#you can find odysseus funny in some moments but do not use those to paint a completely different character

[nikoisme]

Okay something that i've noticed that really rubs me the wrong way is the infantilization of Odysseus. I only see this in the epic the musical tag, which i think says a lot. Even though epic is a loose adaptation of the odyssey, I think that homer's odysseus and epic's odysseus should be seen as seperate characters.

Epic's odysseus is definitely watered down, written so his character was easy to understand and consume by the audience to fit the story format (2h musical in this case). Even then, you should hold respect for this version as well due to the fact that he is based off of homer's odysseus, who holds an important place in greek mythology, history and culture.

Not everything Odysseus did has to be justifiable (eg. in Epic his revelation of identity to Polyphemus is written as an act of grief, when in The Odyssey it's hubris). He didn't do everything for the love of his wife. There were things that he DID do for her,, there are the things that can not be exactly morally justifiable or explained, but then again there are the things he did that are explained by the time period and societal views. Odysseus was a character that came to life in a completely different time period, remember that. As that was well over thousands of years ago, it looks like his motives are explained through a lens that modern audiences could understand: for example love, grief etc. That is not to say they weren't present, but they are not the main and only motives.

I think it has to do with the fact that odysseus is a hero - but today's views of what a hero is is different than the ones of the past. Kleos was a big thing, and as heroes were often those who toed the lined between divinity and humanity,, often was the case that it doesn't matter if you're objectively good as long as you're great. (Now we could start a discussion of what good exactly means but that's not what i'm here to talk about). Not to say that there weren't heroes who were not good! Perseus, for example, could be seen as good. But Odysseus not so much, which is why i think that watering him down to a story of going from kind to ruthless is a risky thing.

Odysseus is remembered for what he is presented as in the odyssey, and his struggles could resonate with people throughout the centuries. He was great, he did noble things but he also did bad things - which is why i think Epic's odysseus just takes away so much from homer's odysseus.

Tl;dr: keep Epic and Odyssey odysseus as two seperate characters, but still hold respect for the fact that Odysseus himself is important to the greek culture.

(I am not Greek or a professional on this subject, these are just some personal thoughts!)

[goldendichotomy]

                                                  -) A START (-

SKINSHIP - bonding through the intimacy of touch, especially of closeness between parent and child.

If parenting is a partnership, then that of yours was a dichotomy.  That word that would come to mean plenty flew over the head of a small youth, a creature toddling after a mother with bright laughter and callused hands or a father with soft eyes and a gentle line for a mouth.  Every argument was a closed door affair, with voices pitched, late hours, music playing like serenity from record players attached to room to room speakers until they were drowned out into a white noise.  You grow used to the sounds without connecting them, realizing that Sinatra meant money or Bach referred to the cold edge of parenting disagreements.  

You grow older.  Bit by bit, and you learn.  Cooking, the beginnings of art, the raising of your voice in song from callused hands.  Theories and thought and the open palms you offer other children, the tired broken ones big kids leave behind, from a soft line of a mouth.  You learn.  You learn so much, you learn to hold the world in your hands and to create more beautiful things.  From her, you learn a twisting open heart that makes you dream of faraway places, of people and things.  You learn to dance, and to put color on your mouth and eyes that make you smile until your face aches.  

He tuts.  He snaps his teeth.  You learn soft fabric rubbing over your face, hands bringing your body to stillness.  Instead come tight suits and solemn features, all of which don’t fit the shape of you until, one day, they do.  Only sometimes itching when the right song plays.  When she paints her mouth bright, glistening red, and your stomach aches so painfully you think it might burst.  

ALEATORY - relying on chance or an uncontrolled element in the details of life or in the creation of art.

So much of your veins are poison when she tells you.  Years past and gone, both your minds trapped between something small and something massive even with your bodies already grown and gone.  You play the game on phone calls, claim duty and brightness in classes that you flip away from whenever you have the chance.  Fill yourself with clear liquids and small things that come in baggies at the proper celebrations.  It’s here you fell in love, you think; fell in with the beautiful creature that kissed pills from your mouth and undressed you with a tenderness you didn’t recognize as anything but tragic with your broken mind.  

It becomes a game of sorts.  She folds paper into beautiful flowers, leaves them on your preferred seat in lecture halls to open and read the ink guts hidden within.  So you write her letters responses in backgrounds of paintings displayed on college walls.  On evenings -- or mornings and afternoons too tedious for the life you choose -- the two of you collide.  She tastes like success, like a future underneath all the chalky substances and strawberry alcohol.  Her fingers feel like silk.  Every breath against your chest makes you want to live for it, consume her until your lungs can mimic that pattern for every future day.

