Epic Win: Why the Odyssey is having a moment | Books
Wand live in a moment of odyssey. The Greek epic on the tortuous tortuous journey and full of adventure of Odysseus after the end of the Trojan war, probably composed between the end of the seventh century Ba great works of art of the past, those that are read and reread over the centuries, have a way of doing it. You examine them on a certain day and their complexities suddenly seem singular, different from how they seemed 20 years ago, 50 years ago, yesterday; They offer something new, something that illuminates the world again. It is time for the Odyssey to capture the light.
Homer’s epic has obviously re -emerged through two important recent translations and two main films. British classicista Emily Wilson’s translation He was published at the height of the #Metoo movement in 2017, and not long before the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. His readiness to the interest of poetry for the dynamics of structural power, including gender dynamics – themes he pulled out in his introductory essay and public conversations on the translation – seemed to directly hit the political moment, and his version has become a cultural phenomenon at his own company. Another, by the American literary scholar, writer and classicist Daniel Mendelsohn, will be released this month; It will be the new Penguin Classics Edition, a successor of the 30 -year -old Robert Fagles translation and, before then, to the version of Ev Riet, to which he worked during the Second World War, while the bombs fell to London.
The translations of Wilson and Mendelsohn, somehow, are conflicting couples: Wilson’s, in the epic English metro of Iambic pentameter, is fleet, full of jokes and exciting, in the foreground the rapid and electrifying rhythm of the original. Mendelsohn’s is much wider; He chose a more spacious six -toe line that detaches himself as close as possible to the original love without losing the complexity and strength of Homer’s language. The result is more languid: if Wilson’s Homer Tottini, the Bobins of Mendelsohn. Translation is a game of choice and compromise. By definition, a translator cannot carry every aspect of the original in another language and cultural context. Reading any translation, perhaps above all of a poetic text, means reading an interpretation, a poem that has been filtered through the skills and concerns of another intelligence.
Mendelsohn has been worried about the odyssey for a long time: his brilliant memorial On the teaching that was published in 2017. Part of the reason he is in the air right now, he thinks, is that “perhaps not only after the war, but perhaps post-ideological. It is a world in which all the old certainties have crumbled”. What calls the “post-essence” of the Odyssey is, he says, “not only that the Trojan war is over, but that everything on which everyone counted during the war, including the model of heroism that made war possible, is now over”. The cover of its new translation is an illustration, clean and clear with the hint of a Japanese wooden block print on it, of a small figure of silhouetted on the background of mountains, sun and sea. A lonely man, an isolated man, against the greatest forces of himself.
The films are another form of translation, from one vehicle to another. It will be another year earlier Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey is releasedplayed by Matt Damon as Odysseus. A characteristic of the Odyssey is its rich and loop narrative structure, which echoes its protagonist’s intriguing and complex mind. The fifth word of the epic is PolitoposLiterally “turn in many ways”: it is an epithet for Odysseus, which brings the strength of him as cunning and subtle and very traveled, very wandering. Wilson makes him “complicated”, to bring moral ambiguity; Mendelsohn goes with “who has had so many ways of roundabout”, mentioning a geographical and mental involution.
Nolan – which has a shape with narrative complexity, especially in films such as Start AND Principle – It could be said that he has a armchair creative mind. It is difficult to imagine that it will not want to dramatize the adventures with the capture of the sea of the Odyssey: the intertwining of the hero with the cyclops, the sirens that destroy the man, the witch circumstances that are, in the poetry told by another plot. But another new film based on Odyssey, The returnby Uberto Pasolini, instead he chooses to do something very particular with the Homeric text. His script, by John Collee and the late Edward Bond and Pasolini himself, is eliminating every notion of gods, monsters and witches; There are no maritime adventures for Ralph Fiennes’s Odysseus, without dying of Homer’s folklore and magic (or humor). Instead, all his attention is concentrated on what takes place on Ithaca, the house of the island where Odysseo’s wife Penelope, played by Juliette Binoche and his son Telemachus, awaits his return after 20 years of absence.
