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selenakLike a great many bookish kids of my generation and older, I first encountered the Greek myths - the Trojan War ones included - via a 19th century rendition and bowlderization, by Gustav Schwab. His big collection of Greek and Roman myths was THE standard present for almost a century. Nine years old me was spell bound and didn't notice the bowlderization until as a teenager I read some of Ovid's Metamorphoses in Latin in school, and some of the great theatre plays - Aischylos, Sophocles, Euripides - in German. I don't think I tackled the non-Gustav Schwab Iliad and the Oddyssey until I was in my later twenties, and then it was a nineteeth century translation, too, because as opposed to the Americans and the Brits, for some reason German scholars don't seem to have produced 20th or 21st century translations of Homer. (Retellings, yes. Fictionalisations, yes. Not translations. When I think of the big translation events being celebrated in the last decades, it's inevitably Shakespeare - seriously, you get a new Shakespeare in German pratically every decade, if not more -, and also the 1001 Nights stories (here the particular celebration was around the fact it was a translation not based on the famous French collection but directly on the Arabian tales.) Now I might be wrong here, and missing out on newer German translations, but googling doesn't give me that impression. Whereas in English, the Homer translation business is alive and thriving. What gives, German scholars?
Anyway, having heard much praise of Emily Wilson's translation of the Odyssey, I listened to Claire Dane's rendition of it on Audible, and with the caveat that much to my Latin teachers' frustration, I chose not to learn Greek at school but French and hence am incapable of judging the "translation" part of it myself, I found the praise well deserved. It's a a text fascinating to listen to - including Wilson's introduction, which already is over an hour of listening time, but by no means missable - , and Wilson's decision to use English iambic pentameter makes the verse feel flowing and natural in that language. To requote her alraedy often quoted rendition of the proem illustrates this beautifully:
Odyssey
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 in the storms at sea, and how
he worked to save his life and bring his men
back home. He failed to keep them safe; poor fools,
they ate the Sun God’s cattle, and the god
kept them from home. Now goddess, child of Zeus,
tell the old story for our modern times.
Find the beginning.
Not speaking Greek, I can't judge the accuracy of "a complicated man" versus the "man of twists and turns" of Fagles and the "contending man" of another translation, but purely as a reader/listener, it does strike me a as a good choice to set up the ambiguity of Odysseus right from the start. Similarly, "he failed to keep them safe" versus the "he lost them" I'm more used to from other versions heightens Odysseus' share of responsibility for the loss of his men.
Now, when you, like I, was introduced to the stories comprised in the Odyssey via the 19th century guy Gustav Schwab, who restructed the entire story to a linear fashion and focuses on the sea adventures (as opposed to Homer, who starts when Odysseus' wandering years are nearly over, doesn't put him on stage, so to speak, until a third of the story has passed because the beginning of the epic tells with Telemachus on Ithaca and his quest to find out what happened to his father via visiting Nestor and Menelaus first, and devotes far more page time on Oysseus on Ithaca - i.e. the Quentin Tarantino-esque revenge tale part of the story - than on the sefaring aadventures), that difference in focus and pacing is what inevitably strikes you first. But also all the differences threethousand years make and doesn't make in behavioral codes. Men in the Odyssey cry often and easy. Odysseus and Telemachus most of all, but also the other heroes. There is nothing to indicate this expression of emotion is coded as feminine. Otoh, Odysseus in his rendition of his adventures for his hosts mentions how he and his men directly after leaving Troy and before getting into the first big adventure sacked another city en route, "sharing" all the women and taking all the loot. As you do. This is not in any way seen as bad or unheroic behaviour. As opposed to the suitors' freeloading Listening to the epic instead of reading it and thus unable to skip anything really hammers home the whole idea of sacred hospitality (and being a good guest) as a central value. (Wilson in her introduction points out the epic's setting predates the use of money. Finding a good host on your travels who feasts you, clothes you and ressupplies you is quintessential for any traveller. But abusing this is therefore extra taboo.) And good lord, but the death of Agamemnon is evoked much, much more often than I recalled. (Schwab & Co. must have cut down the Agamemnon references to the bare minimum, because I could remember them only obviously in the underworld visit when the man himself shows up and in Sparta when Menelaos brings up his brother.) It's the constantly upheld fear that this is how Odysseus' return could go, one of the reasons for his disguises and drawn out undercoverness when finally at Ithaca. It's also intriguing to me that the Odyssey, created ca. 800 BC or thereabouts, has Aegisthos as the main instigator and actor in Agamemnon's death, and Clytaimnestra only as his seduced sidekick - she's even presented as at first having hold out against his attempts to seduce her before falling for him. Meanwhile, all the dramatists tackling the House of Atreus some centuries later make Clytaimnestra the main actor and Aegisthos (if he shows up in person at all) her sidekick, and also give her the death of Iphigenia as a key motive (as opposed to simply having fallen for Cousin Aegisthos). Now, dead Agamenon is still bitter about his wife - going as far as to tell Odysseus not to trust any woman, even if Penelope should prove faithful - because of this -, but everyone else evoking this death singles out Aegisthos as the chief villain and barely or not at all mentions Clytaimnestra.