But that is something.  This is something else.  You see what this is by the plastic in her hands, the tremble in those fingers no matter how steady her voice is.  She says keep, says don’t want, says career and future and you’re so fucking proud of her that you want to be sick.  Or you’re sick over something else.  A thing you don’t want to put words on, you don’t know that you can.  Saying it is realizing it, is truing it.  Is how you shudder when she says adoption, starts to speak of papers.  

You think, I am useless.  I am fool sailors on Odysseus’ boat that did not plug their ears and thought something good would come of it, lost to the story for their choice.  Picking at your nail beds until blood blossoms, you think, I am in love.  I want, I want, I want more than I want to know those old tastes or feel her lungs, I want.

Aloud, you breathe in and rattling sound.  Take her hands in your own, slender to large.  Cradle them like sacred items.  I don’t have anything, you say, I don’t have a future.  But I want it.  Not to force you into anything, vanish if you so desire.  But I want it, even if I don’t know how to keep it safe.

You’ll have to, she says solemnly.  Takes her hands from yours to cradle your cheeks.  Mouth to mouth.  To forehead.  To tip of nose, before drawing back.  You’ll change your mind.

And you, wild and foolish to a fault, hear only the first part.  Call it a light switch flickering, a coin landing on the other side, wind turning over leaves.  You take to classes like religions left behind.  Skirt old familiar buildings full of music and bodies at night, an illness you cannot fill your body with and survive for much longer.  You adjust.  Not change, there is something pure about that word, something selfish about what you are doing that doesn’t match it.  Even if those phone calls back some states away become more sincere now, it is selfish, and you sink into it deeper for finding pride in that.  

Except.  

After graduation.  Long past family meals and farewells, with the cap left behind and gown lost somewhere on the way, she finds you.  Swollen to the touch with the beating of a drum beneath her skin that mesmerizes you, charmer to snake.  She invites you with her.  Solidarity in sobriety, laughter leaving her as she takes you to one of your old haunts.  Hip to hip, arm to arm as you judge the others around you who are lost to sins both your bodies have only recently abandoned.  Imagining futures and failures.  Successes and joys for anyone that pauses long enough for you both to create their story.  

She parts, for a moment.

Is it not funny, how much can happen in a moment?  

A beautiful body can crowd your space, the kind you’d like to paint if you had canvas and easel before you, making paints with the make up of attendees or the liquors scattered around.  He smiles like you’ve been friends for generations.  Offers a drink.  Laughs brighter when you decline.  There are words in your ears that make up for the alcohol.  Fingers on your wrist, and your skin is scalding apart.  Fingers on your waist, and your heart is a jack rabbit caught in a trap.  You sway.  Laugh nervously, laugh until you can pretend you’re not shaking, you’re not following him, that you aren't eager and wild and falling onto a bed you’ve never felt before with a body unfamiliar in so many ways framing your own against the mattress.  

You come apart there.  Dead and broken pieces left behind in sheets tangled and tossed to the side.  Someone else emerges into the morning light, fingers loosely locked into those of a stranger who’s name you choose not to learn, who you will never hold hands with or kiss again after a final one over coffee and bagels.  

Only a few more days pass before the final change, the last knot in the noose of who you were before is formed.  She is small and delicate, she is everything beautiful about her mother and pieces you don’t recognize as hers, know cannot be yours in their purity.  Every cry shakes the hospital room.  Could be the sound that made Mount Vesuvius erupt and swallow Pompeii in ashes.  And you love her, you love her more than life, more than yourself, more than the selfishness that cleaned you up as quickly as anything.  You love her more than art and the people who raised you.  

Her name is Philomene, her last name is yours, and her mother is resplendent with sweat on her cheeks and blood between her legs still being bathed away by nurses.  

There is nothing to do but kiss her.  Even if it feels different than it did before -- or if the feeling is just one you did not recognize until now -- you kiss her, for thanking her for this life in your arms cannot be done through words.  Instead, you say, I love you.

And she, to all the things unsaid -- Your life will be very difficult.  I love you too.

MUTTERSEELENALLEIN - utterly alone, as of refugees from their home country; alone in the desert.

Into the phone that feels like glass against your ear, sharp and slicing with every shifting motion and cheap word you have to spill, you speak.  Croak, maman, I think we need to come home.  I can’t do this by myself anymore, I want-- and laugh like the next words weren’t deadly, like they wouldn’t leave your darling alone on the streets if they came true, cold and wailing as she stumbled on unsteady legs.  Nothing’s okay, maman, please.  Please help me come back.

For a moment, there is silence.  

No.  There is breathing, and a rhythm beneath it.  Faint music that you must be hallucinating, the sweet notes of Bach as though you were already home.  Avoiding one more of their arguments to the rise and fall of a piano.  Bach, for parental arguments.  You flex stiff fingers on the black plastic clutched by your white knuckles and wait.  Pretend you cannot hear those murmurs, for you do not dare try to translate them.  The minutes creep.  Strangers on the street come and go, not even a look to the man and little one crowding into a phone booth.

