de crainte”. Concerning Jaccottet, it seems to be a quite different matter, as he is the first, after Bérard, to use French verses to translate the Greek epics.

Figures 21 and 22 show an alignment around Bérard’s text and a small part of the same text tokenized in blocks in the interface.

We chose to analyze Jaccottet’s translation here [Jaccottet 1955], as Jaccottet declares himself as an heir to Bérard (although not entirely). We should just stress that with the program we could spot two schemes: firstly Jaccottet’s lines, just like Bérard’s, tend to reproduce Greek syntax, secondly, Jaccottet uses high frequency and everyday words, which sets him apart from Bérard. This tends to illustrate what Jaccottet may say himself about his own style: expression should be “loyale” (both “accurate” and “faithful”). From a translator’s point of view, this first means that there is a promise of truth between the word and the object it represents, but also between a foreign word and a familiar word. As Jaccottet states himself:

Y entendre ne fût-ce qu’un écho très affaibli de l’admirable musique originale, il faut alors traduire, dans la mesure du possible et sans tomber dans l’absurde, selon la lettre même du texte. De même, il faut écouter plutôt que lire, ainsi [...] le texte retrouve sa lenteur nécessaire, son mouvement, quelque chose de sa résonance.[16]

Both Bérard and Jaccottet, though to different extents, embody this increasing attention to the poetics of their source material and the need to reproduce an echo of what has been lost. In our text, we can first notice a symmetric inversion of the syntactic order, emphasizing the liturgical aspect of the scene and the Homeric tendency to maintain the hesitation between the narrative and the incantation. The expression “les deux bêtes” (“the two beasts”), most unusual, may be due less to the context than to the phonic imitation of δὲ. The word “trou” is almost shocking, but then again reflects the phonic imitation of βόθρον, and its extreme simplicity (an essential notion in Jaccottet’s poetry). The problematic expression “ψυχαὶ νεκύων κατατεθνηώτων” is translated with apparent ease, both keeping the pleonasm and the naturalness of the language, with “les âmes des défunts trépassés” (“the souls of the departed dead”). The adjective “étrange” (“strange”) maintains Odysseus’ uneasy feeling (implied by “θεσπεσίῃ”), and while Jaccottet maintains the final imperfect (also visible in the Greek text), he gives it an inchoative connotation, which is most original. Finally, let us point out that there are no capitals in Jaccottet’s poetry, corresponding both to his own principle of “effacement” (“disappearance”) and to a vision of poetic rhythm (conceived as a blow, a wind, which should not be stopped).

Here we showed a larger sample of Jaccottet’s abstract, as a smaller sample, similar to ones used for other translations, would not have highlighted Jaccottet’s exceptional attention to accurately recreating the Greek. As we saw, he tends to reproduce as many phonemes as he can, and many of his proper nouns, but also many inner words, are in italics, and he has an exceptional high similarity with the Greek syntax, comparable only to Sommer’s.

Both Bérard and Jaccottet, following the path Leconte de Lisle had initiated, have contributed to a new perception of translation, as a masterpiece both in debt and independent from its source. We would like to conclude this analysis of Jaccottet’s work with one of his own elegant statements about translation in his preface:

Et tel aura été le rêve, utopique, de cette traduction, défectueuse comme toute traduction : que le texte vienne à son lecteur ou, mieux peutêtre, à son auditeur un peu comme viennent à la rencontre du voyageur ces statues ou ces colonnes lumineuses dans l’air cristallin de la Grèce, surtout quand elles le surprennent sans qu’il y soit préparé ; mais même quand il s’y attend, elles le surprennent, tant elles viennent de loin, parlent de loin, encore qu’on les touche du doigt. Elles demeurent distantes, mais la distance d’elles à nous est aussi un lien radieux.[17]

Figures 23 and 24 show an alignment around Jaccottet’s text and a small part of the same text tokenized in blocks in the interface.

The program we made was extremely effective at analysing and identifying different trends and patterns in a range of French translations from the 16th to the 20th century. Thanks to our efforts in alignment and improvement of NLP tools within a single interface, we tried to give the common user access to potentially enriched literary analysis. This has only been a sample, but we hope to develop both our corpus (in different languages) and our tools in future months.