Like a bolt of lightning striking a tree, The Iliad of Homer set my cranium alight when its sheer incantatory power first washed over me. It's an astonishing work, brutal and violent, while at the same time deeply affecting, brimming with incisive insights into human nature.


Odysseus and crew, having taken precautions to not be lured by the Sirens' song, sail past them.

Homer's subsequent epic poem I was less enraptured by because of its lack of focus, even though it is unquestionable that it represents a high-water mark in the Western canon; its qualities as a narrative - and influence - can't be overstated. Similar to Odysseus, I was fervently hoping for a homecoming of some kind ( in my case back in the hands of the master poet ) but the return gave credence to the age-old adage that you truly never can come home again. That first, visceral contact spoiled me, proved to be much too potent for The Odyssey ever to be able to compete with.


Odysseus reveals himself and deals with the suitors.

Do I love it? No, but I coldly admire it from a distance, and as such hold it in great respect. More than likely I'll never get to a point of "intimacy" with it, in a manner of speaking.

Expansive reviews of this and The Iliad of Homer will probably follow in the future, when I decide on re-reading them, probably in different translations from the Richmond Lattimore one (which I highly recommend, especially for the latter).

Οδύσσεια = The Odyssey, Homer

The Odyssey begins after the end of the ten-year Trojan War (the subject of the Iliad), and Odysseus has still not returned home from the war because he angered the god Poseidon.

Odysseus' son Telemachus is about 20 years old and is sharing his absent father's house on the island of Ithaca with his mother Penelope and a crowd of 108 boisterous young men, "the Suitors", whose aim is to persuade Penelope to marry one of them, all the while reveling in Odysseus' palace and eating up his wealth. ...

The Odyssey Characters: Odysseus, Penelope, Helen of Troy, Achilles, Agamemnon, Telemachus, Minerva, Polyphemus

عنوانهای چاپ شده در ایران: «ادیسه»؛ «اودیسه»؛ اثر: هومر؛ تاریخ نخستین خوانش سال 1973میلادی

عنوان: ادیسه؛ اثر: هومر؛ مترجم: سعید نفیسی؛ تهران، بنگاه ترجمه و نشر، 1337؛ چاپ دوم 1344؛ چاپ سوم 1349؛ در 576ص؛ چاپ چهارم سال 1359؛ موضوع: اساطیر یونانی از نویسندگان یونان - سده هشتم پیش از میلاد

