The War Nerd Iliad

Lineages Longer and Purer Than Their Masters’:

A Review of The War Nerd Iliad by John Dolan

“[…] was ever sleeping beauty more effectually concealed behind a more impenetrable hedge of dullness?—and she will have to sleep a good many years yet before anyone wakes her effectually.”
—Samuel Butler, “The Humour of Homer”

“Read the Accounts of Men and Women as they are given us by the most ancient Writers, both Sacred and Prophane, and you would think you were reading the History of another Species.”

—Joseph Addison, The Spectator No. 209

Frank Zappa once remarked that “Jazz is not dead. It just smells funny”^[1]. In doing so, he might have inadvertently touched on something fundamental to the idea of what we call a “classic”. It would be an inherent absurdity to characterize the classics as dead. In bothering to make the argument one presupposes that some kind of relevance, even a negative relevance, persists in them, as compared with their forgotten contemporaries who have been deemed worthy by the ages only of what Marx once called the “gnawing criticism of the mice”^[2]. But in our jaded epoch, it feels no less absurd to claim the opposite, that these texts are just as alive as they were in the days in which they were written. Your English teacher told you this, and perhaps you believed her, right up until the moment your eyes glazed over about a page and a half into whatever text she inflicted on you. Being no philistine, you might have cringed when your classmates gave voice to their objections, but is it not the case that the insult which gives the greatest offence is that which we know on some level to be true?

Stuck between the kind of ahistorical parochialism that proclaims the death of the classics and an ingenuous sentimentalism that elides all distinctions between ages and cultures, we are left in search of a third path that will allow us to grasp the simultaneous overbearing influence and alien quality of the classics. Towards this end, we might do well to think of the classics neither as alive nor as dead, but as undead. In a purely physical sense their persistence is undeniable, and perhaps even something of their original essence is preserved however remote they may be from their point of origin. And yet, something is inevitably lost. Our powers of resurrection are crude and limited, and like the son brought back by the power of the monkey’s paw, the things we bring back are sometimes irreversibly mangled.

Let us take the case of the Iliad, a work so long-lived and acclaimed that, if it cannot be described as a classic, nothing else can. By virtue of this, even if you have never read it, by choice or by force, in one of the countless translations by George Chapman, Alexander Pope, Samuel Butler, Richmond Lattimore, or the Roberts Fitzgerald and Fagles (to list but a fraction of the versions available in English alone) you likely already have some sense of what it is and what it is about. I will therefore make no effort to avoid spoilers, a concept already dubious when applied to contemporary works and which reaches the stage of full-blown absurdity when speaking of works of this status, nor to recount the events of the plot in any detail. Know that in the war between the Greeks and the Trojans, the Greek Achilles withdrew from the campaign due to a dispute with his commander Agamemnon over his favorite sex slave, finally returning in order to avenge the death of his friend Patroclus at the hands of the Trojan Hector. Throughout, the gods watch over the fighting and intervene on behalf of their favorite sides and soldiers. The poet, or succession of poets, we call Homer extends these events into some 600 pages.

It is tempting to begin by explaining why such a tale still holds appeal to us, but this might mean understanding the problem exactly backwards. That the work was so popular and widely regarded in its own day, and has enjoyed transmission through the intervening generations between then and now, suggests that the appeal is fundamental. It is something that we (meaning something like the vague group mind that is called “culture”, not any specific set of concrete individuals) like, not something that we needed to learn to like. The better question is why it has lost so much appeal. Why is it that a young person in Ancient Greece, or even an educated Victorian, was utterly enraptured by it where their modern counterpart is bored to tears? I do not think, as some might, that the original Greek text is simply that much more sublimely written than any English translation. People have often enough written works in English that we can enjoy today without any real friction, and so the problem must be more general.