Wilson in her introduction explains that she chose to use the term "slave" for the various more exact (as to their position in the household) signfiers for the various servants instead of the traditional "maid/handmaiden/nurse/steward/sevant" etc. because to a modern reader/listener, the later would imply these people actually get paid for their services and are free. As opposed to be being enslaved. This, btw, had gone right by 9 years old me when I first encountered the story in its bowlederized version; teenage me did realize that Greek household servants in myths were not paid for their labour, but I think I wasn't aware that, say, the swineherd Eumeious was also Odysseus' property as opposed to someone who saw him as his liege lord. For current readers, yes, I magine many if encountering the story for the first time would not consider someone called a maid or a servant to be a slave by necessity, too.
(Of course, one difference between ancient world slavery and US 19th century type of slavery would be that the former wasn't racially connotated and just about anyone could become a slave if their city got sacked (see Trojan women). This does not make a slave less of a slave.)
(Listening, I found it very interesting that the epic has Eurycleia, Odsseus' old nurse, mention Laertes (Odysseus' father) never touched her out of respect for his wife, and later that Penelope ensured Telemachus never put a hand on her maids. These are not addendums by Emily Wilson - I have a prose translation by T.E. Lawrence (yes, that Lawrence) to compare, and it's there as well - and it's an intriguing glimpse as to what was considered "good" behaviour. Given raping women while sacking cities is fine, I think the laudable behaviour here isn't that the female slaves don't get raped by Laertes and Telemachus, respectively, it's that Laertes respects his wife and knows this would be against her wishes, and Telemachus his mother, and/or that Penelope's servants are the absent Odysseus' property, and therefore it would not have been appropriate for his son to have a go.)
Peneleope's female servants being slaves is a point alluded to again in the passage that to my recollection has only gotten fictional attention in the last fifteen years or so (thanks to Margaret Atwood's Penelopeiad), and Wilson in her introduction also singles it out as something which many a previous translator has sawn fit to add additional sexism to, to wit: after the suitors are killed, Odysseus asks his former nurse which of the female slaves have been loyal and which have betrayed him. Eurycleia says out of the fifty women, only twelve were - and here is where the translations vary: having sex/consorting/ other verb with the suitors. Odsseus orders her to get these twelve, who are then made to clean up and help disposing of the bodies of the suitors; then Odysseus tells Telemachus to kill them via sword, but Telemachus, showing initiative without Athena prompting him for the first time in the epic, decides death by sword is too good for them and hangs all twelve. Wilson points out that a great many earlier translations have him refer to them as "sluts" or "whores", which he doesn't in the Greek original. After hearing her stark and visceral version:
[S]o the girls, their heads all in a row,
were strung up with the noose around their necks
to make their death an agony. They gasped,
feet twitching for a while, but not for long.
