I am translating Homer’s Iliad into epic hexameter verse in English, and publishing it here on my site. Epic hexameter (also called dactylic hexameter) is the verse form of the original text in Ancient Greek. In this form, each line consists of six metrical feet, where each of the first five feet can either be a dactyl (BAH-bah-bah) or a spondee (BAH-BAH), and the final foot must be a spondee. The English equivalent of this fundamentally Greek meter was pioneered by Longfellow in his narrative poem Evangeline. It has two notable differences from the Greek: first, whereas Greek meter is “quantitative” (that is, based on syllable length), English meter is “qualitative” (based on syllable stress); second, in English we allow a trochee (BAH-bah) in place of a spondee, which gives the rhythm just enough freedom for natural language patterns to fit into the epic meter.

As an example of epic hexameter verse in English, consider the first six lines of Longfellow’s Evangeline:

This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,
Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.
Loud from its rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neighboring ocean
Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest.

Here I have highlighted (in bold) the first (always stressed) syllable in each metrical foot. Note that there are always six metrical feet in each line, and the first (stressed) syllable in each foot is followed either by one stressed syllable, or one or two unstressed syllables. The first syllable of the final foot in each line is always followed by one syllable (stressed or unstressed). If we replace the words of the first four lines with “beats,” it reads something like:

BAH bah bah BAH-bah bah-BAH-bah | bah BAH-bah-bah BAH bah bah BAH-BAH
BAH-bah bah BAH | bah bah BAH-bah BAH | bah-bah-BAH bah bah BAH-bah |
BAH BAH BAH-bah bah BAH | bah BAH-bah BAH bah bah-BAH-bah |
BAH BAH BAH-bah BAH | bah BAH bah BAH bah bah BAH-bah

where “BAH” is a stressed syllable, “bah” is an unstressed syllable, and “|” indicates a caesura (that is, a slight pause). I have used hyphens to tie together syllables that belong to a word. We can note a few things, even in this one example. First, the meter is not imposed on the language; rather, the natural way to speak the words fits into the meter. If the sentence sounds awkward when read in the correct meter, then the poet has failed. That said, there are often multiple ways to speak the same sentence. Longfellow’s first line reads like an answer to the question, “What is the forest primeval?”:

“This is the forest primeval.”

But consider how you would speak an answer to the question, “Is this the forest primeval?”:

“This is the forest primeval.”

Same sentence, different emphasis. Thus, while the meter should not be imposed on the language, it may impose a particular emphasis, which can be used to control the sense of the words (in the same way a prose writer might use italics to indicate a particular emphasis, as above).

The second thing to note is that the epic meter, while restrictive, allows a great degree of variation, which can be used for various effects. Not only can the stress patterns be varied within the constraints of the meter, but pauses (caesurae) can be inserted more or less at will by the poet, as long as the metrical form is undisturbed. The flow of the epic hexameter can roll like the ocean:

shadowy mountains loom, | and the bellowing ocean surges.

Iliad I.157

It can stretch with long days, or fall with intermittent pattering like arrows:

Nine days long | did the arrows of god rain down on the army;

Iliad I.53

Or it can spill out across the line like a flood, then pulse like throbbing feet, then gallop like horses’ hooves:

flooding onto the plain of the River Scamander; | the whole ground
throbbed beneath their feet | and thumped with the hooves of the horses.

Iliad II.465-466

In the best metrical verse, the meter guides the action of the poem, and the action guides the meter in turn. As Alexander Pope (another translator of Homer) famously puts it, “The sound must seem an echo to the sense.” This is the way I aspire to use meter in my translation.

A few other things to note: Longfellow can get away with awkward inversions (“forest primeval” instead of “primeval forest,” “garments green” instead of “green garments”) because he is writing in the nineteenth century, when that was the norm in poetry. Today, inversions can sound archaic and stuffy. Though the register of Homer can range from low to high to epic, I try to write in plausibly natural English as much as possible. This is not to say that I write in exactly the way people speak: the gods and generals in Homer do not often speak the way people speak in real life. But their English should still not sound contorted by the meter, or archaic, or awkward, or phony. If I use an inversion, it is not to suit the meter but to alter the tone of the sentence. For instance, consider these words spoken by Agamemnon about Achilles:

Well, so what if the gods everlasting have made him a spearman?
That doesn’t give him the right to hurl his slurs and abuses!

Iliad I.290-291

The inverted phrase “gods everlasting” reads like a religious heightening of the language, but in context it is almost satirical—one can imagine, in a Christian context, a similar use of the inverted phrase “God almighty” (“So what if God almighty made you smart? That doesn’t mean you get to be a smartass.”). I didn’t invert the phrase for the meter (I could have used “deathless gods” instead of “gods everlasting,” and the meter would have fared just as well), but for the tone.

Finally, I’ll note that if the epic hexameter is Homer’s bread, repetition is his butter. While it’s not feasible for a translator to capture literally every instance of repetition in the Iliad (linguistic, metrical, or contextual differences may allow for a repetition in Greek that cannot reasonably be emulated in English), I am trying as much as possible to capture the repetition inherent in the original Greek, whether that be stock phrases, epithets attached to the names of characters and places, or entire passages repeated wholesale from other parts of the poem. As with the meter, repetition is not used lazily in Homer. Often, a repeated word or phrase is used in very different contexts, highlighting different meanings of the same phrases. The same epithets may be applied to quite different characters, inviting the attentive reader to consider the characters together. And sometimes a phrase is repeated with small omissions or insertions or changes in vocabulary, so that meaning is conveyed in the differences between repeated lines.

I’ll add more of my translation here as I go. You can link to it above. In each section of the text, you can also click the link labeled “Scansion” to show my translation with the first syllables of metrical feet highlighted in bold (as I have done above for Longfellow’s poem), or you can click “Greek” to switch to the Ancient Greek text. My translation matches roughly line by line with the Greek, though not rigidly so; in some cases, words may have migrated to neighboring lines, or neighboring lines may have been swapped entirely. Though I hew pretty close to Homer, my goal here is not to create a scholarly translation, or a translation for students of Ancient Greek to learn by. My goal is to create a poem in English that resonates with the Ancient Greek—a poem that can be read aloud in the epic meter, so native speakers of English can get at least a hint of what it might have been like to listen to Homer in a crowd over two millennia ago.