ترجمه روانشاد «سعید نفیسی» با عنوان «اودیسه» نیز چاپ شده است

یکی از دو کتاب کهنسال و اشعار حماسی «یونان»، اثر «هومر» در سده ی هشتم پیش از میلاد است؛ این کتاب همچون «ایلیاد»، به صورت مجموعه‌ ای از سرودها گردآوری شده، اما شیوه ی روایت آن با «ایلیاد» تفاوت دارد؛ «ادیسه»، سرگذشت بازگشت یکی از سران جنگ «تروآ»، «ادیسیوس» یا «الیس» فرمانروای «ایساکا» است؛ در آن سفر، که بیش از بیست سال، به درازا می‌انجامد، ماجراهای بسیاری، برای وی و همراهانش پیش میآید؛ در نهایت «ادیسیوس»، که همگان گمان می‌کردند کشته شده، به وطن خود باز گشته، و دست متجاوزان را از سرزمین، و زن و فرزند خود کوتاه می‌کند، «ادیسه» در این داستان ماجراهای بسیاری دارد؛ او در جنگ با «تروآ» تصمیم می‌گیرد، اسبی از جنس چوب، و بسیار بزرگ بسازد، و با حیله اسب را به عنوان هدیه ی صلح و آشتی، وارد قلعه «تروآ» بکند؛ او خود و افرادش، در داخل اسب پنهان میشوند، تا بتوانند قلعه را تصرف کند؛ اما یک پیشگو، پادشاه «تروآ» را، از بردن اسب به داخل قلعه منع می‌کند، و «پوسایدون» فرمانروای قدرتمند دریا، حیوان دست آموزش را می‌فرستد، تا پیشگو را هلاک کند؛ پادشاه «تروآ»، سرانجام اسب را داخل قلعه می‌آورد، و شب هنگام «ادیسه» شبیخون زده؛ و قلعه را تصرف می‌کند؛ او با غرور می‌اندیشد که به تنهایی قلعه را تصرف کرده؛ «پوسایدون» خشمگین میشود، و «ادیسه» را محکوم می‌کند، تا ابد در دریا سرگردان بماند؛ «ادیسه» در کشتی خود در دریای بی‌انتها، به نفرین «پوسایدون» دچار می‌شود؛ دیری نمی‌گذرد، که به جزیره‌ ای می‌رسد؛ در آن جزیره، غاری پیدا می‌کند، که در آن غار غذای فراوانی وجود دارد؛ در غار با افرادش به عیش و نوش دلمشغول می‌شود؛ غافل از آنکه، صاحب غار، غولی یک چشم؛ بنام «پولیتیموس»، فرزند «پوسایدون» است؛ «پولیتیموس» یکی از افراد «ادیسه» را می‌خورد؛ و «ادیسه» با نیرنگ، معجون خواب آوری به او می‌خوراند، و سپس با چوبی که انتهای آن تیز است، در خواب غول را کور می‌کند؛ غول در حالیکه از درد فریاد می‌زند، سنگ عظیمی که غار را پوشانده، کنار می‌زند؛ و «ادیسه» و همراهانش فرار می‌کنند؛ «ادیسه» دوباره راهی دریا می‌شود، و برای برداشتن آب، به جزیره‌ ای پا می‌گذارد، در آن جزیره، با «آنوس» فرمانروای باد و طوفان، و پسرعموی «پوسایدون» برمی‌خورد؛ و «آنوس» به باد فرمان می‌دهد، که «ادیسه» را ظرف نه روز، به «ایساکا» زادگاهش برساند؛ و باد را داخل کیسه کرده، و به «ادیسه» می‌دهد؛ در راه، در حالیکه به «ایساکا» رسیده بودند، و «ادیسه» در خواب بود؛ افرادش به او خیانت کرده، و در کیسه را به امید یافتن طلا باز می‌کنند؛ اما طوفان حاصل از باد داخل کیسه، آنها را دوباره در جزیره‌ ای ناشناخته در دریا می‌برد؛ داستان ده سال از مسافرت «ادیسئوس» در بازگشت از جنگ «تروا» است؛

تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 14/07/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 11/06/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی

To this day, the most interesting research project that I’ve ever done was the very first. It was on the Homeric Question.

I was a sophomore in college—a student with (unfortunate) literary ambitions who had just decided to major in anthropology. By this point, I had at least tacitly decided that I wanted to be a professor. In my future lay the vast and unexplored ocean of academia. What was the safest vessel to travel into that forbidden wine-dark sea? Research.

I signed up for a reading project with an anthropology professor. Although I was too naïve to sense it at the time, he was a man thoroughly sick of his job. Lucky for him, he was on the cusp of retirement. So his world-weariness manifested itself as a total, guilt-free indifference to his teaching duties. Maybe that’s why I liked him so much. I envied a man that could apparently care so little about professional advancement. That’s what I wanted.

In any case, now I had to come up with a research topic. I had just switched into the major, and so had little idea what typical anthropology research projects were like. And because my advisor was so indifferent, I received no guidance from him. The onus lay entirely on me. One night, as I groped half-heartedly through Wikipedia pages, I stumbled on something fascinating, something that I hadn’t even considered before.

Who is Homer? Nobody knew. Nobody could know. The man—if man he was—was lost to the abyss of time. No trace of him existed. We can’t even pin down what century he lived. And yet, we have these glorious poems—poems at the center of our history, the roots of the Western literary canon. Stories of the Greek Gods had fascinated me since my childhood; Zues and Athena were as familiar as Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf. That the person (or persons) responsible could be so totally lost to history baffled me—intrigued me.

But I was not majoring in literature or the humanities. I was in anthropology, and so had to do a proper anthropological project. At the very least, I needed an angle.