I checked the Lawrence translation and was glad to find good old Lawrence of Arabia also avoids said additional sexism. Same passage in prose, no lest ghastly as to what it describes:
Exactly thus were the women's heads all held a-row with a bight of cord drawn round each throat, to suffer their caitiff's death. A little while they twittered with their feet - only a little. It was not long.
Now the epic, in Wilson's translation as well as in any other, has used a great deal of narrative space to make the suitors obnoxious in their behavior to just about everyone, not to mention that they also earlier have a scheme to waylay and kill Telemachus en route back from Sparta to Ithaca. Their deaths thus work not dissimilar from the recent shows and movies featuring evil and often also stupid rich people who are then narratively punished after first having put the sympathetic characters through hell. But a current day audience is aware that the twelve women, being slaves, would not have had much of a choice, and at any rate only one of them has previously been given a name and a narrative opportunity to behave disdainfully to a still disguised Odysseus. Their deaths thus feel horrendously unearned and cruel. I did remember them, though, which is more than I can say of the death of the one male slave who had previously been shown throwing in his lot with the suitors and behaving aggressively and mockingly towards the Odysseus-loyal Eumeios the swineherd and towards the cattle driver. These two have a go at Melanthius unprompted by any orders, slice his nose and ears and hack off his genitals which are then fed to the dogs. (Not poor Argos the first loyal dog of world literature, he's already dead.) The Odssey: a Tarantino-esque splatterfest, like I said. (As opposed to the "maids" being hanged, I don't think this bit made it into the toned down versions.)
At the same time, I wouldn't say this is a grimdark story in its original form, and not just because there's a surprising amount of humor in it. (See also: Calypso, after Hermes has given her the order from Zeus to let Odysseus go early on in the epic, being annoyed at the double standard and listing all the cases where the male gods very much did not let go of their female mortals, for example. Or Nestor's tendency to ramble being narratively made fun of. Or Athena's plain delight in finding Odysseus, when he meets her in disguise, being so inventive in his lying.) There are plenty of examples for generous, good hospitality, hosts and courteous guests as well. Odysseus' reunion with his dead mother during his visit in the underworld, from his realisation that she's dead - she was still alive when he left Ithaca - to his conversation with her - is a very human moment, as his his willingness to go back to Circe' island just to bury the unfortunate Elpnor who died by accident when they previously departed. For all that she's described as holding him with her against his will, Calypso isn't made into a caricature and gets some of the most poetic passages. And there's the remarkable moment when Achilles, the previous epic's epitome of the warrior who chooses glory and a short life over a long life in mediocrity, tells Odysseus he'd rather be a long lived farmer on earth than the most admired hero in the underworld. (Which reminds me, I see Emily Wilson has now translated the Iliad as well, and I do want to check this out, too - again I think in audio form, because as pretentious as this sounds, there's an extra dimension to being able to listen to something that at first was created in oral form.) And in the final reunion of Odysseus with Penelope. Later fictionalisations have her recognizing him far earlier. The text is ambiguous enough to allow for that interpretation, since we're not told exactly what Penelope is thinking, but it's just as possible to take it at face value, that her test of him - evoking their marriage bed, whose nature (carved out of a living olive tree) only Odysseus will know - is just that, a test, which he has to pass before she accepts him as her husband. Odysseus and Penelope are the people whose cleverness the epic most often extolls, and that reunion scene does feel like they are evenly matched and suited to each other, culminating in this passage:
Finally, at last,
with joy the husband and wife arrived
back in the rites of their old marriage bed (…..)
And when
the couple had enjoyed their lovemaking,
they shared another pleasure — telling stories.
It's the last line that does it, and brings everything full circle, though the epic continues beyond this; the fathers of the suitors blaming Odysseus for not only the deaths of their sons but for taking an entire generation of men from Ithaca if you add those who died at Troy and en route home is solved by a l iteral dea ex machina, Athena making peace so there is no civil war on Ithaca. Not for the first time, my modern sensibilities wish the epic would have ended with the Odysseus and Penelope scene, but then again, allowing the people of Ithaca being not universally thrilled their lord is back but upset at all the deaths is acknwowledging that for all their obnoxious fratboyness, the suitors were human beings. (So were the twelve hanged women, of course, but nobody is set to fight for them or doubts Odysseus' right to dispense with them as he pleased.)
