The Odyssey by Homer | REVIEW

Hi guys, it's Claire. Welcome back. I don't know about you guys, but quarantine has led me down some unexpected reading pathways these past few weeks, and as a prime example of this, I recently read The Odyssey by Homer, which has not at any point been on my TBR. The new Emily Wilson translation did catch my eye when it came out a couple of years ago, but other than that brief flicker of interest, I assumed that I had left Odysseus the city sacker long behind me in high school. But here we are. I ordered this book on complete impulse a few weeks ago, and Emily Wilson's introduction and translator's note are so riveting and illuminating that by the sheer force of those alone, I was propelled through all 24 books of the actual poem. And I have to say, there has been something particularly and kind of surprisingly comforting about reading a very, very old book right now. In case you didn't know, The Odyssey is an epic poem attributed to Homer that emerged out of the oral tradition and is believed to have been first written down in ancient Greek sometime between the 8th and 7th centuries BCE. It tells the story of the Greek hero Odysseus on his journey back to his kingdom of Ithaca after the Trojan War, all told he spends 10 years at war in Troy, and then another 10 years trying to get home to his wife Penelope and his son Telemachus, who in the interim are trying to fend off a mass of suitors who have descended upon the family home. I'm not a classicist, so I'm not really equipped to critique or comment on The Odyssey as a literary or historical text. So what I thought I would do instead is talk about rereading The Odyssey as an adult and some of the things that I had misremembered or completely forgotten since reading parts of it as a freshman in high school. And I should say, I remembered a lot more than I thought I did. I remembered a lot of the key ideas, things like Gnostos and Xenia. Some of the other major things that my teenage brain retained about The Odyssey are Odysseus being gone for a long time, Penelope's loom trick, Telemachus existing, the suitors, epithets, Enmedios race, Poseidon being pissed off the whole time, Athena being wise, the Cyclops, the sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, and what at the time to me seemed like a happy ending for Odysseus. And here are some of the things that I was surprised to learn in rereading The Odyssey in the year 2020. Firstly, I remembered that the poem famously begins in Enmedios race, in the middle of things. But I didn't remember that you don't really meet Odysseus, the hero of this story, until about book five of the poem. Certainly the fame and absence of Odysseus loom over the first four books of the poem, but we don't actually see him. We only hear of him. Book one opens with Homer's call to the Muse to quote, 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 pain he suffered on the sea, and how he worked to save his life and bring his men back home. So Homer invokes the story of Odysseus. We hear that he is currently trapped on Calypso's island, and from there we are swept up to Mount Olympus, where the sharp-eyed goddess Athena beseeches her father Zeus to finally allow Odysseus to return home. Athena sends Hermes off to deal with Calypso while she travels to Ithaca to rouse the courage of Odysseus's son Telemachus, who then spends the next three books sailing to the homes of the old Greek heroes Nestor and Menelaus in search of news about his father. Sorry for that spark note summary, but yeah, the first chunk of this book is about Telemachus being told to man up and everyone else, mortals and gods alike, talking and telling stories about Odysseus. Which is worth noting because these certainly aren't the only stories within a story that we'll encounter throughout the poem. But before we get there, once we do finally meet up with Odysseus in book five, we stay with him for most of the rest of the poem. And one of the most jarring realizations I had was that I had completely misremembered Odysseus's character. I think I remembered him very much in the mold of a Judeo-Christian hero, i.e. an ultimately honorable and virtuous figure who has been blessed by the goddess Athena for his inherent goodness. I remembered him as a kind of everyman, family man, straight out of central casting kind of hero, when in reality he is a much sharper and shiftier character than that. Which makes sense because in her excellent introduction Emily Wilson notes that the word heros in archaic Greek usually just meant warrior and did not imply the virtue or nobility of character that is part of our modern conception of a hero. So yeah, I didn't remember how sneaky and slippery, how deceptive and at times dishonorable Odysseus can be. This guy is like wily as f**k and can be hot-headed at times. He's kind of a pirate and a raider. He leads the majority of his men to their deaths. He like catfishes and taunts his poor old dad Laertes after they're finally reunited after 20 years. And at one point he even decapitates a supplicating priest under his own roof. And like I understand why he does some of those things but you also have moments where you're like, is this necessary? He's a man who's cunning and cautious but also sometimes reckless beyond belief. A man who is racked with grief and homesickness but who also like shacks up with a couple of goddesses on his way home. So yeah, I forgot just how much of a man of many turns he is, including his bloodthirsty and vindictive side. And in that vein, just to keep ragging on Odysseus for a second, I had forgotten what a terrible leader he is. And I'm not trying to be hateful about this, it's just like a mathematical fact. He leaves Troy with 12 ships which contain as many as 600 men and zero of those men, those heroes of the Trojan War, make it back to Ithaca. And it's mostly Odysseus's fault. On the way home he decides to sack the city of the Sikones and he loses six men from each ship in the process. Then in another act of piracy he invades the home of Polyphemus the Cyclops, gets six of his men eaten alive, he blinds the Cyclops, and then as he's escaping by the skin of his teeth he thinks it's a great idea to taunt the Cyclops and shouts back, hey if anyone asks you who blinded you tell them it was me, Odysseus, from Ithaca. And Polyphemus is like, great to know my dad's Poseidon and he's gonna f*** you up for the next 10 years and make sure all of your men die. 11 of the 12 ships bound for Ithaca then get destroyed and eaten by the giant lystrigonians. Circe later tells Odysseus that six of his men are definitely gonna die when they have to sail past Scylla. And