Richard Seibert

Translator

Twenty-five years ago I cracked the spine of a “new” translation of an old classic, the Iliad. The Classics are classic for a reason: they are never old, but are always new. It inspired me to go back to Homer’s original text and tease out one of the epic’s many threads. One of many theories spawned by the “Homeric Question” is that the Iliad and Odyssey were cobbled together from earlier folk tales into the monumental epics that we have today. I imagined a Lay of Helen and cut out the scenes where Helen appears and recast them in a more modern English lyric voice.

I was working with Peter Koch at the time, and he saw my early efforts come tumbling out of the laser printer. He flattered me with a request to publish them when I finished. One of Peter’s geniuses is for bringing people together. This is how I met Winifred, he paired us up to work together as a duet. Words are good as far as words go, but there are places where words cannot go. Picturing the drama reveals nuance in the story which words are insufficient to tell. By telling the tale twice, once in the lines of the poem, and again in the lines of the drawings, a broader range of feeling is explored.

Epics traditionally begin not at the beginning, but smack dab in the middle, and they do not so much end as they just trail off; they pause until the next bard picks up the song again. This is what we humans do: we tell stories and paint pictures of and for each other. We twine the unending flow of our individual thoughts and feelings into a ceaseless succession of song and picture. This doubled strand then tangles with another double helix, the one that is twisting though us.

The alphabet is another natal cord mirroring the one that runs through us. The mnemonic of letters, words, sentences and books are twisted with another thread, the lineage of craft: type-founder, paper- maker, compositor, artist, printer, and finally, in a last step before the reader, the bookbinder who ties the whole package up in a neat little bundle.

Twenty-five years ago, or twenty-five hundred years ago, we are all singing the same song we started two hundred and fifty thousand years ago. We are, each of us, all of us, twisted together, and working toward one weave of culture, like Helen at her loom.