Really, though, the power of storytelling is something that works in this epic on both a Doylist and Watsonian level. Both when bards do it and when Odysseus spins one of his many invented or true (or are they?) stories about himself. And in the power the Odyssey still holds, after threethousand years. And that's why I think it's eminently fitting for "telling stories" being named as a joy on a lovel with lovemaking.
Anyway, having heard much praise of Emily Wilson's translation of the Odyssey, I listened to Claire Dane's rendition of it on Audible, and with the caveat that much to my Latin teachers' frustration, I chose not to learn Greek at school but French and hence am incapable of judging the "translation" part of it myself, I found the praise well deserved. It's a a text fascinating to listen to - including Wilson's introduction, which already is over an hour of listening time, but by no means missable - , and Wilson's decision to use English iambic pentameter makes the verse feel flowing and natural in that language. To requote her alraedy often quoted rendition of the proem illustrates this beautifully:
Odyssey
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 in the storms at sea, and how
he worked to save his life and bring his men
back home. He failed to keep them safe; poor fools,
they ate the Sun God’s cattle, and the god
kept them from home. Now goddess, child of Zeus,
tell the old story for our modern times.
Find the beginning.
Not speaking Greek, I can't judge the accuracy of "a complicated man" versus the "man of twists and turns" of Fagles and the "contending man" of another translation, but purely as a reader/listener, it does strike me a as a good choice to set up the ambiguity of Odysseus right from the start. Similarly, "he failed to keep them safe" versus the "he lost them" I'm more used to from other versions heightens Odysseus' share of responsibility for the loss of his men.
Now, when you, like I, was introduced to the stories comprised in the Odyssey via the 19th century guy Gustav Schwab, who restructed the entire story to a linear fashion and focuses on the sea adventures (as opposed to Homer, who starts when Odysseus' wandering years are nearly over, doesn't put him on stage, so to speak, until a third of the story has passed because the beginning of the epic tells with Telemachus on Ithaca and his quest to find out what happened to his father via visiting Nestor and Menelaus first, and devotes far more page time on Oysseus on Ithaca - i.e. the Quentin Tarantino-esque revenge tale part of the story - than on the sefaring aadventures), that difference in focus and pacing is what inevitably strikes you first. But also all the differences threethousand years make and doesn't make in behavioral codes. Men in the Odyssey cry often and easy. Odysseus and Telemachus most of all, but also the other heroes. There is nothing to indicate this expression of emotion is coded as feminine. Otoh, Odysseus in his rendition of his adventures for his hosts mentions how he and his men directly after leaving Troy and before getting into the first big adventure sacked another city en route, "sharing" all the women and taking all the loot. As you do. This is not in any way seen as bad or unheroic behaviour. As opposed to the suitors' freeloading Listening to the epic instead of reading it and thus unable to skip anything really hammers home the whole idea of sacred hospitality (and being a good guest) as a central value. (Wilson in her introduction points out the epic's setting predates the use of money. Finding a good host on your travels who feasts you, clothes you and ressupplies you is quintessential for any traveller. But abusing this is therefore extra taboo.) And good lord, but the death of Agamemnon is evoked much, much more often than I recalled. (Schwab & Co. must have cut down the Agamemnon references to the bare minimum, because I could remember them only obviously in the underworld visit when the man himself shows up and in Sparta when Menelaos brings up his brother.) It's the constantly upheld fear that this is how Odysseus' return could go, one of the reasons for his disguises and drawn out undercoverness when finally at Ithaca. It's also intriguing to me that the Odyssey, created ca. 800 BC or thereabouts, has Aegisthos as the main instigator and actor in Agamemnon's death, and Clytaimnestra only as his seduced sidekick - she's even presented as at first having hold out against his attempts to seduce her before falling for him. Meanwhile, all the dramatists tackling the House of Atreus some centuries later make Clytaimnestra the main actor and Aegisthos (if he shows up in person at all) her sidekick, and also give her the death of Iphigenia as a key motive (as opposed to simply having fallen for Cousin Aegisthos). Now, dead Agamenon is still bitter about his wife - going as far as to tell Odysseus not to trust any woman, even if Penelope should prove faithful - because of this -, but everyone else evoking this death singles out Aegisthos as the chief villain and barely or not at all mentions Clytaimnestra.
