E. V. Rieu

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Emile Victor Rieu (1887–1972) is best known for his lucid translations of Homer, as editor of Penguin Classics, and for a modern translation of the four Gospels, which evolved from his role as editor of a projected (but aborted) Penguin translation of the Bible. His translation of the Odyssey, 1946, was the opener of the Penguin Classics, a series that he founded with Sir Allen Lane and edited from 1944 to 1964. According to his son, "[h]is vision was to make available to the ordinary reader, in good modern English, the great classics of every language."[1]

The inspiration for the series, initially faint, came early into World War Two, while bombs were falling on London. Each night after supper, Rieu would sit his wife and daughters down in the drawing-room and translate passages from a copy of the Odyssey on his lap. His subsequent rendering of that volume would come to be recognised as a classic itself, celebrated for its smoothness and un-translation-like prose.

Often, though, he embroidered Homer's verse. Whereas the direct translation would read, for example, "As soon as Dawn appeared, fresh and rosy-fingered", Rieu's version offered "No sooner had the tender Dawn shown her roses in the East". He also employed a number of inappropriate contemporaneities, like "the meeting adjourned", "I could fancy him" and "It's the kind of thing that gives a girl a good name in town". He either discarded Homer's anonymous immortals ("a god put this into my mind" becoming "it occurred to me") and formulae: "thoughtful Telemachus replied" becomes "Telemachus replied thoughtfully". Rieu also had a habit of rendering the Ancient Greeks more courteous than they really were, "Kindly" and "Be good enough to" preceding myriad orders. His son amended many of these foibles.[2]

By the time of Rieu's retirement as general editor of the Penguin Classics series, he had overseen the publication of approximately 160 books. He assiduously tracked down all the scholars and translators he wanted for each.

Rieu also translated the Iliad, the Voyage of Argo by Apollonius of Rhodes, The Four Gospels and Virgil's Pastoral Poems.

Patrick Kavanagh evoked the translations' crisp and readable character in a poem "On Looking into E. V. Rieu's Homer":

"In stubble fields the ghosts of corn are
The important spirits the imagination heeds.
Nothing dies; there are no empty
Spaces in the cleanest-reaped fields."[3]

Rieu was a scholar of St Paul's School and Oxford's Balliol College. In 1923, he joined Methuen Publishing, where he was employed as Managing Director from 1933 to 1936, before becoming Academic and Literary Adviser. Leeds University awarded him an honorary D.Litt in 1949 and the CBE in 1953. In 1951, he was appointed President of the Virgil Society and, seven years later, Vice-President of the Royal Society of Literature.

The genial and witty Rieu was a friend and editorial mentor of the science fiction writer Olaf Stapledon. His son, D.C.H. Rieu, has revised his translations. Rieu is less known for his children's verse, Cuckoo Calling: a book of verse for youthful people (1933). He also penned The Flattered Flying Fish and Other Poems. He was influential in the development of Oxford University Press in the early 20th century.

The sole contemporary rival to his prose translation of the Iliad was the verse translation of Richmond Lattimore.

Bible translation running in the family, another of his sons, C.H. Rieu, translated "The Acts of the Apostles by Saint Luke" which was published by Penguin in 1957.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ DCH Rieu's preface to The Odyssey (Penguin, 2003), p. vii.
  2. ^ DCH Rieu's preface to The Odyssey (Penguin, 2003), p. vii.
  3. ^ The implied comparison is with Keats' "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer"


[edit] References