Milman Parry and Albert Lord duly provided this angle. The two men were classicists—scholars of ancient Greece. But instead of staying in their musty offices reading dusty manuscripts, they did something no classicist had done before: they attempted to answer the Homeric question with field work.

At the time (and perhaps now?) a vibrant oral tradition existed in Serbo-Croatia. Oral poets (guslars, they’re called there) would tell massive stories at public gatherings, some stories even approaching the length of the Homeric poems. But what was most fascinating was that these stories were apparently improvised.

In our decadent culture, we have a warped idea of improvisation. Many of us believe improvisation to be the spontaneous outflowing of creative energies, manifesting themselves in something totally new. Like God shaping the Earth out of the infinite void, these imaginary improvisers shape their art from nothing whatsoever. Unfortunately, this never happens.

Whether you’re a jazz saxophonist playing on a Coltrane tune, a salesperson dealing with a new client, or an oral bard telling a tale, improvisation is done via a playful recombining of preexisting, formulaic elements. This was Milman and Parry’s great discovery. By carefully transcribing hundreds of these Serbo-Croation poems, they discovered that—although a single poem may vary from person to person, place to place, or performance to performance—the variation took place within predictable boundaries.

The poet’s brains were full of stock-phrases (“when dawn with her rose-red fingers shone once more”), common epithets (“much-enduring Odysseus”), and otherwise formulaic verses that allowed them to quickly put together their poems. Individual scenes, in turn, also followed stereotypical outlines—feasts, banquets, catalogues of forces, battles, athletic contests, etc. Of course, this is not to say that the poet was not original. Rather, it is to say that they are just as original as John Coltrane or Charlie Parker—individuals working within a tradition. These formulas and stereotypical scenes were the raw material with which the poet worked. They allowed him to compose material quickly enough to keep up the performance, and not break his rhythm.

But could poems as long as The Odyssey and The Iliad come wholly from an oral tradition? It seems improbable: it would take multiple days to recite, and the bard would have to pick up where he left off. But Milman and Parry, during their fieldwork, managed to put our fears at rest. They found a singer that could (and did) compose poems equal in length to Homer’s. (I actually read one. It’s called The Wedding of Smailagic Meho, and was recited by a poet named Avdo. It’s no Odyssey, but still entertaining.)

All this is impressive, but one question remained: how could the oral poems get on paper? Did an oral poet—Homer, presumably—learn to write, and copy it down? Not possible, says Alfred Lord, in his book The Singer of Tales. According to him, once a person becomes literate, the frame of mind required to learn the art of oral poetry cannot be achieved. A literate person thinks of language in an entirely different way as a non-literate one, and so the poems couldn’t have been written by a literate poet who had learned from his oral predecessors.

According to Lord, this left only one option: Homer must have been a master oral poet, and his poems must have been transcribed by someone else. (This is how the aforementioned poem by Avdo was taken down by the researchers.) At the time, this struck me as perfectly likely—indeed, almost certain. But the more I think about it, the less I can imagine an oral poet submitting himself to sit with a scribe, writing in the cumbersome Linear B script, for the dozens and dozens of hours it would have taken to transcribe these poems. It’s possible, but seems unlikely.

But according to Ruth Finnegan, Alfred Lord’s insistence that literacy destroys the capacity to improvise poems is mistaken. An anthropologist, Finnegan found many cases in Africa of semi-literate or fully literate people who remained capable of improvising poetry. So it’s at least equally possible that Homer was an oral poet who learned to read, and then decided to commit the poems to paper (or whatever they were writing on back then).

I submit this longwinded overview of the Homeric Question because, despite my usual arrogance, I cannot even imagine writing a ‘review’ for this poem. I feel like that would be equivalent to ‘reviewing’ one’s own father and mother. For me, and everyone alive in the Western world today, The Odyssey is flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood. Marvelously sophisticated, fantastically exciting, it is the alpha and omega of our tradition. From Homer we sprang, and unto Homer shall we return.

