Sing to me of the line turned thrice.

When Homer calls Ulysses polytropos, he conjures a man of many turns—clever, wayward, folded in on himself. But I think of the line itself: turned once, then again, and again.

This series takes its name from that multiplicity—because I, too, am reading each line far more than once. A minimum of three times, actually: English (Murray), French (Bérard), and the original Greek. The goal is not to triangulate a single meaning, but to feel the pressure points, the fault lines where interpretation shifts. The line becomes a hinge, a thing that can bear weight because it bends. Tritropic is about following that movement: reading with the grain, against, and across it.

I start at the question of beginnings. To open something well—an argument, a poem, a conversation—is to create a direction; it prepares the reader for movement without determining the destination. This is the art I want to think about: how an opening invites us in. What is foregrounded, what is sacrificed: what choices author and translator (perhaps a false distinction) are forced to negotiate.

So this is the first go. Tritropic starts from no thesis, but instead a posture: curious, slant, slightly off-center. Like Ulysses on the shore, this is always arriving, always about to depart.

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Introduction

Let’s begin with an overview of the three versions and their respective approaches to opening the Odyssey—what each one foregrounds, what gets relegated to the background. From there, we’ll move into close readings of selected lines and phrases to ground the analysis. Finally, we’ll wrap up with a reflection on the interpretive choices each version makes.

Overview

I chose these translations for fidelity rather than flourish. I’ve read more poetic renditions of the Odyssey before—this January, I listened to Emily Wilson’s iambic pentameter version, particularly relishing the experience of orality—and enjoyed them greatly. But since my aim here is to learn both Epic Greek and modern French precisely, I sought translations that hew closely to the original line structure. The occasional flourish is still present, of course, but ideally these embellishments echo Homer’s own style, rather than showcasing the translator’s innovations.

1. Greek (Homer): Epic immediacy and economy. The poem begins mid-thought without naming Odysseus, as if the story is already in motion. The identity of the hero is constructed through epithet and action, not personal detail. Syntax, too, reflects this: the Muse is invoked not in isolation but embedded within the sentence, mid-line, as part of the narrative’s machinery rather than as ornament. The structure is tightly coiled, balancing compression with clarity. It prioritizes movement, ethos, and a certain moral ambiguity: the line blames the men’s deaths on their own actions, but doesn’t dwell on it. The register is neutral, even austere. It’s less about grandeur than narrative pressure.

ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ
πλάγχθη, ἐπεὶ Τροίης ἱερὸν πτολίεθρον ἔπερσεν:
πολλῶν δ᾽ ἀνθρώπων ἴδεν ἄστεα καὶ νόον ἔγνω,
πολλὰ δ᾽ ὅ γ᾽ ἐν πόντῳ πάθεν ἄλγεα ὃν κατὰ θυμόν,
ἀρνύμενος ἥν τε ψυχὴν καὶ νόστον ἑταίρων. (5)
ἀλλ᾽ οὐδ᾽ ὣς ἑτάρους ἐρρύσατο, ἱέμενός περ:
αὐτῶν γὰρ σφετέρῃσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν ὄλοντο,
νήπιοι, οἳ κατὰ βοῦς Ὑπερίονος Ἠελίοιο
ἤσθιον: αὐτὰρ ὁ τοῖσιν ἀφείλετο νόστιμον ἦμαρ.
τῶν ἁμόθεν γε, θεά, θύγατερ Διός, εἰπὲ καὶ ἡμῖν. (10)

2. French (Bérard): Elevated, rhetorical, almost ceremonial. The anaphoric structure builds rhythm and stature, layering Odysseus’s identity through a litany of actions. He’s gradually evoked, perhaps even summoned, through his deeds and suffering. The effect is reverent, with an undertone of moral reflection. Where Homer enters mid-thought, Bérard expands the opening, giving it space and resonance. It feels less like a launch and more like an unveiling.

C’est l’Homme aux mille tours, Muse, qu’il faut me dire—celui qui tant erra quand, de Troade, il eut pillé la ville sainte; celui qui visita les cités de tant d’hommes et connut leur esprit; celui qui, sur les mers, passa par tant d’angoisses, en luttant pour survivre et ramener ses gens. Hélas! même à ce prix, tout son désir ne put sauver son équipage: ils ne durent la mort qu’à leur propre sottise, ces fous qui, du Soleil, avaient mangé les bœufs; c’est lui, le Fils d’En Haut, qui raya de leur vie la journée du retour. Viens, ô fille de Zeus, nous dire, à nous aussi, quelqu’un de ces exploits.

3. English (Murray): Spare, formal, and slightly distanced. Murray often mirrors the Greek more directly, especially in structure and sequence, but smooths out its syntactic tension. The tone is restrained, almost academic—archival rather than evocative. This is a translation written for sense, not sensation. Compared to Bérard, it holds back emotionally, but gains a kind of angular precision. It doesn’t call attention to itself, but allows the structure of the Greek to show through in quiet outline.

Tell me, Muse, of the man of many devices, driven far astray after he had sacked the sacred citadel of Troy. Many were the men whose cities he saw and whose minds he learned, and many the woes he suffered in his heart upon the sea, seeking to win his own life and the return of his comrades. Yet even so he did not save his comrades, for all his desire, for through their own blind folly they perished fools, who devoured the cattle of Helios Hyperion; whereupon he took from them the day of their returning. Of these things, goddess, daughter of Zeus, beginning where you will, tell us in our turn.