The problem is still one of translation, just not in the simple sense of translating from one language to another. There may indeed be difficulties in taking the meaning of a passage written in Greek and expressing it in English, but with recourse to circumlocution and neologism it needn’t be strictly impossible. Rather than taking the essentialist view that there exists some spirit of the Iliad that exists only in its original form and which cannot be recreated elsewhere (an odd contention, given that the poem is believed to have been composed iteratively over generations, rather than all at once in a definitive version by a single poet), we might consider that maybe ancient and modern audiences are looking at the same work and merely responding to it differently.

From this view, the difficulty in translating Homer is not so much in finding the right word in English to convey the meaning of πολύτροπος as it is in bridging the gap between our culture and the one in which the meaning of such a word was self-evident and uncontroversial. It might be said that the greater the distance between two cultures, the more one culture must rely on interpretation to render intelligible the works of the other. An insistence on this term, interpretation, over translation is of use here, as this is not simply a matter of finding equivalences between phrases in the source text and phrases in English. The two are not entirely commensurate, and so in choosing to capture or emphasize certain aspects of the original work, one must at the same time sacrifice or deemphasize its other aspects.

The interpreter has before him a work that at some time in the past induced a particular effect on an audience. His task, to reproduce the work in a way that will affect an audience today. The dilemma is this: if he maintains the strictest possible fidelity to the original text afforded to him by the English language, his intended audience will not be able to perceive it in the same manner as their ancient counterparts due to the cultural distance that divides them. If he instead attempts to produce a work readily intelligible to his audience, he must necessarily make the kind of allowances that less charitable observers might call “inaccuracies”.

Our interpreter, or necromancer if you prefer, is caught between Scylla and Charybdis. There is no sense in attempting to find a happy balance between the two potential approaches. Doing so only shifts the issue from that of the whole work, pass/fail, to a case-by-case sentence-level analysis. The totality will no doubt still end up alienating adherents to one or the other philosophy, and so we are forced pick one. So let us consider our options.

On the one hand we have the path of modernization, where our interpreter holds the particular details of the original in no particular regard, willing to remove anything that might present an obstacle to the understanding of the reader, or even to add new details that might aid in this understanding. It is difficult to muster much enthusiasm for this approach, being loathe to ever admit that something might be simultaneous made better and more popular. The problem is not so much that any change in detail is inherently sacrilegious. Again, the works of Homer (among others) were not even in their day static entities, and may not even be entirely consistent internally. What concerns me is that with each well-meaning, individually justifiable step one progresses further along in a race to the bottom that ultimately undermines the concept of a classic.

Borges complained that Butler’s rendering of Homer reduces the events of the epics into a “series of sedate news items”^[3]. I can’t quite agree with the particulars of his assessment, perhaps being a product of greater decline than he, but the broader point stands. In being too eager to remove all sources of friction between the text and the reader, one is at risk of removing that which might only in retrospect turn out to be load-bearing. This appeal to an essentially solipsistic audience, which cannot recognize value in anything that cannot immediately and neatly be fit in alongside the existing contents of their mind, degrades art into entertainment, and entertainment further into pornography.

One might object to this characterisation of something like the Iliad as artistic and some of its more extreme modernizations as pornographic, or at least to the notion that pornography is of lesser value than art. It is difficult to resist the brute force of the argument that consumer demand is the greatest measure of value. An argumentum ad populum, yes, but lacking any real badge of authority, the objectors will have a hard time presenting themselves as something other than a niche demographic within the market with delusions of being apart from it. We might weakly venture that one inevitably becomes inured to constant, monotonous pleasure, and that the capacity for pleasure is refreshed through the experience of friction. Works which appeal directly and frictionlessly to the desires of their audience quickly become objects of boredom, while those which provide a more complex system of effort and reward have the potential (but are by no means guaranteed) to evade this tendency towards habituation and so may in the long run bring greater pleasure.