[Note: I'd also like to add that this time, my third or forth time through the poem, I decided to go through it via audiobook. Lucky for me, the Fagles translation (a nice one if you're looking for readability) is available as an audiobook, narrated by the great Sir Ian McKellen. It was a wonderful experience, not only because Sir Ian has such a beautiful voice (he's Gandalf, after all), but because hearing it read rather than reading it recreated, however dimly, the original experience of the poem: as a performance. I highly recommend it.]

I appreciated The Odyssey when I read it in college - especially after decoding the ornate, padded stanzas with the help of a class. But this reading was totally different! Emily Wilson's new crystal-clear translation and Claire Danes' audio interpretation create an electrifying experience. And so suspenseful! I glided through this book (or rather walked, cleaned and drove). It seems to me that this is the way Homer is meant to be read - oral poetry delivered straight to the heart. I did have the print book on hand, thinking I might need it, but only referred to it at the end, for the excellent introduction and translator's note.

Before buying a copy of this (Richard Lattimore's translation, fyi) in a secondhand bookstore, I had a passing familiarity with The Odyssey. My introduction to the story, as was the case with a lot of classic literature, was provided by the PBS show Wishbone (you have not lived until you've seen a Jack Russell terrier in a toga firing an arrow through twelve axe heads, trust me on this). Then in high school, one of my English classes read some selections from the poem - I remember reading the Cyclops part, and the stuff about Scylla and Charybdis, and I think also the stuff with Circe. But I had never read the entire story as a whole before now, and a couple things surprised me:

-First, like The Iliad, the timeframe of the story is actually very brief. The majority of the action - basically everything that happens to Odysseus right after leaving Troy - occurs as a flashbacks, told by Odysseus to his hosts after he washes up near his home after nine years. The majority of his adventures are recounted by him, rather thane being seen firsthand by the reader. And now that I think about it, that suggests that the majority of the quintessential action of The Odyssey - Cyclops, the sea monsters, Circe, Calypso, etc - might not have actually happened at all. Odysseus is constantly making up stories in the poem, mainly to protect his identity, but the stories he makes up are so detailed, and so similar to the rest of the adventures that he assures his audience really did happen, that I'm just now starting to wonder if maybe Odysseus just invented all of those adventures to explain why he was gone for ten years. For all we know, he spent the entire decade shacked up with Calypso and realized that he'd have to come up with a better reason for never writing. Thinking about it, I totally believe that he would do this, because honestly...

-Odysseus is kind of a dick. First there's the fact that he makes a big deal about how he was able to resist the charms of Calypso ("It was awful, Penelope! She kept trying to get me to marry her, but I was a good husband and so I just fucked her brains out for three years!") and then goes and murders the twelve maids who were stupid enough to sleep with/get raped by Penelope's suitors - but I knew about all of that already, and was prepared for it. What I wasn't prepared for, as hinted at above, was the fact that Odysseus seems to be a pathological liar. He technically had a reason to lie about his identity when he was making his way home - because, I don't know, the suitors might actually leave his wife alone when they found out that Odysseus was alive? - but he also tells these elaborate lies for no reason. At the end of the poem, after he's (spoiler!) killed all the suitors, he goes to visit his father to tell him that he's not dead. He finds his father, and since his dad doesn't recognize him, Odysseus is like, "Hi there! I'm so-and-so, and I knew your son. He came to visit me and told me all about his awesome adventures - hell of a guy, by the way - but then I heard that he died in battle or something. But he was really brave and really awesome" and then his dad starts crying and then Odysseus is like "AAH!I GOT YOU! I'm really Odysseus, I'm alive and everything. Oh man, you should have seen your face!" What the hell, man? What was the purpose of that?

-I realized while reading this that The Iliad hadn't really covered what happened to Helen after Troy was destroyed. I'd always assumed that she had been killed, but then, during The Odyssey, Telemachos is traveling to Sparta to find out if anyone's heard from his dad in the past seven years or whatever, and he goes to see Menelaus, and Helen's totally there, serving dinner and being like, "Hi sweetie! Remember that time you had to murder thousands of people and destroy a city because I was a shameless whore? That was so sweet of you. You're the best!" and I felt so bad for her.