That island is certainly not an Aegean paradise: it is hard, isolated, swept by the wind – a desolate landscape that reminded me of the novel by Colm Toíbín of 2017 House of nameswhich also deals with the consequences of the Trojan war, vaguely based on Euripides and Aeschilo and which is the same way raked by the gods. When Fiennes’s Odysseus lands on his island, his crazy and naked body is face down and close to death on the beach. This is a departure: in Homer’s poetry, Odysseus’s eventual return is protected by the goddess, and returns home with a stock of wealth; Just suspicious of what could wait for him, it disguises himself like a beggar. Pasolini’s Odysseus, however, is truly a man who remained nothing left if not his ingenuity and his yarn of Old Warrior’s body.
What kept him away for so long, in this version of the story, is shame – has lost all the men who have put themselves with him from Ithaca – and, we deduce, trauma of war. He lived with another woman in a place that is easier to be at home; And it is not clear why it is back. Above all, the Odysseus of Fiennes is, unlike Homer’s talkative pendant, a man of silence, a man who rejects the narrative, whose life is hidden in depth within himself. It is a gloomy reading of poetry, but in tune with our times; All over the world the soldiers are really returning home, changed and scarred in a myriad of ways, with stories that cannot tell.
For Pasolini and his two hypnotizing central actors, the way in which Odysseus and Penelope gradually come to recognize each other, in the utmost sense of the word, is anxious, full of mutual suspicion and repressed anger, before a last, tenitive of the tenderness. Perhaps the most surprising passage of the film, however, is when Odysseus turns his arrows on the pretenders who have harassed Penelope and consumed his wealth. He kills them all, transforming his home into a bloody battlefield and inducing the Telemaco in the brutal codes of violent virility. All this is there in the original. Poetry was interpreted through the lens of the war trauma at least from the book of Jonathan Shay of 2002 Odysseus in America, in which the psychiatrist reads poetry alongside the problems faced by the US soldiers who had returned from Vietnam – trauma that sometimes took place as Outburation of terrible violence.
Odysseus, therefore, brings with him the war at home. But in the Iliad, the Homeric poetry set during the Trojan war is a very different character. Here, Odysseus is part of a collective unit, an ensemble player in an army. He is a ruthless fighter, an excellent negotiator, an occasional spy; He lives with heroic codes. On the contrary, the Odysseus of the Odyssey is a lonely, a man who masks himself, who is about to get out of trouble; Those who spread so much that his identity can also be lost for himself, as Mendelsohn points out in his introduction to the new translation. When the cyclope asks for his name, Odysseus replies notoriously, “ou tis” – meaning, none. In a sense, it is a comic moment: the hero has just blinded the terrifying cyclops, so that when the giant with his eye to one eye tries to evoke by helping him to his friends: “” nobody “is attacking me!”
But the moment also serves, it suggests to Mendelsohn, to suggest to one of the deepest modern questions-and seem modern: “How do we know who someone is? How do we know who we are ourselves? What is the difference between our inner and external lives?” These questions follow the character until the end of poetry. The reader is left to wonder: in what sense are he and Penelope the same people who greeted 20 years earlier? “Although the goal is reinstatement in the collective, family, marriage, community and kingdom, poetry never shows it,” says Mendelsohn. “Poetry ends on the verge of all this, but in reality you never see it as part of anything, except as the subject of his own machinations.”
The translation of the Odyssey of Ev Riet, the first classic of Penguin, became a bestseller in 1946, his story of a return soldier who falls into the hands of thousands of return soldiers. If there are too much things full of pain to look directly, the distance of the myth can help.
The Iliad is the poetry of death. Death chases its lines, the blood immerses him. Countless young men appear in poetry just to be demolished. His hero, Achilles, merciless scithes through hundreds of bodies in an attempt to slap his pain and the fury for the killing of his beloved companion, patroclus. But in the center of the Odyssey there is life and survival. This survival is not pretty, comfortable or dignified. It implies a profound loss: of the companions, of the house, of a sense of the place, of the status, of belonging, of identity – and when those things are restored, it is certainly not, exactly, what has been resumed. But Odysseus is alive. He is alive, breathe, he continues.
