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

  The perfidy of the horse and the origin of the Roman people are specifically linked and heightened in The Divine Comedy when Vergil answers the pilgrim Dante’s query about the twin flames they see in the eighth circle of hell. These are Ulysses and Diomedes, Ulysses’ companion on many missions, who together, as Vergil says, “bemoan / the snare of the horse which made the gate / whence issued the noble seed of the Romans” (Inferno XXVI.58–60). What Dante knows of Odysseus he knows through the Latin tradition, primarily Vergil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and Statius’ Achilleis (widely read notwithstanding its unfinished state) along with their commentaries, which were the staples of medieval schooling in the Classics or, as they were then called, “The Authors” (auctores). Dante conveys his recognition that his knowledge of these figures of Greek epic is entirely mediated by Latin, along with his profound sense of the historical belatedness of his Italian tongue, by staging a Vergilian intervention when it comes time for Dante to question Ulysses and Diomedes. “Leave the speaking to me,” Vergil advises, “who have understood / that which you wish: for perhaps they would be disdainful, / since they were Greeks, of your speech” (XXVI.73–75).

  Vergil adjures them by his own celebration of both characters in verse and asks one of them to tell how he came to die (XXVI. 79–84). Dante makes Ulysses respond, and now it is the Italian poet’s turn to make the next move in the literary game of interpolation. The subsequent narrative of Ulysses’ last journey is often read, anachronistically, as a remarkable anticipation of romantic, even Faustian, striving. But Dante, like Augustine before him, need only have looked within himself to find the great temptation for an intellectual that the desire for unbounded knowledge represents. Indeed, that temptation, and all the woe born of it, runs back in the Judeo-Christian tradition to the first temptation in Eden. The shipboard address of Dante’s Ulysses to yet another set of comrades he will lead to destruction continues the tradition of Odyssean eloquence, and, while it wins over Ulysses’ shipmates, Dante expects the reader of the The Divine Comedy to be wary of its appeals to the senses and experience (XXVI. 115–16). He gives Ulysses these concluding words: “Consider your stock: / you were not made to live like brute animals, / but to pursue manly valor and knowledge” (XXVI. 118–20).

  But for Dante there is a third way, between brutish existence and undisciplined striving for glory and wisdom: submission to authority and the willingness to brook the limits placed on human knowledge by God. Dante goes far beyond Vergil’s presentation of Ulysses as a negative example of irresponsible leadership, against which Vergil highlights Aeneas’ self-effacing responsibility. Dante’s Ulysses destroys both his companions and himself not merely in striving to satisfy idle curiosity and to see other lands and peoples but in searching for knowledge, on which he, erring, places no limits. It is out of his own understanding of the temptation of the desire for knowledge that Dante could describe in such heroic terms Ulysses’ five-month-long sea journey beyond the Pillars of Hercules (i.e., the Strait of Gibraltar), which for Greco-Roman and medieval navigators marked the bounds of the known world. But, as even Dante’s Ulysses makes clear when he describes his ultimate shipwreck—“and our prow sank, as it pleased another, / until the sea closed back over us” (XXVI. 141–42)—this is a heroism which attracts us at our peril. The “other” mentioned in the canto’s penultimate line is, Dante’s Ulysses now understands, Dante’s God.

  While the double-sided nature of Odysseus, explicit already in The Odyssey, gave rise to the widest range of interpretations and responses, many of the other players have also left their impress. Penélopê, even if a bit impatient and peeved in the first of Ovid’s Heroides (“Letters from the Heroines”), became for medieval readers of that very popular collection of poetic epistles the epitome of married chastity. And beyond: “Penelope” became synonymous with “faithful wife” in English and other European languages—with the obvious possibility that the term could be used sarcastically (as in Da Ponte’s libretto for Mozart’s Così fan tutte). Likewise, but with no blot on her scutcheon, her famous ruse has entered the proverbial: a “Penelopean web” is any work that will never be finished.