Odysseus is like, oh man that blows but I'm not gonna tell them about it ahead of time because they're gonna freak out and jump ship. And then the rest of his remaining men get killed by Zeus after eating the cattle of the sun god, which is technically their own fault. But I also kind of feel like Odysseus put them through a lot, you know? But those adventures, fatal though they were, those famous episodes with the Cyclops and Scylla and Charybdis, Circe and the sun god and the sirens, those had always been for me the most memorable parts of the poem and in my mind kind of the core of the poem. And so in rereading it so many years later I was genuinely shocked to discover that the odyssey in the odyssey doesn't actually happen in real time. Instead it's recounted by Odysseus when he has landed on the And the whole story is told in the space of about four books and it's a story within a story. Which leads me to a more important realization, which is that I did not remember and did not appreciate how prominent the conceit of storytelling is throughout the poem. Before we even really meet Odysseus, as I mentioned earlier, his son Telemachus goes to old King Nestor who regales him with stories from Troy and his own journey home. Telemachus then goes to Sparta where Menelaus and Helen tell him more stories about Troy and the story of his father and the Trojan horse. When Odysseus is the guest of the Phaeacians before his identity is revealed he asks their poet bard to sing a story about the Trojan war. During his side trip to the underworld Odysseus meets the shades of Agamemnon and Achilles and Agamemnon laments that the story of his death is an ignominious one full of treachery and disgrace. And when Odysseus finally arrives back in Ithaca and disguises himself as a beggar even his old slave the swineherd Eumaeus has a story to tell and it is one that is exceptionally moving and has its own strains of homesickness and grief. And all of this makes sense in the context of the ancient Greek obsession with fame and reputation and honor, with having a name and a story that is remembered and passed down. Storytelling is also how a lot of these characters grieve. And the other and maybe the biggest thing that I didn't remember about The Odyssey is how much the whole poem is about grief. This book is filled with Greek tears. The tears of Penelope and Telemachus, the tears of old Laertes, the endless tears of Odysseus's men, and the tears of Odysseus himself. The losses and the traumas of the Trojan War haunt this poem and all of the deaths and further losses that Odysseus's men suffer are marked by floods of tears and sometimes animal-like grief. And even moments of joy and reconciliation are tinged with the bitterest kind of sadness. When Telemachus finally recognizes his father on Ithaca, their reunion is described like this. They both felt deep desire for lamentation and wailed with cries as shrill as birds, like eagles or vultures when the hunters have deprived them of fledglings who have not yet learned to fly. That was how bitterly they wept. Their grieving would have continued till the sun went down. So yes, this is a book about Nostos, homecoming, and Xenia, guest friendship, but I had forgotten how much it's a book about the trauma of war and the grief and devastation that ripple out from it for decades after the fact. There are also a couple of striking moments in the poem where Homer twines together the ideas of storytelling and suffering. When Eumaeus the swineherd tells Odysseus his own tale of woe, he says, and take some joy in hearing how much pain we each have suffered after many years of agony and absence from one's home, a person can begin enjoying grief. And when Odysseus and Penelope are finally reunited in their marriage bed, the poem says, and when the couple had enjoyed their lovemaking, they shared another pleasure, telling stories. She told him how she suffered as she watched the crowd of suitors ruining the house, killing so many herds of sheep and cattle and drinking so much wine because of her. Odysseus told her how much he hurt so many other people and in turn how much he had endured himself. She loved to listen and she did not fall asleep until he had told it all. So in those two spots, telling stories of one's suffering is described as being and I found that quite surprising but also very moving. That idea of storytelling as a balm and as a way to commune over shared joy and shared suffering and that idea of storytelling as a kind of monument to all that a person has endured. A couple quick notes about the Emily Wilson translation. As I mentioned earlier, her introduction and translator's note are phenomenal, like worth picking up this edition for those alone. In the translator's note, she outlines some of the key departures that her version makes from earlier translations of the Odyssey. The first major one is her decision to write the entire poem in meter using the same number of lines as the original text. It's impossible to replicate the original meter, which is dactylic hexameter, into English, so instead she uses iambic pentameter, which I had mixed feelings about initially because the lines are shorter than the lines in dactylic hexameter and sometimes you can feel that constriction and that abruptness in the lines, but I ultimately really appreciated that a meter was there because it does really give the text a rhythm and a beautiful swiftness that kind of just carries you through the story. Her other major change was her decision to use fairly contemporary and familiar English in her translation because the original Greek would have been quite accessible to audiences at the time, and I think that works for the most part, but there are a handful of moments where words like babysitter or annoying or get lost do kind of take you out of the text a bit, so I had a few quibbles with that, but otherwise really enjoyed the translation. I haven't read any other full translations of the Odyssey, so I can't really compare it, but I just started the Fagel's translation of the Iliad and even within the first few pages I can already tell that it is much denser and more ornate than Wilson's approach to Homer, but those are all my thoughts on the Odyssey by Homer as translated by Emily Wilson. This whole thing has sent me down a bit of a Homer hole, so I will be back at some point to talk about the Iliad. In the meantime, let me know your thoughts on the Odyssey, various translations of the Odyssey, and if you have any Homer-adjacent recommendations, either classic or contemporary, please feel free to send those my way. As always, thanks so much for watching and I'll see you next time. Bye!