To continue, Chester River Press is planning a new presentation of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. The initial task was to locate acceptable electronic texts of Alexander Pope’s translation of the Iliad and Odyssey, and the classic Greek text. As we found during our preparation of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, what at first seems simple enough turns into a complicated process. In essence, on line texts are a wonderful convenience, the alternative being a retyping of printed texts into a workable electronic format. However, the methods used to produce an on line text are fraught with problems and oversights. If they are to be used for anything but reading, they require careful editing and comparison with published editions and, even then, errors, omissions, and author changes from edition to edition have to be accounted for. And in this case, we were dealing with Greek and English.
While we were pondering the textual problems, we decided to contact Steven Shankman to ascertain his interest in our project. Professor Shankman teaches at the University of Oregon, and is Distinguished Professor, College or Arts and Sciences, and also UNESCO Chair in Transcultural Studies. He has authored many books and numerous articles on Homeric studies, is well known for his scholarship on Alexander Pope, and edited an Alexander Pope translation of the Iliad for Penguin Books in 1996. We wrote to Professor Shankman explaining and presenting our project, asking if he would consider writing an introduction for the publication. We were ecstatic to receive not only a favorable response but a strong endorsement of our project. He agreed to prepare an original introduction for what, in his words, would be “a magnificent edition” of Homer.
Our plans for the illustrations of the Iliad and Odyssey were centered on Greek vase painting of the Homeric period. We envisioned using the classic Greek vase shapes illustrated with original art depicting chosen scenes from the Iliad and Odyssey, at least one scene from each of the 48 books. Using the internet, we sent out an “artists call”, describing the project and emphasizing the classical Greek nature of the planned drawings. Over the period of several weeks we received more than 150 responses, all of which were noteworthy in their professionalism and artistic talent, but unfortunately very few demonstrated the classical style of art we were seeking.
Our disappointment turned to excitement when one morning a young artist named Avery Lawrence came into our bookshop, opened his portfolio and showed us his just completed drawings of Greek vases with two scenes from the Iliad. We were amazed. They were exactly what we envisioned. Over the next six months Bill Frank worked with Avery on scene and vase selections, fine tuning the drawings and matching them with couplets from the Pope translation. The final result would be more than fifty full page art pieces accompanied by catalogue entries.
There are, of course, many editions of Pope’s translations of the Iliad and Odyssey. Some significant changes were made over time, a most noteworthy one in 1736 when Pope changed the first two lines of his Iliad from the 1720 first edition. The lines originally read as follows:
The Wrath of Peleus’ Son, the direful spring
Of all the Grecian Woes, O Goddess, sing!
Pope changed them to the now familiar:
Achilles’ wrath, to Greece the direful spring
Of woes unnumber’d, heav’nly Goddess, sing!
Pope made other changes over the years, dealing mostly with spelling, hyphenation, punctuation, and the use and non-use of italics. After his death in 1744, the changes to Pope’s text rested with the various editors who prepared later publications of his work. By the mid-nineteenth century fairly standardized texts of the Pope translations were in use. Even so, the electronic versions we reviewed contained several variations which proved inconsistent with specific published editions of Pope we studied. We finally settled on the edition introduced by Theodore Buckley in the 1890’s. This edition incorporated not only Pope’s major changes but the smaller revisions to the text we were comfortable with.
The standard Greek text of the Iliad and Odyssey is the Monro-Allen edition of 1920. This edition was available to us electronically, but posed the problem of ascertaining the accuracy of a classical Greek electronic copy. We would need to edit the Greek. Bill Frank reads and studies classical Greek, but attempting to proof the entire Iliad and Odyssey was a mountain a bit too high to climb, for Bill or any of us at Chester River Press. We decided to seek both an editor for the Greek, and to be on the safe side, an editor for the English text, to bring the Pope electronic version in line with the Buckley edition.
Jim Dissette made contact with Professor Barry B. Powell, University of Wisconsin, who is a renowned Greek scholar. His books include: Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet, 1991; Writings and the Origins of Greek Literature, 2002; and most recently Writing: Theory and History of the Technology of Civilization, 2009. To our great fortune Professor Powell agreed to proof the electronic Greek text, and considered it a ‘fun’ project! In the course of our work he became an invaluable resource for us, going far beyond what we asked him to do.
Professor Shankman put us in touch with Steven Shurtleff, a Pope scholar who had assisted him in the research for the Penguin edition of the Iliad. Mr. Shurtleff agreed to edit the electronic text of Pope’s Homer to correspond with the Buckley edition. This was monumental, since the editing covered spelling, punctuation, and all of the minor differences in the two versions. He knew Pope’s Homer intimately, was a pleasure to work with, and his expertise and diligence were crucial to our effort.
Thus far, at least, the Greek gods were smiling upon us. Designing the book itself promised to be a challenge. This was Jim Dissette’s expertise and he prepared several mockups of the page layouts, title pages, dust jackets, and typefaces. A basic decision was how to present the Greek and English texts. We knew we would need to publish in two volumes, but the Iliad and Odyssey are lengthy books and, depending on the font size, running Greek on one page and English on the facing page could prove unworkable. Jim designed a two column page, placing the Greek in one, the English in the other. He designed each page in a wide lateral format to accommodate the text with generous margins. It was definitely not your standard book shape, but a practical one, and very elegant too.
Jim designed Avery’s full page art pieces to be ‘tipped in’ as opposed to bound into the book. We would use a heavier stock coated paper for the fifty-plus art pages, which would enhance the magnificent colors in the printing process. Each volume would have a vase art frontispiece, with the title pages printed in gold Greek lettering on a black background. The dust jackets would mirror the title pages.
At last came the day when the introduction was completed, the proofing and editing of Greek and English finished, all art pieces and catalogue entries ready, and Jim was working on the delicate and lengthy process of adjusting the texts to the pages to accommodate the shorter Greek text with the longer Pope text. We each read the text carefully again to ensure there were no lines dropped, no Greek fonts erroneously transmitted from computer to computer, no pages out of sequence, and all of the detail checking that comes along just when you think the layout is completed. And then we were finished, and it actually looked like we had a book, two in fact. The files were off to the printer and we awaited the galleys, when the proofing process would begin all over again.
So we take a deep breath, begin planning our marketing campaign, and wait, gripping tightly to the Walls of Troy.