Really enjoyed this new translation very much.
4.5*

I first read Homer in the 19th-century French translation by Leconte de Lisle — the equivalent, say, of the 18th-century translation into English by Alexander Pope: a pompous, archaic and exhausting bore of a book. I kept my chin up and, after a while, tried another inflated Frenchman: the 1955 translation by the curly-moustached Victor Bérard (in the prestigious Pléiade edition, with an odd arrangement of chapters). A bit less depraved than the Parnassian poet, but all in all (alack!) not much better. Only last year came this new English translation by Emily Wilson, an American academic and allegedly the first woman to translate Homer into English. And it is a damned refreshing take on Homer! Basically, it’s the first time I’m reading The Odyssey without dozing off on every other page.

Yet, Wilson laid down a daunting challenge to herself: to keep the same number of verses as in Homer’s epic and transpose the Greek’s dactylic hexameters into the traditional (Shakespearian) iambic pentameter. An amazing feat indeed, and she pulled it off with ease, concealing, like an expert weaver, the technicalities of her achievement and dodging some of the ponderousness of the Homeric text (not least of which: the grinding epithets attached to each character or some awkward similes that pop up from time to time): the result is an unaffected, luminous poem, sometimes energetic, sometimes delicate, that flows effortlessly, focusing our attention not on some turgid, embalming, purple prose, but on what is actually at stake in the story, and on the beat of the tale.

A few things become glaringly apparent thanks to this new translation: Odysseus is not quite the wise and glorious war hero that we might think. As Wilson states in her opening verse, he is “a complicated man” (πολuτροπον), who messes around with everyone he encounters and talks rubbish on every occasion; in short: he is an inveterate liar. So much so that, in the end, he could easily qualify as the first case of “unreliable narrator”. Most notably, when he is invited to the court of Alcinous and tells the story of his misadventures after the Trojan War — the famous embedded and somewhat fantastical tale (books 9-12) of the Cicones, Lotus-Eaters, Cyclopes, Aeolus, Laestrygonians, Circe, Helios, the dead, the Sirens, Charybdis and Scylla and Calypso —, we cannot help but wonder to what extent Odysseus is making up all this, to entertain his generous hosts. Later on, Odysseus will tell a completely different account of his adventures to other people, or a strongly expurgated version of the first tale to his own wife, misrepresenting himself to her. In short, he is indeed a consummated storyteller — a shining mask for the rhapsodist himself?

If The Iliad is the grandfather of pretty much all literature, then The Odyssey is the grandmother: Aeneas, Sindbad, Gulliver, Robinson, Pym, Ahab, Nemo, Marlow are all descendants of Odysseus; Hamlet is a sort of echo of Telemachus; Excalibur is an ersatz of Odysseus’ mighty bow; James Joyce’s Dublin is a Homeric town. We might wonder, however, why Odysseus’ adventures have become such a significant source of inspiration for writers and scholars who claim to be feminists, like Emily Wilson, of course, but also recently Madeline Miller, with her best-seller Circe, and a few years ago, Margaret Atwood and her Penelopiad.

Clearly, most characters in The Odyssey express a form of mistrust towards the opposite sex: men believe women to be either nosy sluts or demi-hags; women would rather turn men into pigs or captives than actually deal with them. Even the fair queen Penelope — the only character on the level and the antithesis of the treacherous and fiendish Clytemnestra — is actually just as deceptive, weaving and unweaving her crewelwork to avoid standing up to the wolfish suitors. That being said, let’s save the old nanny Eurycleia, if you insist... But, after all, isn’t this gender suspiciousness at the heart of feminism? It is notable, by the way, that although Odysseus looks like the paragon of manliness and a confirmed skirt-chaser (Penelope, Circe, Calypso, Nausicaa), the fact of the matter is that he is either the punchbag of Poseidon (a male god) or a puppet in the hands of the goddess Athena (a female), who transforms him at will, stultifies his enemies and makes him the pin-up of every girl he encounters. I will confess: in this old tale, men are, at best, a bit ridiculous and irritating — if not “complicated”.