Close Readings

1. πολύτροπος and its discontents

We have no choice but to begin with the very first phrase—so thoroughly debated and reinterpreted throughout Homeric scholarship. I want to focus on the word πολύτροπον (polytropon), and how Murray and Bérard each handle it. Murray uses “the man of many devices,” while Bérard chooses l’Homme aux mille tours—“the man of a thousand tricks” or “turns,” with tours carrying the connotation of sleight-of-hand, deception, or magical illusion. Both gesture toward resourcefulness, but neither quite captures the full semantic range of the Greek. More critically, both seem to assume a certain foreknowledge of Odysseus’s character—baking in the idea that he is clever or crafty from the outset, rather than allowing that identity to emerge gradually.

Let’s briefly review the three primary senses of πολύτροπος. First, there’s the literal reading: “much turned” or “widely traveled”—someone who has been spun about by experience or circumstance. Second, we have the metaphorical sense: “turning many ways,” with its implications of cunning or adaptability—this is the sense Murray and Bérard both foreground. Finally, there’s a broader, more abstract reading: “varied,” “manifold,” or “complex,” which Emily Wilson interestingly captures with her rendering: “Tell me about a complicated man.”

My view is that we are not yet supposed to know Odysseus is wily. Rather, the poem opens with a quality that invites interpretation—ambiguous enough to resonate differently as the narrative unfolds. The word sets up a possibility, one that the story gradually confirms, refines, and occasionally challenges. The opening line becomes a touchstone for the question of who Odysseus really is—and how we come to know him.

That’s why, as compelling as l’Homme aux mille tours is, it risks being too definitive, overly revealing. But this is the dilemma: no single word in English or French captures all three senses of πολύτροπος without tipping the translator’s hand. A phrase suggesting “much turned about” would arguably be more faithful to the line’s ambiguity and the shape of the sentence as a whole. But the translator is constrained by the target language’s limitations—by the impossibility of fully conveying the layered meanings carried by one word in the original. This, in turn, raises fascinating questions about what a translator should do when faced with a linguistic and semantic compression that resists clean transfer.

2. Anaphora of Celui qui

Bérard’s most striking structural departure from Homer is his use of anaphora: the repeated phrase “Celui qui…” (“he who…”), which appears three times in quick succession. This repetition is entirely absent from the Greek, which presents Odysseus’s identity in a single, flowing participial phrase. Bérard, by contrast, builds Odysseus slowly and ceremonially—almost liturgically—through a catalogue of trials. The effect is grand, formal, and reverent: Odysseus is not simply introduced, but elevated, summoned through a rhythmic invocation of his feats. Each “Celui qui…” functions like a rung on a ladder, progressively constructing the man through his actions and sufferings. It slows the tempo of the opening and foregrounds the translator’s interpretive stance: this is not an epic dropped into mid-action, but a hero’s life laid out for consideration. In doing so, Bérard shifts the invocation from Homer’s abrupt immediacy to something closer to an unveiling. We are asked not simply to listen to a tale, but to witness an emergence.

3. Le Fils d’En Haut vs Helios Hyperion

Another departure comes in the form of Bérard’s rendering of Helios Hyperion, the Sun God whose sacred cattle the crew consumed. Where Homer gives us Ὑπερίονος Ἠελίοιο—a doubling of name and epithet that emphasizes divine lineage and radiant power—Bérard offers a striking paraphrase: le Fils d’En Haut, “the Son of the One Above” or “the Son from on High.” While not a direct equivalent, this phrase preserves the sense of elevated origin and distance, reframing Helios less as a named deity and more as a remote, celestial force. The capitalization of En Haut subtly enhances this effect, suggesting a kind of cosmic authority. The result is a tone that feels more solemn, even vaguely moralizing, than the Greek, which names Helios with mythic familiarity. Bérard’s version trades specificity for grandeur, shifting us from epic genealogy to something abstract and severe.

The original suggests a cosmic, almost elemental force—Helios as a being of grandeur and consequence, but not necessarily judgment. Bérard’s phrasing, by contrast, injects a sense of moral authority and divine retribution. It subtly shifts the register from epic cosmology to something more solemn and punitive, perhaps more familiar to modern readers raised in Abrahamic traditions. It’s a moment where fidelity bends toward resonance—and in doing so, reorients the ethical frame of the passage.

Conclusion

Taken together, these choices (lexical, structural, and tonal) reveal the translator’s position as co-creator. The opening of the Odyssey is a test of orientation. What kind of man is Odysseus? What kind of journey is this? And what kind of voice is being summoned to tell it? Each version answers those questions differently—by emphasizing character, or pacing, or cosmic justice—and in doing so, opens several paths at once. The line, turned thrice, doesn’t narrow but widens.

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And in this act of beginning—of turning the line three times—I’m also opening something in myself.

If you read the first Marginalia post, you know that I’ve long felt more at ease among the dead. Ancient languages have given me structure, distance, and safety: a world of forms I could move through silently, precisely, without the risk of mispronunciations. I called it intimacy, and it was. But it was also retreat.

Now, for the first time, I’m trying something different. I’m learning a living language to actually use it in my life. And I’m doing it by going to what I know best: texts I already love, structures I’ve long studied, lines I can trust to guide me. I’m approaching French from the inside out, trying to inhabit it the way I first dwelled in Latin: structurally, curiously, joyfully.

This attempt is a kind of bridge for me: between ancient and modern, dead and living, silence and sound. That’s what this Tritropic project is, at heart: not just about literacy, but about vocalizing too. I don’t know where this will go. But I’m here, at the opening, bent toward what comes next.