  Diametrically opposed to Penélopê, Kirkê (Circe) became the archetypal temptress. She is the ultimate progenitor of Ariosto’s Alcina and Tasso’s Armida in the Italian Renaissance, not to mention the various Spenserian temptresses inspired by them. Nor is her afterlife limited to the literary tradition; she too became proverbial. For example, Germans, many of whose proverbial expressions reflect the value their culture has placed on a classical education, may still call a seductive woman a “Circe,” and they have even created a verb, becircen, to describe Circe-like erotic enchantment. Like Penélopê’s web, Circe’s cup has become proverbial: it is the draft, literal or figurative, which works enchantment, particularly of the erotic variety.

  Mentor too has a proverbial existence as the name of any adviser; indeed, so common is the appellation that in English we no longer even need capitalize the name. The Oxford English Dictionary suggests that its use as a common noun, which dates from the eighteenth century, is due largely to the important role Mentor played in the then wildly popular novel Télémaque by the French abbé Fénelon (1699). If so, this is yet another indignity inflicted on Telémakhos, who of all the characters in The Odyssey has had the least impact on literary and popular traditions. Historically, this is in large measure the result of his having virtually no profile in the Latin tradition, but it is also true that, without a careful and sympathetic reading, he runs the risk of becoming a rather uninteresting prig. Poor Telémakhos! The French novel of which he is the title hero is not only unread today but virtually unreadable, unless one is held by interminable discussions of virtue and theories of moral education.

  Less important characters in The Odyssey have had better luck. Nausikaa, like Telémakhos a virtual prisoner of the Greek tradition, had to wait until the recovery of Greek to work her charm in the West, but when she did, her champion was none other than Goethe, who sketched and completed parts of a drama about her failure to win Odysseus as a bridegroom. Soon thereafter Eumaios returned in twelfth-century dress as the Saxon slave Gurth in Sir Walter Scott’s historical romance Ivanhoe (1820), a story of absent lords, usurpers, and disguised returns which clearly shares more than a swineherd with The Odyssey. But the most surprising figure to enjoy a poetic afterlife in Odyssean spin-offs is Polyphêmos, the one-eyed Kyklops. Perhaps it was the very challenge of the task which inspired poets to present him hopelessly in love with the nymph Galatea. The mannerist tradition of the lovesick monster begins in Greek with Theokritos’ eleventh Idyll and makes its way to the European baroque in large part thanks to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where the spurned lover kills Acis, his “rival” for Galatea’s affections (XIII.740–898).

  I referred earlier to the fact that knowledge of Greek and Greek texts virtually disappeared in western Europe in the Middle Ages, so that poets like Dante and Chaucer were dependent on the Latin tradition. Clearly, knowledge of The Odyssey depended on knowledge of Greek, but surprisingly, the reverse seems also to have been true: The Odyssey played an important role in the reintroduction of the study of ancient Greek in Renaissance Europe. Petrarch (1304–1374) owned a manuscript of The Odyssey, but it was a closed book to him. Having Homer so near and yet inaccessible pained him, and he and Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) hired the Greek Leonzio Pilato to translate The Odyssey into Latin in the 1360s.

  Pilato’s translation was neither distinguished nor influential, but the Italian poets’ patronage of him accelerated the interaction of Italian humanists and Byzantine Greeks. In shortly over a hundred years, Italian humanists had learned enough Greek from their Byzantine contemporaries to introduce ancient Greek into the curricula of some of the more advanced Italian academies (e.g., Florence) and to read Horner and other Greek originals in growing numbers. Increasing concern with Greek texts in Greek inspired more humanists to acquire books from the hoard of manuscripts in C
onstantinople, a transference of cultural goods which proved fortuitous, since in 1453 the Turks finally succeeded in taking Constantinople, ending a tradition of Greek scholarship, much of it devoted to Homer, that ran back all the way to the Alexandrian scholars. From Italy, scholarly study of Greek literature spread across western Europe, and it was on the basis of the manuscripts gathered from the remnants of the Byzantine empire, at first primarily in Italy, that the first Greek texts were printed (The Iliad together with The Odyssey in Florence by 1488; see illustration number 10).