To top it all off, the Odyssey is, at its heart, a tale of extreme violence. I’m not just thinking of the savagery of Polyphemus, the Laestrygonians or Scylla, all blood-thirsty monsters who decimate Odysseus’ crewmen. I’m thinking of Odysseus himself, probably the most blood-thirsty character in the whole poem. In fact, instead of coming back home as the one true king of Ithaca and properly claim back his throne and wife in a straightforward manner, he chooses (or instead follows Athena’s plan) to approach the suitors under the guise of a despicable old beggar, puts the devil in them — curses, insults and stools fly back and forth across the saloon on every page — and, when the time is ripe, gets into a shooting spree, slaughters the suitors pitilessly one by one (they are a bunch of more than a hundred dudes!), and tortures atrociously whoever, herdsmen or slave girls alike, got mixed up with them. The Odyssey ends with a big spring cleaning in a merry bath of haemoglobin... Which begs a nagging question: seeing how he behaves, might Odysseus himself not have killed his crew at sea (perhaps to gobble them up, since he is such a gourmand of meatballs and shish kebabs?), and later on told all sorts of baloney about cyclops and shipwrecks to justify his situation?... Anyway, had Homer been working in Hollywood instead of Ancient Greece, he would indeed be on the same side as Peckinpah, Coppola, Scorsese and Tarantino!

And now, let’s wait for Emily Wilson to work her magic on The Iliad…

College Reading.

What amazes me about stories like this is how long it has been around. There are hundreds of generations who have read this and passed it down. This story has been around for thousands of years. To me, that is mind blowing. Truly.

I recently read 'Circe' that is taken from The Odyssey and The Iliad. The story has influenced much of literature in some way. This is the ultimate quest story.

I still have a hard time understanding a journey for 10 years. How your family would miss you. Cyclops, witches, Sirens, and more come from this story. I hope to re-read it some day.

The Journey Of The West

Homer's Odyssey is the prototypical "journey" of Western literature. The epic tells of the wanderings of the Greek hero Odysseus, King of Ithaca. Odysseus spent ten years with the Greeks at Troy (he is an important character in Homer's Iliad) and devised the strategem of the Trojan Horse which led to the fall of Troy. Following the fall of Troy, Odysseus wandered for ten years before his return to Ithaca. The Odyssey celebrates his trials during this long period and his ultimate vindication upon his return to Ithaca.

The Odyssey differs in tone and content from the Iliad. Simone Weil, a mid-20th century French writer, described the Iliad as the work of Western literature which best explored the use and limitations of force. Battle scenes, death, and the human cost and folly of war are realistically if heroically described. The Odyssey is more in the nature of romance. It surely has moments of grandeur and heroism, but its story is in the telling and in the journeying and in the adventures of Odysseus along the way.

The tale of the Iliad, and of Achilles' wrath, involves only a few days in the Trojan War and the poet of the Iliad recounts his story in a forward-moving chronology. The story is focused in that the main action takes place entirely in Troy and its environs. The Odyssey is much more diffuse, covering as it does the wanderings of Odysseus for ten years. The scene shifts frequently and the story is told with flashbacks and shifting tenses and locations. The bulk of the action (the last 12 books of the epic) occur in Ithaca after Odysseus returns home. These books are recounted in the voice of the poet. (Homer) The first four books of the Odyssey recount a smaller-scale journey of Telemachus, Odysseus's son, as he searches for news of his father and tries to avoid death at the hands of the suitors of Penelope who are plaguing Ithaca and plundering Odysseus's estate. (In addition, many of the women servants are having affairs with the suitors.) The middle section of the book deals with Odysseus's adventures, with mythical characters such as the Cyclops, Scylla and Charibdis, the rock-throwing Laestroginians, the Lotus eaters, the sirens, and many others. We learn of Odysseus's long but ultimately unsatisfactory dalliances with Circe and with Callypso and his perseverance in returning home.

