Some foreign-language words are untranslatable with single-word synonyms. Others can be translated in a few words, and some require even more space for clarification. Some of us are familiar with the currently hugely popular film "Odyssey" (Nolan) and that it was inspired by a recent, but not the latest, translation of the Greek epic the Odyssey. Emily Wilson's 2017 translation has sold more than a million copies since the film was released. Not only is the public on fire, but it's possible that a few people may choose to major in the classics if not ancient Greek or study ancient Greek on their own. A few among them may pursue the classics as a career in teaching and/or scholarship. Reading Homer in the original is the best way to experience his opus, after all, as an expert addressing a general audience recently noted when asked which translation is the best.
But my focus here is on the first adjective Homer applies to the hero of the Odyssey, Odysseus: polytropos. It appears in the first line to describe the as-yet unnamed man who will be the subject of the poem. The magisterial lexicon of ancient Greek to English, Lyddell and Scott's Greek-English Lexicon, supplies the first meaning as "much turned, much traveled, much wandering."
The Odyssey begins:
Tell me about the polytropos man, Muse, who greatly ...
My favorite translation of the Odyssey is in French prose, by the distinguished French scholar Victor Be/rard. His translation of polytropos in line one is "aux mille tours," literally, "of a thousand tricks/feats/skills, turns of mind." Note that I take all of the vocabulary Larousse's Dictionnaire moderne (an authoritative French-English lexicon) provides, not just one synonym, because all can apply to the hero of the poem.
But tour du monde means a traveling around the world, so that "traveled" can be added to the connotations. It is important.
But we have not finished defining polytropos, and neither has Be/rard. The second and only other occurrence of this adjective in Homer is in Book 10 of the Odyssey (line 330), where the first adjective the nymph/sorceress Kirke applies to Odysseus when she recognizes who he is is polytropos. The god Hermes had prophesied to her of his upcoming visit and moreover supplies the hero with the herb moly, which shields him from Kirke's magic spell that turns his crew into swine. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. At this line Be'rard translates the adjective as aux mille ruses, "of a thousand artifices." This also accurately refers to the hero. Other meanings of these two French adjectives coincide.
Speaking of Hermes, in the Homeric hymn to this god, the first adjective ascribed to him after birth is polytropos, which H. G. Evelyn-White translates as "of many shifts." The next adjective applied to the neonate is haimulometen, which Evelyn-White translates as "blandly cunning." Polytropos occurs once more in the hymn to describe the god, at line 439, where it is translated as "resourceful." Other words are stacked in this hymn to describe Hermes and many can apply to Odysseus as well. But these three appearances are the only ones of this adjective in the Homeric corpus (which encompasses the two epics plus the 33 hymns to the gods). It seems coincidental, if not purposeful, that polytropos is the first descriptor of Odysseus twice and Hermes once, also emphatically first, the moment of his birth! This might indeed be purposeful and will reward further analysis. I have since learned that Hermes is a distant forebear of Odysseus, supposedly maternal great-grandfather, from a reddit post whose source I don't know.
And so, M. Be/rard has ultimately defined polytropos as "of a thousand tricks/feats/skills, turns of mind/[travels]/artifices." I think he's nailed it.
And now I turn to the erudition of Gemini, which I've used above to provide me with the quotations from translations; I unfortunately don't own all of the ones cited. I asked Gemini to explore translations of the Odyssey throughout all the languages of the world throughout time and to find the most exact, one-word, presumably a compound, translation of polytropos. It found the German compound vielgewandt:
- Etymology: Viel (many) plus gewandt (from wenden, meaning "to turn"; modernly meaning agile, skilled, or versatile).
- At 1.1 and 10.330: It beautifully preserves the literal "many turns" while carrying both definitions. It means both "one who has turned around the world a lot" (much-traveled) and "one who can turn his mind to any situation" (resourceful and quick-witted).
Gemini told me that the source of this amazing word was Johann Heinrich Voss, the father of German Homeric translation, in the 1793 version of the Odyssey. His first, 1981, translation used vielgewanderten, "much traveled," but he advanced to vielgewandtbecause it incorporates the cerebrality detailed above.
The very first translator into English of the Odyssey is the renowned George Chapman. His (1615) translation of polytropos is the periphrastic "many a way / Wound with his wisdom."
In a future post I can list other takes on polytropos. With all due respect to the brilliant tradition. and the many other interpretations, I think I've culled the best ones, those that best absorb the several connotations of polytropos: imho, of course!