Then, a more present breathing, a hitching that you catch before it instinctively strikes into your own.  Inhale.  Hitch.  Pause.  Exhale.  Too light for anyone but your mother.  Alec, she says, wavering in the lilt of her voice you’ve grown familiar with from a time you cannot hope to remember.  Yet here you are, reaching for it.  Struggling to breathe as you lean your head against the dirty glass of the stall around you.  

Alec, again, a shattering prayer around you both.  We love you very much, but.  You see, you’ve... these are your choices.  And we can’t support them.  So I don’t think you should come back home to us.

You take little time in setting the phone back into place.  Staring down at your hands, ten thousand things that could have been spoken explode into your mind like a cacophony.  The only person that will be with me when I slit my throats is a little girl, not a man.  Brittle.  Who is the ‘we,’ maman?  Did he teach me to take care of the others on the sides of streets?  Brutalized.  But I’ll change, I promise, please there is nothing else for me here, please maman I--

But what leaves you is this: a savage sound, an animal one, a fist that hits the glass and then hits it again, and again, and mimics until cracks from the pressure and slices at your knuckles.  No.  Until she weeps, the sound too much, her ears fragile and her eyes filling with water that spills just like that from your own.  Sinking besides her, you pull her into your chest and let her bury her face there.  Pretend blood does not stick to the loose strands of hair from her braid that kiss your fingers.  

I’m sorry, you say, though a little thing like her cannot understand for what.

[how2to18]

BY MY COUNT, we have seen 27 translations of Homer into English since 2000, so no one can say we languished for want of a new Odyssey. It’s all the more remarkable, then, that Emily Wilson is making her presence felt in so crowded a field. This she does with the full literary arsenal of our age. She tweets, she appears discreetly photographed and interviewed in The New York Times Magazine, and writes for The New Yorker. Her tweeting then becomes a topic in itself for The New Yorker and Bustle. She makes the rounds on two continents for readings and chats. Good for her! We classical scholars can only rejoice to see a colleague hit the big time. Of course, tweeting is an offensive weapon, and she has ruffled feathers by taking her predecessors to task for misogyny — while also tweeting footage of dreamy Mark Ruffalo reading her verse for some celebrity cachet. So let me anticipate the inevitable criticism with an observation: Emily Wilson is not breaking norms of behavior as the first woman to translate Homer’s Odyssey into English; she is fulfilling them. From the outset, our English translators have all been on the make. Take our founding father, George Chapman. His translation is surrounded by punchy commentary and wild claims, both for Homer’s genius and his own bona fides as a translator — to the extent of calling one critic an “envious windfucker” for suggesting he had not really read the Greek (the word refers to a type of kestrel, so maybe it’s not as bad as it sounds).

Chapman’s successors were reinventing the book business, effectively, with innovative schemes. John Ogilby made use of a clever subscription drive, getting wealthy aristocrats to pay for the illustrations (which he adorned with their crests) to help float his huge folio Homers and Virgil. Alexander Pope was the ultimate artist of the deal; his Homer made him one of the first people in history able to live off the proceeds of a literary translation. So before the critics dismiss Wilson for taking to Twitter and making the most of her moment, I say look to her predecessors and know that Chapman and Pope would definitely have had Twitter accounts. Translations have a way of finding new readerships, and if Wilson is actively responding to her readers and building a different audience for Homer, then she is doing the gods’ work and well deserves a silver bowl — maybe even a gleaming chariot — for her efforts.

“Tell me about a complicated man.” So this new Odyssey begins, and with this verse Wilson plants her flag of difference. It’s a line that introduces a fundamental ambivalence toward the epic’s hero, whom Renaissance translators strove to make a wise and stoic mirror of princes. Wilson dove into the meanings pooled in the keyword polytropon and swam up with “complicated,” the kind of euphemism you use to describe a person you once admired, but who has hurt you. It’s kind of a trilingual play on words, as “much turned/turning” shades into “folded up” (from Latin complicare) and comes out, “complicated” (we never really sense the physicality of our Latinate words, but the classicist learns to savor it). The funny thing is, though this verse complicates Odysseus’ stature, it greatly simplifies the syntax of Homer’s opening sentence, which includes a number of snaking clauses and actually ends on line five. But this single verse introduces both her take on the work’s hero and a poetics of reduction that she observes rather ruthlessly in order to make a poem that matches Homer’s line for line. That’s quite a challenge when rendering Homer’s dactylic hexameter (ranging from 12 to 17 syllables) into iambic pentameter (comprising 10 or 11 syllables), a meter that slips behind easily unless you toss things overboard. But Wilson would rather match the old bard verse for verse than allow herself the indulgences of past translators. The result is a lean, wiry Homer, shorn of his more ornamental features. In this she is consistent, even to a fault.