The most striking element of the poem for me was Book 11 which chronicles Odysseus's journey to Hades and which teaches him that human life is precious and irreplaceable for all its pain and suffering. Much of the middle section of the book is told as a flashback with Odysseus speaking in his own voice. There is much in the Odyssey (unlike the Iliad) about the nature and function of epic poetry and about its performance.

The Odyssey concludes with Odysseus' slaughter of the many suitors of his faithful wife Penelope and with his reuniting with his wife, aged father Laertes and son Telemachus. Odysseus is a wily, much-battered, and cunning hero. But in his perseverance and strength, he is a hero nonetheless.

The Odyssey is a much-translated work. I found this translation by Robert Fagles helped me get into and involved with the poem. The translation is in a modern American free verse idiom which to me lets the poem speak and does not call attention to itself as a translation. For a work such as the Odyssey, I think that if the translation moves and the reader is drawn into the work, the translator is doing a good job. By this test, the translation is outstanding.

There is an excellent introduction by Bernard Knox which introduces the reader to the scholarly issues surrounding the composition of the Odyssey and the Iliad and which discusses as well the major themes of the poem.

The Odyssey and the Iliad are works to be read and reread at many stages of life. They should probably be explored in several translations for those, (most readers) who don't read the original Greek. This is a stirring epic poem of what has become the journey of the West.

Robin Friedman

n  After many years of agony and absence from one’s home, a person can begin enjoying grief. n

This feels a little silly to rate given that it’s the Odyssey, but I did read it and I did enjoy myself.

Some notes on things I enjoy about this translation:

➽ Emily Wilson in her intro focuses on Xenia –hospitality. The villains in the Oddysey are villainous because they either pervert hospitality – by eating guests instead of feeding them – or fail to engage with pompe [sending] as defined by Menelaus’s declaration that “To force a visitor to stay / is just as bad as pushing him to go”. The suitors, too, pervert hospitality by eating too much; and ultimately, so does Odysseus in slaughtering them.

➽ There’s a similarly intriguing focus on the character of Odysseus as not good or bad but clever and cunning above all. As established as the chapter begins, Odysseus is not the favorite of Athena because he is good – he is the favorite because he is clever.

➽ Penelope is a very compelling character. I kind of enjoy the ambiguity as to whether she knows her husband is home – that being said, I think she definitely has an inkling.

➽ The translation’s focus on repeating Homer’s “smaller units of sense” and its simple language to convey that “stylistic pomposity is entirely un-Homeric” is very fun.

➽ Another conceit I really enjoyed: The focus on the doglike women’s face. “The idea that it is not the woman or goddess herself, but her [Helen’s] face, that is like a dog suggests that it might be male perceptions of women, rather than female desires themselves, that threaten the social fabric.”

➽ The penultimate book – Odysseus’s slaughter of the suitors – is brutal and animalistic, with gorgeous but oddly terrifying imagery. I enjoyed it quite a bit and may at some point have further thoughts about its use of violence.

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Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns.

How in the world does one go about reviewing such a classic poem? So, I will keep it very simple. This epic contains the basis for so much literature that has come after it and has been an inspiration to many authors. In fact after reading Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain this past year, I was inspired to read the original work to learn more about Odysseus, king of Ithaca who journeys for 20 years to his home from the Trojan war and meets with many, many hardships and struggles along the way. There is a theme of hospitality throughout as well as vengeance, suffering, cunning, endurance and loyalty.

Much have I suffered, labored long and hard by now
in the waves and wars. Add this to the total—bring the trial on!

I’ve heard so many of these stories in some form or another and it makes such a big difference to read them myself. We’ve all heard of the god Zeus and goddess Athena, the Sirens, the Cyclops, Calypso and Circe. It’s all here and very readable. There are 24 books total and you can read it at whatever pace you like. It took me one month to read it and now I need to go back and read the Iliad.

AHAHAHAHA I FINISHED THIS IN ABOUT NINE COLLECTIVE HOURS OF READING
WITH AN HOUR TO SPARE BEFORE MY ENGLISH FINAL


UPDATE: I FAILED THE FINAL BUT IT'S OKAY