This book, a magnificent, weighty feat of translation by celebrated author Daniel Mendelsohn brings the great epic, Homer’s Odyssey to vividly poetic new life. The author is known widely for his essays on classical literature and culture, gives us a line-by-line rendering of the Odyssey that’s both engrossing as poetry and so true to its source. He rejects the modernising and streamlining approach of many recent translations, by artfully reproducing the epic’s formal qualities- meter, alliteration, assonance, and in doing, restores to Homer’s masterpiece its archaic grandeur.
In some ways the Odyssey needs no introduction but a general knowledge of history that covers geographical, religious, moral, political, cultural and societal context, certainly frames the backstory. Over the nearly 30 centuries since Homer’s thrilling adventure about a hero, Odyssey’s homecoming from the Trojan War began to circulate its story, characters, and themes have become tightly woven into the fabric of our literature, art, music and drama, that they seem to the readers, inevitably natural.
Whether you are reading Virgil’s Aeneid or watching The Wizard of Oz or Finding Nemo, you are enjoying a story that borrowers the Odyssey’s plot– a hero, separated from home and loved ones, must wander among strange peoples and fantastical places during a difficult and often dangerous journey before arriving at last to reclaim family and homeland, which were drastically changed by the politics and economy than when he left. Equally, making your way through J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye or Stephen King’s Stand by Me, you are following a metaphorical arc first traced by Homer. Think Ulysses by James Joyce uses the Roman name for Homer’s hero with large themes of his epic proving to be enduring. His desperation to return home tempered by his lust and curiosity about strange places through which he wanders.
He is a gritty survivor, in stark contrast to the haughty warrior. Odysseus’s fraught interactions with immortals such as the nymph Kalypso whose offer of eternal life and youth if he rejects returning to his aging wife, forces us, like the hero, to grapple with the meaning of morality, and mortality as compared to human love. The epic’s complex portrayal of its morally ambivalent main character often leaves destruction and sorrow in their wake. It wasn’t a right conferred by the g-ds when Kalypso offered him immortality. Odysseus’s expertise as a talented raconteur and on occasion, an expert liar is backed up by a history of poetry and legend-filled stories. And so we read the story today with a bracing sense of dejavu, and we feel we know the narratives, met the character, except for the Cyclops. This work, famous for its exciting narrative of the hero’s adventures in exotic worlds and among strange creatures, is in fact preoccupied above all with the biz of being a human being– an identity that turns out to be defined by relationships: between hosts and guests, strangers and intimates, foreigners and countrymen, mortals and immortals; between the idealised past and the troubled present, the dead and the living; between man and woman, spouses and lovers, parents and children.
Don’t be surprised when, at the end of the story, it becomes clear that the object of Odysseus’s many wanderings through time and space was not simply to reach Ithaka , or even to reach his son, his wife, and his father, but rather to be reintegrated into the entire web of relationships–emotional, familial, political– that define his homeland and hence, define him.
I found so many new discoveries about the complexities that cast their net over Athenian and Agean dominance and fall, to ensure my delving deeply into historical and allegorical literature. Fascinating read by sn author who never fails to satisfy.
