A Guide to the Odyssey: A Commentary on the English Translation of Robert Fitzgerald Read online

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Preface

  Introduction

  Homer and the Archeological Reader

  Poet and Poem, Singer and Song

  History and Geography

  The Gods

  Violence

  Fathers and Sons

  Men and Women, Families and Couples

  Memory

  A Final Word Before Reading

  Notes

  Chronology

  Map and Illustrations

  Commentary

  BOOK I: A Goddess Intervenes

  BOOK II: A Hero’s Son Awakens

  BOOK III: The Lord of the Western Approaches

  BOOK IV: The Red-Haired King and His Lady

  BOOK V: Sweet Nymph and Open Sea

  BOOK VI: The Princess at the River

  BOOK VII: Gardens and Firelight

  BOOK VIII: The Songs of the Harper

  BOOK IX: New Coasts and Poseidon’s Son

  BOOK X: The Grace of the Witch

  BOOK XI: A Gathering of Shades

  BOOK XII: Sea Perils and Defeat

  BOOK XIII: One More Strange Island

  BOOK XIV: Hospitality in the Forest

  BOOK XV: How They Came to Ithaka

  BOOK XVI: Father and Son

  BOOK XVII: The Beggar at the Manor

  BOOK XVIII: Blows and a Queen’s Beauty

  BOOK XIX: Recognitions and a Dream

  BOOK XX: Signs and a Vision

  BOOK XXI: The Test of the Bow

  BOOK XXII: Death in the Great Hall

  BOOK XXIII: The Trunk of the Olive Tree

  BOOK XXIV: Warriors, Farewell

  Who’s Who in The Odyssey

  Bibliography: Suggestions for Further Reading

  Acknowledgments

  List of Illustrations

  1. Map: The World of The Odyssey

  2. A Plan of the Palace at Pylos

  3. The Homeric Ship: Odysseus on His Travels

  4. A Scene from The Odyssey: The Ram Jug, 7th century, B.C.E.

  5. Odysseus’ Bow: Strung and Unstrung

  6. Stringing the Bow: A Coin from Thebes, 5th century, B.C.E.

  7. The Test of the Bow: Ring-Handled Axes in a Line

  8. Double Axe-Heads Fixed in the Ground

  9. A Fragment of The Odyssey, Book XV. 161–181, 3rd or 4th century, C.E.

  10. A Page from the Editio Princeps of The Odyssey, Book I.1–32, Printed in Florence, 1488

  Preface

  Following is a guide to The Odyssey keyed to the translation of Robert Fitzgerald. I had long known, as reader and teacher, that the Fitzgerald translation of The Odyssey is astoundingly vivid; it seems to me to capture in English what I appreciate in Homer’s Greek. As I worked on the guide, rereading, back and forth, again and again, both Homer and Fitzgerald, I began to appreciate what a truly monumental accomplishment the Fitzgerald translation is, how accurate, how brilliant. But let me emphasize that however much this volume is intended as a companion to his translation, neither publisher nor editor constrained me always to agree with Fitzgerald. Indeed, as users of the guide will see, I introduce discussion of Fitzgerald’s translation into my comments at many points, often providing more literal renderings of the Greek, occasionally marking my disagreement with the translator’s interpretation and proposing an alternate solution. Obviously, accuracy is my first aim here, but I have brought readers into the interpreter’s shop with several other purposes in mind. First, exploring a particular choice on the translator’s part is an effective way to highlight differences between Homer’s world and our own.

  As I explain in the Introduction, appreciating the distances across which The Odyssey comes to us is part of the task of the “archeological reader.” One aspect of this distance is the translation, which lies between us and the original not as a sheet of plate glass but as a darkened mirror. The work of the translator should be demystified, however much the end product shares in the miracle of poetry (and it does because Fitzgerald is a true poet). If I so often say, “No, it doesn’t really say this, the Greek means …,” it is because I want readers occasionally to be frustrated that they aren’t reading the original, frustrated so that at least some of them will decide to learn ancient Greek for themselves. Homer in the original can be read with pleasure and profit, albeit slowly, after only a year of study. Even if it takes years to become adept at the finer points of Homeric philology, it is well worth the effort.