  However, Pilato’s was not the first translation of The Odyssey made on the Italian peninsula. Not that it remained extant so long that Petrarch could have used it, but around 220 B.C.E. Livius Andronicus had effected for his Roman students a prose translation of The Odyssey, a work which can justly be credited with laying the foundation of Classical Latin literature and certainly of establishing the tradition that this literature model itself on Greek literature. Livius Andronicus’ version was successful in that it was quickly surpassed in stylistic refinement. Almost at once, Greek literature was not just seen as the stuff from which translations were made but was imitated in ever more creative ways. I have already spoken of many uses of themes or characters from The Odyssey in Roman literature, and that discussion came nowhere near exhausting the possibilities. Ovid, describing his trip into exile from Rome, compares his woes with those of no figure more frequently than Odysseus. I have also mentioned how Vergil modeled large parts of The Aeneid on The Odyssey, from scenes (the hero addressing his companions at the height of a storm; the hero rebuffed by the shade of one he had aggrieved and whose death he had, indirectly, caused) to structural elements (the hero’s inset narrative of his own travels and travails).

  In more modern times, retellings of all or parts of the actual Odyssey have been relatively infrequent. Odysseus’ return is the subject of Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria, written for the Venice opera season of 1641, as it is of Gabriel Fauré’s rarely performed Pénélope (premiered in Monte Carlo in 1907). Poor Telémakhos again: he was banished from the libretto for the sake of a sharper focus on the married lovers. Even more recently (1954), there is a film version of the entire epic, with Kirk Douglas as a swashbuckling Odysseus. But without doubt the most significant and influential “remake” of The Odyssey in the twentieth century, and arguably since Vergil’s Aeneid, is James Joyce’s modernist masterpiece, Ulysses (1922). Joyce does not so much retell the story of The Odyssey as use the Homeric original as a deep subtext for both structure and characters. The reader’s knowledge of The Odyssey is taken as a background against which Joyce expects him or her to read the events of a day in Dublin, and Leopold and Molly Bloom are drastic revisions of Odysseus and Penélopê. Here, finally, Telémakhos comes into his own in the person of Stephen Dedalus. Besides being an experiment in narrative form and language, Joyce’s Ulysses aims to be more encyclopedic of modern culture than Homer’s Odyssey is of Mycenaean and Dark Age Greece.

  It would be impertinent to pretend to analyze the relations between Joyce’s modern masterpiece and Homer’s Odyssey in depth here. Let its existence suffice to testify to the vitality of Homer’s Odyssey in our century. Nor did that vitality exhaust itself in the mythic modernism of a Joyce or Kazantzakis.3 The most recent publication of the 1992 winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, Derek Walcott, is a long narrative poem entitled Omeros.4 Achille, Hector, Antigone, Philoctete live and love in a West Indian milieu. Their characters and story are even more loosely tied to The Iliad and The Odyssey than Joyce’s Ulysses is to the latter. What links the world Walcott creates to that of Homer’s poem is a vision of a shared landscape and the ethos that emerges from it. I say “landscape,” but it is as much a shore-and seascape. The shore Walcott evokes is at once a directly observed Caribbean and a Mediterranean refracted through Homeric recalls. As in The Odyssey, a tired castaway can find rest in a bed of leaves where the sea washes the land, and Homer, too, after so many centuries of cultural seafaring, is reconstituted once again.5

  HOMER AND THE ARCHEOLOGICAL READER

  Even without reference to the rich afterlife Homer’s Odyssey has enjoyed, reading the original poem in our time involves us willy-nilly in a project of archeology. This is true, in different ways, whether we read Homer in a Greek or an English text. In fact, The Iliad and The Odyssey have always demanded archeological reading. Let me explain what I conceive to be the task of the archeological reader.

  Discussions of readers and audiences tend to assume Homer’s original audience as the ideal. There is no question that such an audience shared with the poet a code of language, ideas, and assumptions that enabled them to receive The Odyssey with a simplicity and immediacy that can never be re-created. It is often presumed that our aim ought to be just such a reception. Leaving aside the obvious consideration that this is not possible, and without considering how close an approximation could be achieved, we ought to ponder whether it is even desirable.

  Perhaps in part because it is impossible to recover, the state of the ideal audience is presented as if it were Edenic, a paradise now lost to us. The immediacy of reception that characterizes that lost innocence is, however, by nature unreflective. Masked behind the longing to experience a work precisely as its first audience did is often a desire not to think about the context of its production (as the first audience did not need to); not to analyze the dependency of meaning and interpretation on time, place, and culture; and not to reflect about the work of reading itself. Rather than lament our fallen state, I propose that we consider the benefits of distance, reflection, even—perhaps—objectivity. All of which is not to say that trying to imagine our way back into the mind of the first audience ought not to be one of our tactics in reading. But by making it only one part of the package, we are less likely to overvalue it and, out of desperation, to claim that we have in fact achieved what can only be approximated by an act of informed imagination.