There you have in miniature a hedonistic defense of the idea of art as something separate from and superior to entertainment, which you may find more or less convincing, but this is all quite besides the point. In choosing to resurrect something old, over composing something entirely new, the interpreter is implicitly admitting that there is something in the original worth preserving. Whether or not you ultimately accept the notion of the classics as something greater than the works of today, or those of the past that are no longer remembered, the interpreter must, if his work is not to seem arbitrary. From this standpoint, it would seem that the only way forward is to cleave as close to the originals as possible, to preserve what one can however strange and offputting the results may be.

This leads us to the other approach, which we might characterize as academic or scholarly. These words alone are enough to engender hostility in a certain contingent. Some of this is no doubt veiled resentment. After all, any fool can whip up their own hip modernization of Homer (see 2004’s idiotic Troy, or a certain other film forthcoming), but how many of us are really capable of going back to the original and doing the work of rebuilding it from the ground up? Such a task implies a mastery of two separate cultural frameworks, and very few of us have mastery over even one. But then my own sympathy with this tendency is not free of ulterior emotional motives. You might have a well remunerating job, or a beautiful wife, but do not forget that some of us must derive our own sense of personal worth through the affectation of cultural sophistication.

If we politely dispense with psychoanalysis in either direction, we can say in support of this approach that it respects the specificity of works like the Iliad. That is to say, it takes them to be things with a persistent identity rather than vectors for general entertainment which may be altered whenever convenient. That this approach so often produces works which strike us (note here the diplomatic use of the first person) as distasteful is therefore inevitable. I do not mean to say, as critics might, that the point is strictly to baffle the reader. Rather, I mean that the point is to produce the Iliad, and that doing so successfully will result in bafflement. The notion that a concern for fidelity to the original is purely an expression of ivory tower elitism is based on the assumption of ill-intent on part of the producer behind what is ultimately a failure, however understandable, on part of the consumer.

As with its modernizing counterpart, the academic approach has a tendency towards undermining itself. One vocal opponent of what he calls the “classicist guild”^[4], John Dolan, argues that the Iliad was in its original form something like a campfire story, or a tall tale. In order to maintain a strict fidelity towards the particulars of the original, interpreters are ironically forced to move further and further away from this popular form. Necromancy becomes something more like taxidermy, and an obsession with preserving the particulars of the poem demands its final death as an object of broader public interest.

Blog readers may already recognize the name of John Dolan a.k.a. Gary Brecher a.k.a. the War Nerd. From the late-90s through the mid-2010s, Dolan, writing in character as Brecher, was responsible for the War Nerd columns, appearing first in The eXile. The character was an obese, mentally-unwell office worker from Fresno whose sole pleasure in life was living vicariously through war reporting, and Dolan played him well. Dolan’s rendering of the Iliad, somewhat dishonestly marketed by the publisher as a translation, is worth reading solely as a vehicle for his amusing and endlessly memorable writing style, but my interest here is in considering its success or failure as a solution to the problems we have outlined.

The most obvious characteristic of Dolan’s version, The War Nerd Iliad, is that it is written in prose. Dolan observes that we live in a prose culture. This claim was optimistic even nine years ago when the book first came out, but it can be rendered true with the minor amendment that it is the shrinking portion of our culture that still reads at all which is dominated by prose. Even the segment of the population that still produces serious poetry, who are both less relevant and whose prospects for survival are more precarious than uncontacted tribes in danger of getting bulldozed in the Amazon, have by and large abandoned the form of the epic. As a culture we have long since settled on the novel as our means of writing narratives of any real length. The most obvious approach to the problem of producing a readable, modern Iliad is to simply make a novel of it. Dolan’s version is good to the extent that he stays this course, and bad to the extent that he is drawn away from it by the siren song of the epic.