  I had the opportunity of meeting Robert Fitzgerald only once, when he spoke to a group of eager undergraduates about finding the right register for each of his translations of ancient epic (he also translated The Iliad and The Aeneid). From the passion for the poetry he radiated then, and from the poetry of his translation itself, I daresay that no one would be happier if his work led readers to read and study Homer in Homer’s Greek rather than his own English. And while no translation is the equal of its original, Homer is among the more “translatable” of ancient authors: his carefully plotted story, his subtle characters and their eloquent speeches, his vivid descriptions and striking metaphors, in short, the major portion of his infinite invention transfers well into modern English, guaranteeing joys to the reader of a translation comparable to the pleasures of reading the original. As Fitzgerald, himself a consummate student of Homer’s Greek, proves, we need not choose between the two.

  * * *

  Two notes to readers:

  In general I employ the spellings for proper names that Fitzgerald himself used—transliterations of the original Greek names—even though English-speaking readers will in some cases be more familiar with the Romanized versions of these names. Thus both translator and commentator refer to Odysseus rather than Ulysses (based on the Latin Ulixes); Akhilleus, not Achilles; Kirkê, not Circe; and so on. However, in the Introduction I use the more familiar English forms for place names where confusion might otherwise arise (e.g., Crete, not Krete), and I do refer to “Ulysses” when I am speaking of the character in the Latin tradition, from Vergil to Dante to Joyce. One note on my own transliteration of Greek words: Greek “u” [u—upsilon] is rendered “u” except for the family of poly-epithets—an element whose familiarity to English readers I did not want to obscure—and for the name “Euryalos” [Eurualos], translated “Seareach” by Fitzgerald (VIII. 148), but often appearing as “Euryalos” or “Euryalus” in literature on Homer and his epic descendants.

  Finally, I use the abbreviations “B.C.E.” (Before the Common Era) and “C.E.” (Common Era) in place of the older denominators of the same periods, “B.C.” (Before Christ) and “A.D.” (anno Domini).

  Introduction

  Apart from the Bible, it is hard to think of any literary work that, in the world we have come to call “the West,” has been so influential through so many centuries as The Odyssey, as both a text and a direct source of characters and incidents. This may be a surprising outcome for a poem that seems to have had its beginnings as sung entertainment in the banquet halls of petty chieftains in Greece and around the Aegean basin during a time often named the Dark Age of Greece (roughly the years 1150–800 B.C.E.). Darkness is, of course, relative. Even if the written documents and material culture of the early first millennium B.C.E. in Greece seem meager compared with those of the earlier civilizations of Mycenae and Crete, much less the subsequent brilliance of Classical Greece, both of these cultural moments and all subsequent Western civilization are illuminated by the twin flames t
hat blazed forth out of that darkness: The Iliad and The Odyssey. No matter what role a bard named Homer had in the final shaping and polishing of the epics, the enduring strength of these two works lies in the fact that they are the living productions of entire cultures, the culmination of the narrative talent of who knows how many generations of bards and audiences, each of which contributed in some way to the drama, the images, the wisdom—in short, the humanity to be discovered in these poems.

  Both The Iliad and The Odyssey were popular as sung stories in their time, and once recorded in written form they were installed by literary scholars and have never been replaced as the twin models of the genre of epic poetry. If The Iliad has traditionally been received as in some sense the more epic—in other words, the more fiercely heroic and bloodier of the two—The Odyssey has been treasured as the more accessibly human. Even as Odysseus’ narrative takes him well beyond familiar geography, the boundaries of the human psyche and human society are drawn and figuratively patrolled. The very border of mortality marks the limits of the human, while at the same time it is presented as penetrable: the poet takes Odysseus once and us twice into the realm of the dead, to speak and listen to the shades of the dead. And even if in The Odyssey we see less petty backbiting and infighting among the gods and demigods than in The Iliad, the gods of The Odyssey are frequently all too human. Learning how to behave toward the gods, in daily piety and ritual, and how to negotiate the incursions of the divine into the human—from interpreting oracles and portents to facing the presence of a god in disguise or in epiphany—all of this tests and defines what it is to be human.