  The archeological reader may learn other things about a text by coming to it after a careful process of discovery, that is, of uncovering. Nor are the layers through which we dig wholly detritus. Of course, the later accretions and responses to a text are not in any sense part of the original, but they are of interest in the context of a wider cultural history. Even if not part of the text itself, they are a necessary component of our study of it, since we as readers stand at the end of an ongoing process of interpretation. We may of course prefer to ignore our own history as a reading culture, but the archeological reader always chooses the hard work of analysis and discrimination over the fantasy of unmediated response. This is not to deny us moments of such response. I will maintain that at least part of the time we must work to enjoy the spilling of blood in an act of just vengeance as I imagine the first audience would have, and as Homer expected them to. But to know that we should in some sense have this response is already a historically self-conscious position; it can be indulged responsibly only as part of the larger and more complex response I call archeological reading. Archeological reading is the kind we must do whenever we can, and certainly whenever our aim is to study a text in the context of the culture in which it was created.

  POET AND POEM, SINGER AND SONG

  The Homeric Odyssey requires archeological reading at an even deeper level, since it is not simply the creation of one poet for one audience at one time or in one place. So complex is the puzzle of the origins of the Homeric epics that scholars and amateurs alike refer to “the Homeric question.” (Indeed, to make it sound yet more portentous, English speakers often use the German die homerische Frage in tribute to the nation which has wrestled most earnestly with the question over the past two centuries.) What is the Homeric question? Simply put, it is Who was Homer? The question is as old as the establishment of a literate culture in Greece in the sixth century B.C.E. In the earliest phase, argument centered on questions which now appear simple. For example, Where did Homer live? Many towns vied for the honor. Which poems did Homer wr
ite? During this phase, many were willing to ascribe to Homer considerably more segments of the epic cycle than the two major poems alone—The Iliad and The Odyssey—that have come down to us in their entirety. Finally, which group or guild of rhapsodes recited the authentic version of the Homeric poems? (The rhapsodes were so called from the staff—Greek rhabdos—they held while declaiming, reciting the poems by rote, or, more likely, because they “stitched” [rhaptein] one song to another.)

  By the Classical period (fifth and early fourth centuries B.C.E.), the Homeric poems had long been the backbone of Greek moral education, but even in that increasingly literate and literary time, the vast majority of Greeks would have heard Homer more often than they read him. In the Ion, Plato gives us a portrait of a rhapsode who performed in Athens and throughout Greece in Socrates’ own day, in other words, in late-fifth-century B.C.E. Athens, the age of Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes (to name dramatists only). Plato’s brief dialogue is well worth reading, not only as a portrait of a popular rhapsode and thus evidence for this important stage in the transmission of the Homeric poems but above all for the critique of the claims the educational and cultural establishment made for Homer, a critique that Plato puts into the mouth of his Socrates.

  Greek culture and rule were extended far beyond the traditional borders of Greek influence by Alexander the Great, originally of Macedonia. The wider, more cosmopolitan world he left at his death in 323 B.C.E. is commonly known as the Hellenistic world. The small islands of self-rule and limited democracy that characterized the Classical period were overwhelmed by regional satrapies. Under the patronage of local princes, particularly in Pergamum on the coast of Asia Minor and in Alexandria, scholars collected and compared the texts of the Homeric poems. Under this new scientific scrutiny—already Alexander’s tutor, Aristode, had addressed “Homeric questions” at the conclusion of the first book of his Poetics—a range of philological problems emerged. To begin with, the assemblage of multiple copies of the Homeric poems made it clear that the texts varied. More than one scholar set himself the task of preparing an authoritative text. How was one to decide which word to choose when different papyrus rolls offered different readings? Which lines should be accepted or rejected when the texts varied radically or when some passages were repeated and others seemed crude to the tastes and expectations of highly literate Hellenistic scholars?