Take, for example, the moment we might imagine a female translator would relish: Penelope’s challenge of the bow contest to the suitors. Male translators in the past have made Penelope very much a queen in this moment — or as Pope says, a “matron, with majestic air.” Wilson’s Penelope is remarkably understated, sounding almost depressive by contrast.

She said,

           “Now listen, lords. You keep on coming to this house every day, to eat and drink, wasting the wealth of someone who has been away too long. Your motives are no secret. You want to marry me. I am the prize. So I will set a contest. This great bow belonged to godlike King Odysseus.”

Contrast this with the high dudgeon of Robert Fitzgerald’s Penelope:

                                       “My lords, hear me: Suitors indeed, you commandeered this house to feast and drink in, day and night, my husband being long gone, long out of mind. You found no justification for yourselves — none except your lust to marry me. Stand up, then: we now declare a contest for that prize.”

Fitzgerald’s Penelope is irritated and indignant, pointing out they are violating her husband’s space. Wilson’s in contrast only vaguely refers to a “someone” whose wealth is being wasted, though she is still very much attached to the house. Fitzgerald resorted to the plural of majesty for the contest’s big reveal; Wilson’s speaks in short sentences, with diamond clarity but little defiance. We have come a long way from Pope’s, “If I the prize, if me you seek to wife / Hear the conditions, and commence the strife.”

Epic blank verse is making a comeback recently, and to her credit Wilson knows how to craft her lines in the most flexible way, including a number of those ridiculously named “feminine” endings (an unstressed 11th syllable — this is only shocking if your notion of iambic pentameter comes from Pope and not Shakespeare, whose “To Be or Not to Be” starts with five 11-syllable lines in a row). But while her verse is traditional and flexible, her syntax is so clipped and terse at times she seems to be channeling Hemingway. Her sense of poetic diction is so austerely modern it’s as though she has jettisoned all the frippery from Homer’s argosy, paring it down to the frame. Perhaps it’s just as well — Odysseus only needed a raft to set out for Ithaca.

The result pitches between the ancient and modern as any translation must if it chooses to pursue the vitality of storytelling over the archeology of poetic form. Translating epic is, after all, a marathon, not a sprint; you have to be careful what you grab onto. Wilson’s verse may be traditional, but it contains an interesting variety of modern conveniences. Canapés and kebabs are now being served aboard Homer. Odysseus is a “scalawag.” Demeter has “cornrows in her hair” — anachronistically, if the metaphor is based on new-world maize; ironically, when we think she is an agricultural goddess.

Wilson shows humane concern about the status of slave women, though we might quibble that calling female slaves “girls” may not be not as enlightened as she thinks (to Homer they are women), nor is the suggestion that their escapades with Penelope’s suitors were things those men “made them do.” No one seems to believe this in the poem, including the other slaves, and Wilson has chucked the option of class rebellion in favor of a protective if bougie instinct to save their reputations. There’s a thread of philological justification for this, and she is right to tweet out no one actually refers to them as sluts and whores in Homer. But that strong language of past translations was focalized through Telemachus and Odysseus, not the narrator. The brutality of the women’s execution by mass hanging — sadly, perhaps the only thing Telemachus thinks up on his own — still speaks for itself: uppity slaves get lynched.

Wilson strives quietly at moments for striking imagery in order to deliver on epic’s “poetry” beyond the ticking of plot points. This typically occurs when she faces the dilemma of Homer’s formulaic lines, part of the repetitive boilerplate of traditional poetic diction that unnerves the translator; “rosy-fingered Dawn” and “winged words” are already clichés in English. Wilson responds with imagistic variations: “The early Dawn was born, her fingers bloomed,” “When vernal Dawn first touched the sky with flowers,” “When early Dawn, the newborn child with rosy hands, appeared.” Homer’s functional formularity thus becomes an occasion to wax lyrical, as if to turn the routine signposts of oral tradition into so many miniaturist paintings. This lyricization of epic may restore the poetry through the backdoor, but it reveals the tension between Homeric and modern notions of poetry. Again, Wilson has the virtue of consistency in her choices here. As a classics professor, an Englishwoman at home in the United States, a deep reader of English and American verse, Emily Wilson has come by her Homer honestly. Her poem has the stamp of a clear and consistent vision, and brings Odysseus home to us again — cunning, eloquent, murderous; in sum, complicated.

¤

Richard H. Armstrong is author of A Compulsion for Antiquity: Freud and the Ancient World (Cornell University Press, 2005) and the forthcoming Theory and Theatricality: Classical Drama in the Age of Grand Hysteria (Oxford University Press), as well as the co-editor, with Alexandra Lianeri, of the forthcoming A Companion to the Translation of Greek and Latin Epic (Wiley-Blackwell).

The post Homer for Scalawags: Emily Wilson’s “Odyssey” appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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