ŷ������

ἄνδρ�� μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσ��, πολύτροπον, ὃ�� μάλα πολλ��
πλάγχθη, ἐπε�� Τροίης ἱερὸν πτολίεθρον ἔπερσεν:
πολλῶ�� δ' ἀνθρώπων ἴδε�� ἄστε�� κα�� νόον ἔγν��,
πολλ�� δ' �� γ' ἐ�� πόντ�� πάθεν ἄλγε�� ὃ�� κατ�� θυμόν,
ἀρνύμενος ἥ�� τε ψυχὴ�� κα�� νόστον ἑταίρω��.
ἀλλ' οὐ��' ὣ�� ἑτάρου�� ἐρρύσατ��, ἱέμενό�� περ:
αὐτῶν γὰ�� σφετέρῃσι�� ἀτασθαλίῃσι�� ὄλοντ��,
νήπιοι, ο�� κατ�� βοῦ�� Ὑπερίονος Ἠελίοι��
ἤσθιο��: αὐτὰρ �� τοῖσι�� ἀφείλετο νόστιμον ἦμα��.
τῶ�� ἁμόθε�� γε, θεά, θύγατερ Διός, εἰπ�� κα�� ἡμῖν.

Tell me about a complicated man.
Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost
when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy,
and where he went, and who he met, the pains
he suffered in the storms at sea, and how
he worked to save his life and bring his men
back home. He failed to keep them safe. Poor fools,
they ate the Sun God’s cattle and the god
kept them from home. Now goddess, child of Zeus,
tell the old story for our modern times.
Find the beginning.

So opens Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey. I’d read Homer’s great epic poem of adventure and magic in Robert Fagles�� highly acclaimed free verse translation, and then in Richmond Lattimore’s literalistic, foreignizing translation. In both versions I loved the poem, but on one level I always thought of it as inferior in sublimity, gravitas, and depth to The Iliad. Of course, I tend to share the Ancient Greek preference for The Iliad, but I’ve come to view The Odyssey as equally essential to Western literature, and equally as magnificent a poem. And Wilson’s blank-verse translation was crucial to my growing appreciation for the poem of Odysseus.

Whether or not Emily Wilson was faithful to the Greek’s meaning, syntax, or not, I’ll leave to more experienced reviewers (though Edith Hall and Gregory Hays and the Bryn Mawr Review, excellent classicists, praise Wilson on this ground). What I want to do is speak about how through her translation this poem of adventure and magic started to really speak to my feeling and enter my memory as much as The Iliad did. That’s partly because her poetry is eminently readable for sound, meter, and regularity. That’s why I could feel comfortable reading several “books�� per day - because her translation was that engaging. And the regularity seems to me especially well-done. Other translations like those of Fagles and Lattimore get the repetition of Homeric formulae down, but Wilson gets aspects of the repetition and regular rhythm of the dactylic hexameter Greek poem by transposing it to our iambic-pentameter. I think that was a good decision.

But besides the poetic delights of Wilson’s efforts, I found myself identifying with, being attracted to and surprised by, and experiencing and feeling with the poem’s hero, Odysseus, son of Laertes, a “complicated�� man. He’s depicted with a certain multiplicity of identities that is unparalleled in ancient Greek literature: he is the hero, warrior, leader, pirate, lover, seducer and flirter, avenger, murderer, liar, storyteller, poet, husband, father, son, slave-owner, speaker, guest, property owner, king. Many of the epithets dedicated to him �� polytlas, polymetis, polytropon �� are about Odysseus�� complexity and capacities. He always has battle plans, lines, strategies, and quick thinking. He is especially pious and smart; he is “clever�� Odysseus. Likewise, Odysseus�� multiplicity is mirrored by the different ways his loved ones and supporters and slaves �� Eurycleia, Eumaeus and Philoetius the slaves; Circe and Calypso and Athena the goddesses; Penelope and Telemachus and Laertes among his family; the Phaeacians as the hosts of this hero; the suitors as the victims of Odysseus�� violence; and the perspectives of the Olympian deities.

Yet Homer, being a superb poet, represents this complex hero in an ethically complex fashion. There is something problematic about his lying and his propensity to violence, perhaps the hero’s two most salient features in the poem. The lying and violence seem repeated even to the point of excess, as his encounter with Laertes and his continued martial rage against the Ithacans indicates. The poet and poem are largely philodyssean, but that does not mean they whitewash Odysseus. And The Odyssey does give voice and credence to those who are hurt by him and who hate him: Poseidon, Polyphemus, Antinous and the suitors, Eupeithes, Eurylochus, and more.

