Category: My Odyssey Reading

Following are the collected blog posts accompanying my reading of “The Odyssey”. (The January 12 2020 post announcing my project is pinned here at the top of page one – that is, at the end of my journey to date. To read chronologically from the beginning, scroll through to page 3. Yes, I know, I know, a bit like hit “Start” to turn off! Now, that, a blast from the past!)

The Odyssey (2): Books 1 – 2

The Journey Begins

Firstly, Homer, I have now concluded, is meant to be read aloud. Browsing and rereading passages is one thing, but to capture the rhythm and maintain concentration one must, absolutely must, emote! So that is precisely what I am doing in video chunks of a maximum of fifteen minutes – privately I should say. Being unsure sometimes of a correct pronunciation, I have found the comprehensive glossary with pronunciation key at the back of Wilson’s book [pp. 553-577] to be very helpful, and as a last resort a “how to pronounce…” request to Google has an answer every time. And, it is not cheating to refer to the Notes, including summary paragraph! [pp. 527-552]

To also be said, English translations of The Odyssey have named each of the twenty-four sections variously: “Song”, “Rhapsody”, “Scroll”, “Chapter” or, as Emily Wilson like other translators has chosen to do, simply “Book”. Further, she gives each of the books a title, which, if not unique, seems at the very least to be unusual, and I think a really nice touch – adding to the work’s order and accessibility.

Book 1: The Boy and the Goddess

pp. 105-119

This most famous of epic journeys does not begin with an actual journey, nor with the hero, the principal journeyer, rather in medias res at the point in which Athena intervenes, sanctioned by the will of Zeus, upon the woes of her favoured one, Odysseus, to facilitate his homecoming. Under the guise of Mentes and familial friendship, Athena infiltrates the chaotic Ithaca household of Odysseus’ wife Penelope and son Telemachus, overrun as it is by bawdy, avaricious suitors, and with all her wiles and powers of persuasion sets the path Telemachus will follow on a journey of his own – a journey in search of the absent father and in a wider sense a journey to manhood.

Book 2: A Dangerous Journey

pp. 120-134

But before his journey is to begin, Telemachus must bring his case to the Ithacans – and the suitors. One of the suitors, Antinous, reveals Penelope’s trick of the never finished burial sheet for Laertes – weaving by day and surreptitiously unweaving by night. Zeus sends down swooping eagles, but the prophecy foretold by one is not heeded. Telemachus shows his stuff and faces down the suitor’s taunts, but again it is only with the divine help of Athena that a ship and crew is procured – and the earthly loyalty of his old nurse Eurycleia in keeping his secret safe and gathering together the rations required. Under the guidance of Athena (guised as Mentor), and the winds and seas under her control, the curved ship sets sail.

The Odyssey (1)

Introduction

pp. 1-79

A fairly long but very fine introduction that should inspire any interested reader, and certainly further kindled my enthusiasm. Emily Wilson seriously wants me (and you, and you, …) to go on this journey, for not just its literary and cultural worth but as an exploration of the underlying themes that are deeply relevant to our contemporary human condition and concerns.

We are reminded of just how small an epic story or life can be, and conversely the grandiosity of each and every ordinary life. The epic hero Odysseus is, when it’s all said and done, just a man.

Wilson discusses the narrative structure, the vast tableau of characters – gods and human and neither one nor the other, and geography – getting home is never easy, and time – beginning as it does in medias res – of this great epic tale.

She ponders Homer in depth, but in words and tone accessible to we, the non-classicists; authorship, reception, oral tradition, dialectic and folkloric influences. And his world – the whens and wheres. The temporal; debated vigorously but some consensus at about 8th – 7th century BCE, and place (places!); all at sea, but certainly the Mediterranean and Aegean, and as muddled as the peoples that populate them.

The pages relating to “hospitality” – to somewhat abbreviate the discourse – are especially interesting. It says something I think that the ancient Greek word, xenia, meaning hospitality and a particular sort of friendship, is now associated with the negative connotations of xenophobia, and all the turning away and keeping out that it implies (p.23). It is hard to overlook an analogy in our own time – the plight of refugees on the aforementioned seas and their reception which is more often less than welcoming.

I read with interest the precision in which Wilson defines xenia as “guest-friendship”, differing it from the more familiar, intimate “friendship” but going beyond the somehow rather clinical notion of “hospitality”, and not used very much in everyday English. Living in Germany, I note that “Gastfreundschaft” is very much a concept and a word often used (though practiced or not to various degrees!).

Much more is discussed in the introduction. Women, for instance. Of course as characters – Penelope, Calypso, Athena – but Wilson also sketches how it could have been to be a woman in the ancient world, as an elite or as a slave. And the coming of age and father and son story identified in respect to Telemachus. And the multitude of translations, versions, adaptations of The Odyssey, that continue to inspire.