  The narrative course of The Odyssey presents a wider range of characters than The Iliad offers. In the besieged Troy we get a glimpse of family units—men, women, and children—but the thematic pattern of The Odyssey demands that both poet and audience enter more often and more deeply into the hopes and fears, the desperation and exultation of individual characters—among others, a fatherless youth, a slave bereft of his master, a husbandless wife, a young woman who fantasizes about a potential bridegroom, an old man condemned to mourn his son, and an older and erotically experienced woman who gives up her best hope for a lasting relationship. It is the variety and depth of character as much as the compelling plot in which they all play their allotted roles that have kept The Odyssey irresistibly alive in the minds of readers of all ages.

  Poets are readers, too, and many poets have refashioned bits of Homer’s Odyssey to suit their own purposes, not simply mining the Homeric vein for foreign riches but adding levels of significance to the original poems. In a fragment of the archaic Greek poet Arkhilokhos often invoked as one of the first individual voices in the West, the singer describes how he threw away his shield and ran from battle. Alkaíos and Anakreon follow suit. Centuries later the Latin poet Horace picks up the theme, and it begins to look like part of the poet’s traditional self-deprecation. However, the originator of this claim is Homer’s Odysseus, who says of one particularly sticky pass, “I wrenched my dogskin helmet off my head, / dropped my spear, dodged out of my long shield / [and] ran,” here not away, but to beg mercy from the Egyptian king (XIV.318–20). Significantly for both later poets, this is one of Odysseus’ fibs, for this episode is part of the story the disguised Odysseus tells about his assumed character of Cretan traveler and fortune seeker. The individual’s and the poet’s voices then partake of the voice of Homer’s Odysseus in the very passage where Odysseus is being most himself—lying, and most poetic—inventing fictions.

  This is not the place to explore the manifold transformations that The Odyssey and above all the character of Odysseus have undergone through subsequent literature, not least because a good map of much of the territory exists in W. B. Stanford’s survey of the “Ulysses theme.”1 Some stories concerning Odysseus which circulated in antiquity are lost to us, but many are still extant. We meet Odysseus in Sophocles’ tragedies: Ajax (before 441 B.C.E.) and, more darkly, Philoctetes (ca. 408 B.C.E.); briefly in Euripides’ Hecuba (ca. 424 B.C.E.); in the Rhesus; and in the satyr play Cyclops. The Odysseus of the tragedies takes on a life of his own, which will resound down the ages through Seneca’s Troades, the mid-first-century C.E. Latin adaptation of Euripides, and ultimately to Shakespeare’s The History of Troilus and Cressida (1602–1603) and Jean Giraudoux’s 1935 theatrical fable La guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu (The Trojan War Will Not Take Place). Shakespeare’s dark play is based in part on Geoffrey Chaucer’s narrative poem Troilus and Criseyde (ca. 1385), which itself follows any number of medieval Latin and vernacular Troy poems.

  Like Shakespeare’s, all the many stage representations in which Odysseus plays a role draw on other Odyssean traditions, beginning with The Iliad and including the meanings that gradually accreted to his figure across centuries and cultures, which then were partially erased and massively revalued. In Greco-Roman philosophical traditions, Odysseus became the example of the man who survives—for the Stoics by the strength of his character and the subordination of fear and desire to will; for some of the other philosophical sects by his astonishing adaptability. The Odyssey had shown Odysseus in both lights and did not apologize for the moments when his infinite adaptability crossed the line into guile and deceit. The Roman comic poet Plautus has more than one character invoke Odysseus as cunning strategist and archtrickster, and it is no surprise that the master wordcrafter among Roman poets, Ovid, chose Odysseus’ battle with Ajax over Achilles’ arms as the moment in Odysseus’ career he would highlight, a battle which was waged and won by skill in words alone (Metamorphoses, Book XIII).