He is the wanderer, and this wandering occurred after he had sacked Troy. We are alerted by the narrator to Odysseus�� reputation as a fearsome city-saker, and in Odysseus�� own wandering stories, he mentions how, after the Trojan War ended, he went to the island of the Cicones to sack it. The Greek has this: hos malla polla/plankthe, epei Troies hieron ptoliethron epersen. Is this fate of wandering and being lost due to his having sacked Troy? This might not be that far-fetched an idea to think of, considering that, with the exception of Nestor, many of the heroes on the Achaean side, like Agamemnon and Menelaus, were troubled in their returns. Likewise, Odysseus�� habit of invading the island of the Cyclops, the subsequent blinding, and the boastful self-mention gets him into further trouble. His curiosity and impulse to martial valor, both in the islands he visits and his attempt to fight off Scylla, get him and his men (hetairoi) in loads of trouble and further delay his homecoming.

It’s largely through a growing appreciation of Odysseus that I came to further love The Odyssey. My heart has often been for The Iliad, which I still consider the more sublime masterpiece for its tragic outlook, its elevated poetic sensibility, and the pathos and humanity that is animated by that poem’s life-and-death scenario; I also have a fondness for the more elaborate epic similes of that poem. Part of my preference for The Iliad also hinges on my preference for Achilles, who appeals to me for his sense of honor and principle, his masculine heroism and valor, his divine-human identity, his remoteness, his pathos, that special mixture in him of great wrath and great magnanimity, and more, including the challenger of authority. Odysseus, in contrast to this superlative Greek hero, seemed to me to be the arch-defender of kingly authority and the punisher of dissidents. Likewise, at critical parts The Odyssey seemed to be grotesquely brutal in ways that The Iliad wasn’t (think of the mutilation of Melanthius, the hanging of the slave women, and more). But I guess I got a better taste for The Odyssey and its peculiar mixture of comic and violent, grotesque and elevated, and the inconclusive conclusiveness that is part of that poem’s mixture. Also, The Odyssey appears to me to be more ethically, poetically, and morally complex than I once granted it to be. And its interesting relationship to The Iliad is always worthy of meditation: the memories and the sadness of the veterans, Odysseus�� own complicated relationship to his past, the Sirens, Helen, the violence that replays the Trojan War on a more curtailed but also more horrifying scale, the way that violence centers around the sake of a woman’s honor. And Odysseus has many similarities to Achilles: he, like Achilles, is a skilled warrior; he is also touchy about his own sense of honor; and he chooses to experience mortal life with a glory and identity rather than a long-lived or immortal life lived in ease and freed from time and death. The last part, Odysseus�� choice, is quite poignant both for how it is unique to our hero, who loves his wife and son and land, but also has a kind of death drive that moves him to reject Calypso’s offer of immortality, and for how it links him to the Iliad’s honor-bound warrior.

Which brings me to this: The Odyssey (and its predecessor The Iliad) works so well for me because it works as a poem. What I mean is: the method for how Homer told the story, in verse, feels like an appropriately timeless, rhythmic, expressive way to tell the wanderings of Odysseus, his revenge, the plans of the gods, and the lives and stories of its many characters. I do not well know Homer’s Greek yet, but what little I have by heart grips me because of its vitality and regularity. Likewise, the poem has some of the most inventive and fascinating similes, many of which are centered around Odysseus: Odysseus like an octopus on sea, Odysseus like a seed of fire, Odysseus like a crying widow about to be enslaved, Odysseus like an artwork fashioned by a divinely-inspired craftsman, Odysseus like a lion that just ate an ox (this is crucial for it links Odysseus to the various hosts that devour and slay unwanted guests), and more), Odysseus�� heart like a barking dog, Odysseus’s restlessness like a cooking blood sausage (this is one of the strangest pieces of poetry), and more. Likewise, poetry features as a key part of society: we have Demodocus, the bard who sings of sex and war; Phemius, the bard of Ithaca; and Odysseus himself, who tells the wandering stories in verse and himself uses epic similes.

The Odyssey and The Iliad are poems that I will never stop revisiting, because Homer truly is a treasure and a banquet, as the ancient Greeks recognized, and as readers realize again and again. Like the poem’s own repetitions of phrases and scenarios, the poems repeat themselves in the minds of writers and artists who take from them; in the minds of critics and scholars and linguists who will constantly wrestle with the meaning and influence of the poems; in the minds of the opponents who view Homeric poetry, and poetry in general, as a danger better kept contained; and in the minds of the common readers who will be moved by the characters, and the stories, and the energy of the poems.