Wilson in her introduction explains that she chose to use the term "slave" for the various more exact (as to their position in the household) signfiers for the various servants instead of the traditional "maid/handmaiden/nurse/steward/sevant" etc. because to a modern reader/listener, the later would imply these people actually get paid for their services and are free. As opposed to be being enslaved. This, btw, had gone right by 9 years old me when I first encountered the story in its bowlederized version; teenage me did realize that Greek household servants in myths were not paid for their labour, but I think I wasn't aware that, say, the swineherd Eumeious was also Odysseus' property as opposed to someone who saw him as his liege lord. For current readers, yes, I magine many if encountering the story for the first time would not consider someone called a maid or a servant to be a slave by necessity, too.
(Of course, one difference between ancient world slavery and US 19th century type of slavery would be that the former wasn't racially connotated and just about anyone could become a slave if their city got sacked (see Trojan women). This does not make a slave less of a slave.)
(Listening, I found it very interesting that the epic has Eurycleia, Odsseus' old nurse, mention Laertes (Odysseus' father) never touched her out of respect for his wife, and later that Penelope ensured Telemachus never put a hand on her maids. These are not addendums by Emily Wilson - I have a prose translation by T.E. Lawrence (yes, that Lawrence) to compare, and it's there as well - and it's an intriguing glimpse as to what was considered "good" behaviour. Given raping women while sacking cities is fine, I think the laudable behaviour here isn't that the female slaves don't get raped by Laertes and Telemachus, respectively, it's that Laertes respects his wife and knows this would be against her wishes, and Telemachus his mother, and/or that Penelope's servants are the absent Odysseus' property, and therefore it would not have been appropriate for his son to have a go.)
Peneleope's female servants being slaves is a point alluded to again in the passage that to my recollection has only gotten fictional attention in the last fifteen years or so (thanks to Margaret Atwood's Penelopeiad), and Wilson in her introduction also singles it out as something which many a previous translator has sawn fit to add additional sexism to, to wit: after the suitors are killed, Odysseus asks his former nurse which of the female slaves have been loyal and which have betrayed him. Eurycleia says out of the fifty women, only twelve were - and here is where the translations vary: having sex/consorting/ other verb with the suitors. Odsseus orders her to get these twelve, who are then made to clean up and help disposing of the bodies of the suitors; then Odysseus tells Telemachus to kill them via sword, but Telemachus, showing initiative without Athena prompting him for the first time in the epic, decides death by sword is too good for them and hangs all twelve. Wilson points out that a great many earlier translations have him refer to them as "sluts" or "whores", which he doesn't in the Greek original. After hearing her stark and visceral version:
[S]o the girls, their heads all in a row,
were strung up with the noose around their necks
to make their death an agony. They gasped,
feet twitching for a while, but not for long.
I checked the Lawrence translation and was glad to find good old Lawrence of Arabia also avoids said additional sexism. Same passage in prose, no lest ghastly as to what it describes:
Exactly thus were the women's heads all held a-row with a bight of cord drawn round each throat, to suffer their caitiff's death. A little while they twittered with their feet - only a little. It was not long.