A novel is not simply an epic in prose. In his “Pierre Menard”^[5], Borges suggested, perhaps seriously, perhaps jokingly, that the Don Quixote that was in fact written by a Spaniard at the start of the 17th century means something very different from the exact same sequence of words written by a 20th century Frenchman. Likewise, however similar they might seem at a glance, the novel and the epic are products of distinct cultures. Dolan sees an affinity between Homer and the modern literature of science fiction and fantasy. He is not entirely wrong in this assertion, being correct that perhaps SFF alone takes seriously nonhuman agencies and retains a sense of grandiosity and heroism that other literatures have abandoned for what Dolan derides elsewhere as “divorce on Cape Cod”^[6]. But this is only an affinity. I dare say that Homer does not cut it as a fantasy author in our post-Tolkien world.

Consider what notes an author might receive back from his publisher, were he to attempt to submit the Iliad in a version of our present where it never existed. He might be told that it is rife with plot holes. How, for instance, is the young Achilles, who has been away from home for nine years, able to have a son who is old enough to fight in the same war that ends a year later? Or perhaps other inconsistencies will take them out of the story. How is it that characters are able to deliver long monologues, quite literally sharing their life stories, in the middle of raging battles as though they were in Dragon Ball Z? And there’s no magic system to speak of! Those gods do as they please without regard for rhyme or reason, let alone the reader’s suspension of disbelief.

Of course plenty of modern works have plots of questionable integrity. More damning from our modern perspective are the poem’s stylistic qualities. The writing is repetitive, with the shameless reuse of similes and even the duplication of entire paragraphs, telling us again what we have already been told. Even when the writing is not strictly redundant, it is odd in terms of what is given emphasis. The infodump that has come to be known as the “catalogue of ships”, which infamously lists dozens of the Greek captains and the lands they come from in excruciating detail, drags on for longer than the accounts of the deaths of major characters. This work clearly predates the notion of “show, don’t tell”.

One might add to this list the general flatness of the characters, and the way in which the course of the narrative is arbitrarily diverted by the influence of the gods, but it is not a point I wish to belabor. It is no failure of Homer’s not to have foreseen what the people of the would like from him, and so compose for a then-hypothetical audience of a background totally alien to his own. The Iliad is not a bad novel, because it is not a novel at all. This is only to say that, were one to make a novel of it, there is much that needs to be changed.

Dolan’s version does begin with a healthy distrust for the template set before him by the long train of existing translations. There are lots of smaller quality-of-life considerations, such as the merciful omission or truncation of many of the digressions, for instance in Nestor’s long-winded, Grandpa Simpson “back in my day” rants. The most important difference, however, is tonal, this version being informed by the commentary of Samuel Butler and Friedrich Nietzsche. These influences give the text, respectively, a sense of irony and cruelty which are not strictly absent from other translations, but require one to resist the demands of these versions for reverence and solemnity.

Dolan follows Butler in interpreting some of the poem’s more amusing episodes as works of intentional comedy^[7]. Zeus, for example, is accorded no particular respect, being in practice a henpecked husband doomed to an eternal struggle with his battleax of a wife and his spoiled daughter, and who only happens to be the most powerful being in the universe. When I first read the Iliad, it was difficult to tell whether I was meant to be laughing at things like this, or if the author or translator simply did not realize how they were coming across. Rather than trying to paper over any threats to the seriousness of the work, Dolan makes use of the polyphonic quality of the novel to complicate the monotony, in the most literal sense, of the original.

A strong sense of irony pervades this version, but it is not the flippant detachment we normally now refer to by the use of the word. Rather, the narration is conscious of its own status as a perspective which exists separate from and in opposition to those of its characters, and so it is possible for a character to conceive of himself in one way and yet be perceived quite differently. Reading other versions of the Iliad, it is at times not difficult to see how someone like Julian Jaynes could be led to the conclusion that it is the work of a culture without any capacity for interiority^[8]. The actions of a character like Agamemnon seem at all times to be taken seriously by Homer, however foolish or hypocritical they may be, which results in a ridiculous contrast from our modern perspective. The more parsimonious explanation for this is simply that the Greeks of this time held different values to us, and felt that the nobility of a figure like Agamemnon was assured by his social status independent of his particular actions. Dolan’s version works within the modern, I dare say liberal, view of personal worth as a quality not subject to any kind of formal system of determination. This principle is extended not just to the kings or gods of the story, but to the status of the author himself. Dolan can not have overlooked the fact that one of the most pathetic and contemptible characters of the Iliad is himself named “Dolon”.

