This website is dedicated to the slow accumulation and gradual interpretation of knowledge through the play of research.
This website is dedicated to the slow accumulation and gradual interpretation of knowledge through the play of research.
I am reading Robert Fagles' Odyssey right now, and I must say it is brilliantly executed and a stunning, spellbinding read. It has been many years since I last read about Odysseus, in the Fitzgerald translation, my only previous source for the work (I don't yet know Homeric Greek?).
I have only just reached book two, and I feel compelled to comment because of the sudden clarity I have felt about Homer?'s brilliance as poetry — I speak of the author as poetry because only in this form does the very idea of the person "Homer" take shape. There is no Homer except in verse.
It is not only Homer's creative in medias res opening... this has been imitated in so many other literatures that we fail to feel its freshness. But the complexity and beauty of it! The way the poetry acknowledges beforehand the many corners of the tale, events brought forth as bywords in the discourse of the gods, who are taking counsel over the fate of Odysseus?.
Athena? is determined to bring him home. She conceives of a plan involving Odysseus' son, Telemachus. She visits Telemachus in human form, urging him to rid the house of all suitors, to sail forth in search of Odysseus, and ultimately, to slay every last one of the lollygagging suitors, living by theft in his father's house, giving them a "blood wedding" in Fagles' incandescent phrase.
This is a thought-provoking sequence for students of religion, who may marvel at the ease with which the narrative imagines a gender-swapping Goddess walking among humans, promoting her bloodthirsty plans, and lifting up the courage and hatred and downright manliness of a weakling teenager.
Anyway... an awesome read.