Now the epic, in Wilson's translation as well as in any other, has used a great deal of narrative space to make the suitors obnoxious in their behavior to just about everyone, not to mention that they also earlier have a scheme to waylay and kill Telemachus en route back from Sparta to Ithaca. Their deaths thus work not dissimilar from the recent shows and movies featuring evil and often also stupid rich people who are then narratively punished after first having put the sympathetic characters through hell. But a current day audience is aware that the twelve women, being slaves, would not have had much of a choice, and at any rate only one of them has previously been given a name and a narrative opportunity to behave disdainfully to a still disguised Odysseus. Their deaths thus feel horrendously unearned and cruel. I did remember them, though, which is more than I can say of the death of the one male slave who had previously been shown throwing in his lot with the suitors and behaving aggressively and mockingly towards the Odysseus-loyal Eumeios the swineherd and towards the cattle driver. These two have a go at Melanthius unprompted by any orders, slice his nose and ears and hack off his genitals which are then fed to the dogs. (Not poor Argos the first loyal dog of world literature, he's already dead.) The Odssey: a Tarantino-esque splatterfest, like I said. (As opposed to the "maids" being hanged, I don't think this bit made it into the toned down versions.)
At the same time, I wouldn't say this is a grimdark story in its original form, and not just because there's a surprising amount of humor in it. (See also: Calypso, after Hermes has given her the order from Zeus to let Odysseus go early on in the epic, being annoyed at the double standard and listing all the cases where the male gods very much did not let go of their female mortals, for example. Or Nestor's tendency to ramble being narratively made fun of. Or Athena's plain delight in finding Odysseus, when he meets her in disguise, being so inventive in his lying.) There are plenty of examples for generous, good hospitality, hosts and courteous guests as well. Odysseus' reunion with his dead mother during his visit in the underworld, from his realisation that she's dead - she was still alive when he left Ithaca - to his conversation with her - is a very human moment, as his his willingness to go back to Circe' island just to bury the unfortunate Elpnor who died by accident when they previously departed. For all that she's described as holding him with her against his will, Calypso isn't made into a caricature and gets some of the most poetic passages. And there's the remarkable moment when Achilles, the previous epic's epitome of the warrior who chooses glory and a short life over a long life in mediocrity, tells Odysseus he'd rather be a long lived farmer on earth than the most admired hero in the underworld. (Which reminds me, I see Emily Wilson has now translated the Iliad as well, and I do want to check this out, too - again I think in audio form, because as pretentious as this sounds, there's an extra dimension to being able to listen to something that at first was created in oral form.) And in the final reunion of Odysseus with Penelope. Later fictionalisations have her recognizing him far earlier. The text is ambiguous enough to allow for that interpretation, since we're not told exactly what Penelope is thinking, but it's just as possible to take it at face value, that her test of him - evoking their marriage bed, whose nature (carved out of a living olive tree) only Odysseus will know - is just that, a test, which he has to pass before she accepts him as her husband. Odysseus and Penelope are the people whose cleverness the epic most often extolls, and that reunion scene does feel like they are evenly matched and suited to each other, culminating in this passage:
Finally, at last,
with joy the husband and wife arrived
back in the rites of their old marriage bed (…..)
And when
the couple had enjoyed their lovemaking,
they shared another pleasure — telling stories.
It's the last line that does it, and brings everything full circle, though the epic continues beyond this; the fathers of the suitors blaming Odysseus for not only the deaths of their sons but for taking an entire generation of men from Ithaca if you add those who died at Troy and en route home is solved by a l iteral dea ex machina, Athena making peace so there is no civil war on Ithaca. Not for the first time, my modern sensibilities wish the epic would have ended with the Odysseus and Penelope scene, but then again, allowing the people of Ithaca being not universally thrilled their lord is back but upset at all the deaths is acknwowledging that for all their obnoxious fratboyness, the suitors were human beings. (So were the twelve hanged women, of course, but nobody is set to fight for them or doubts Odysseus' right to dispense with them as he pleased.)
Really, though, the power of storytelling is something that works in this epic on both a Doylist and Watsonian level. Both when bards do it and when Odysseus spins one of his many invented or true (or are they?) stories about himself. And in the power the Odyssey still holds, after threethousand years. And that's why I think it's eminently fitting for "telling stories" being named as a joy on a lovel with lovemaking.