It is difficult to denounce this change as nothing but a modern perversion. Even the self-styled reactionaries and elitists of our day seem to spend much of their time bemoaning the behavior and decisions of actually-existing elites. We have all simply gotten too used to our own precious perspectives to relate to the hierarchical worldview of ancient Greece. But in case there is any lingering doubt that this is a bad case of Homer “gone woke”, I should like to note that the other thinker that Dolan draws on in establishing the tone of his version is Nietzsche. Though it depicts both the brutality of war and the emotional effects on those who survive that brutality, the Iliad is in no sense an anti-war book. It does not step outside its own context to question the general practice of sacking a city, killing all of its men and raping and enslaving all of its women, even if it can acknowledge the unpleasantness of particular points in the process. As we have seen, Dolan’s version is skeptical of the poem’s own conception of itself, but this is a passive skepticism rather than an active, tedious denunciation of the actions the characters make.

Neither does he change the story to conform to our modern sensibilities. It would not be hard to do, a viable course presenting itself quite readily. Were one to write the story today, the obvious candidate for the part of the hero is not Achilles, it is Hector. He is, after all, a defender against a campaign of pillaging and mass murder, itself a punishment delivered to many for the transgression of an individual. He is by far the most sympathetic of the major characters (though I confess I sometimes wish he would hurry up and die so we can get to the bit where Achilles reconciles with Hector’s father). For him, it seems that glory in battle is really only the unfortunate prerequisite for the nobler domestic concerns of fatherhood and marriage. But one gets the sense that the world of ancient Greece was not one where merely being sympathetic got one anywhere, other than perhaps the grave. Dolan is right to resist the temptation of a shift in perspective which is so popular in revisiting the stories of the Greeks. As they say in a very different context, the cruelty is the point.

I do not wish to give the impression that this is all that different from any other Iliad on the market. The approach I have described applies really only to a small sliver of the book, mostly towards the beginning. As the story wears on Dolan forgets, or otherwise abandons, this approach in favor of a more straightforward retelling. For this I cannot entirely blame him. One who subjects this review to a close enough reading may be able to pinpoint the exact sentence where I got sick of writing it. The result is still however straightforwardly inferior either to a purely novelistic reinterpretation of the story, or else a translation in the epic mode which takes great pains towards accuracy.

There is one vestige of the epic form here which works and is worth retaining, that being the invocation of the Muse. The original, like other works of ancient Greek poetry, purports not to be the composition of the one writing or reciting it, but something transmitted to him by a goddess. Dolan renders this quite succinctly: “I didn’t write this story. I’m just delivering it”. For him then, the Muse is not a literal goddess speaking to or through him, but the Iliad itself. Some might read this as merely cute or clever, but I think that Dolan’s conception of himself, and by extension other interpreters of the Iliad, as better or worse vectors for the poem rather than competitors in the quest to produce the One True Version™.

For Borges, Homer was not so much an author (even if something of a convenient fiction) as he was a genre. In the absence of any way to produce a translation that captures all aspects of the original, one is left to contend with the question of which aspects one thinks are worth capturing. This question amounts to that of whether one’s necromantic tastes incline one more towards ghosts, which have retained their spirits but not their forms, or zombies, whose forms are preserved in absence of the spirit. That is not to say that there are no wrong answers. There are always wrong answers, but we should not be so arrogant as to think our own personal preferences say anything about a work so alien to all of us. All one can do is pick a side and accept that no satisfactory conclusion to the matter is forthcoming. For my part, I have enjoyed this attempt at packaging the Iliad for someone like me, but I am content to look for entertainment elsewhere, and let Homer remain old and strange.