Translator’s notes

pp. 81-91

Given in the context of this scholarly work but informing well beyond the particular, there is a short essay on the technical aspects of translation, especially as pertaining to classical works, and the choices that have to be made by a translator, and the choices made by this translator.

I am learning here, so I will record just briefly some of Emily Wilson’s comments. The Odyssey was originally composed in dactylic hexameters, that is, in six-footed lines, the conventional meter of ancient Greek verse. Previous English translations have used a variety of techniques, for instance, George Chapman (1615) in iambic pentameter, Alexander Pope (1715) went a step further with rhyming couplets, but most modern translators like Robert Fitzgerald (1961) and Robert Fagles (1996) have shied away from a regular beat in favour of free verse or prose.

Wilson returns to the iambic pentameter, being the convention of “…regular English narrative verse…of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Keats..”[p.82] To my mind that makes absolute sense, for this is the “sound” that many people have “heard”, however fleetingly, at school or university, in theatre or film. I haven’t got this far yet, but I imagine that familiarity and the regularity of beat may well provide parameters for a good reading aloud (privately!).

The translator also is firm in her commitment to forgo rhetorical flights of fancy in favour of plainer language and contemporary speech patterns, but I certainly don’t understand that to mean simplification or rigidity; in fact perhaps the opposite is achieved through precision in language, varying metaphors and epithets and what she describes as “a wide range of stylistic registers” [p.84]

Reading Homer’s “The Odyssey”

My reading project

As a special project in this new year 2020, I intend to embark upon a personal and concentrated reading of Emily Wilson’s celebrated 2018 translation of Homer’s “The Odyssey”, and will regularly write some posts to accompany my progress. Whether I can be as industrious as Penelope during her long tormented wait for Odysseus’ return is debatable!

To avoid the complication of having a separate blog, I’ll categorise and number in brackets each post (as in the header above) pertaining to my readings; collated, together with other related material, they will then be accessible as My Odyssey Reading from the main menu.

Page numbers, Book titles and other references will be cited from my hardback first edition copy: Homer, The Odyssey, trans. by Emily Wilson, First Edition, New York: W.W. Norton, 2018

My copy of Emily Wilson’s translation of Homer’s “The Odyssey“

writer and translator

Before getting to the book and the really very substantial introductory pages therein, firstly an introduction to the writer, poet, composer, and all the plurals of the same, that we call simply Homer, and his, her, their most recent translator Emily Wilson.

Marble bust of Homer, British Museum, London.

Whilst legends persist (the blind bard for instance) and are certainly not without interest, whether there was this one Homer to whom can be attributed the epic works of The Iliad and The Odyssey is debatable. I very much like the idea of differentiating between a historical Homer and the poet Homer, which is probably not a terribly original thought but it seems to me a bit like the way of, for instance, approaching the historical Jesus alongside he explained through the lens of Christian dogma. Also, it may be that in a literary sense, identification is better explained through the more generalised “Homeric Question”; answered also with many a dissenting voice but all with the emphasis on Homer as an oral tradition.

Unlike Homer, Emily Wilson is absolutely one real person and has a website and can speak for herself, but briefly: Wilson is a British classicist born into the right family to therefore be educated at the right places to now be Professor of Classics at University of Pennsylvania, celebrated overnight it seems with the publication of her translation and she is, loathe that I am to mention it, since the Summer a recipient of one of these so-called genius grants. None of which I begrudge her, and mercifully, though she may sound a twee bit posh, I don’t think she would hang high the “genius” label! Following is a really interesting lecture she gave in September at Columbia University, focusing on her Odyssey translation, but with more generalised remarks on her method of work.

Also, I think Emily Wilson would have appreciated this review by Gregory Hays in The New York Times with its imperative on the nuance that she brings to her translation, and this is a nice magazine piece also in the Times. Together they say something about the person as scholar and translator, and the very special art of translation. Further links I will add to the sidebar menu.

In the coming days I will post some thoughts on Wilson’s introductory and translator notes – interesting enough in themselves I must say. I am really quite excited about this (Winter!) reading project; in itself an odyssey of sorts. My only encounter in any meaningful way with classics has come in recent years via Gregory Nagy’s edX course The Ancient Greek Hero (which may be caught in a new iteration) and the private reading and study that it encouraged, so the best I can do here is present the observations of an everyman, -woman.

Famously, The Odyssey has 24 books or scrolls, but my ambitions do not stretch to writing systematically on every one of those, instead I’ll condense the purely narrative and concentrate on more thematic aspects that I find to be particularly thought-provoking.