  As knowledge of the Greek originals faded in the West, reaching its nadir in the Middle Ages, Odysseus became little more than a byword for trickiness, even treachery. This was reinforced by the fact that the Roman Catholic West was inclined to regard in a dim light the Greek Orthodox East, with its center at Constantinople (once Byzantium, now Istanbul), from which the Catholic West had split first politically and then doctrinally. Of course, the theme of Greek “treachery” predates the schism of Rome from Constantinople, running back to the stratagem of the Trojan horse itself, and is kept alive in every retelling of the fall of Troy. This is inscribed in Vergil’s Aeneid, the classical text which was most widely studied in the West and one of the few secular texts which was read and recopied without interruption throughout the Middle Ages.

  The relationship of the crowning work of Vergil, the Roman Homer, to both Homeric poems is complex (as was noted already in Vergil’s own time), but the clever way the Roman challenges his Greek precursor may be well exemplified by the role Ulysses has in The Aeneid. In his epic about Aeneas—who, according to legend, escaped the fall of Troy, led Trojan settlers to Italy, and through both battle and alliance established the basis for the founding of Rome by his descendants, Vergil permits Odysseus to appear only at a distance, and in sharp and rather unflattering perspective. In Books II and III, Aeneas—not unlike Odysseus at the court of Alkínoös and Arêtê—responds to his hostess’ request and tells Dido of the fall of Troy and his own subsequent wanderings. Within this Vergilian tribute to Homer’s strategy of having Odysseus narrate The Odyssey Books IX-XII, Ulysses is mentioned. It is from Book II of The Aeneid, and with reference to Odysseus’ Trojan horse, that we derive the proverbial “timeo Danaos et dona ferentes” (“I fear the Greeks even when they are bearing gifts,” II.49). Despite such warnings and even more spectacular portents, the false Sinon manages to convince the Trojans to breach their walls and drag the wooden horse within the city. (The Greek Sinon had first established credibility and won Trojan sympathy by pretending to have been maltreated by his comrades, Ulysses in particular.) Although it is never stated in so many words, it is hard not to imagine that Sinon’s whole script is the work of Ulysses, whom tradition makes the inventor of the ruse of the horse. In this narrated scene in The Aeneid, Odysseus is thus invisible behind Sinon’s words (but visible in that invisibility), just as readers know that he is hidden in the horse.2
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  Throughout Aeneas’ account of the travels that brought him from Troy to Dido’s Carthage, Vergil has him skirt Ithaka, and only once does he bring Aeneas’ and Odysseus’ itineraries together. At one stop on the desolate coast of Sicily, Aeneas and his companions discover Achaemenides, who turns out to be—so Aeneas reports the story—one of Ulysses’ men who had been left behind in Polyphêmos’ cave. The Trojans give him aid and transport, despite his being a Greek and their mortal enemy. The more important point is to highlight an Odyssean episode which shows Odysseus at his most irresponsible. “Pious Aeneas,” in contrast, saves his followers—indeed, he even saves one of Odysseus’, if, that is, we permit Vergil to interpolate this character into The Odyssey and, as it were, correct Homer. Nor do the literary repercussions of this Odyssey-inspired scene end here: Vergil’s successor Ovid repeats the maneuver, interpolating Vergil as well as Homer, by recounting yet another version of Achaemenides’ experiences in the land of the Kyklopês and then presenting a newly invented character, Macareus, one of Odysseus’ companions who, Ovid claims, skipped ship after hearing of the dangers Kirkê foretold (Metamorphoses XIV. 154–444).

  The Aeneid memorializes the Trojan origins of Rome. In its wake, through the Middle Ages, cities and nations, most prominently France and Britain, put about stories that provided each with a Trojan foundation. In this way an ancient pedigree was provided for their contemporary aversion to the Greeks, with Ulysses standing first in the line of sworn enemies most directly responsible for the fall of Troy, a defeat they now made their own, and his character epitomizing the perfidious Greek at his worst.