|
In many ways, this review is more for people who have already read it. He seems incapable of seemingly walking into any situation without first putting everyone in sight to some sort of test. Bernard Knox brings up one of the puzzles in his very useful introduction. It seems almost as if it would be preferable to know that he died gloriously on the fields before Troy. The Odyssey places that conundrum right in front of us in the course of a wonderfully exotic and enticing story.
I am talking about the whole issue of Odysseus' renown or fame. And Odysseus, in the eyes of the world, is now a man without a stable renown. For what. I would love some knowledgeable comments on the points I want to discuss.There many things about the book to puzzle over and ponder. By the way, that hanging is worth long consideration. He is not just a schemer.
Telemachus in order to begin to gain his own renown has to be grounded in the renown of his father, Odysseus. And, yet somehow, the book gives the impression that this was justice served.And finally there is the character of Odysseus himself. Do not listen to anyone who tells you that one translation is closer to Homer (in some way which they rarely explain). I am not going to join in the debate on translation. It's main characters are people who we recognize, who we sometimes understand and who sometimes are bizarrely foreign. Whether it is Helen referring to herself as a whore or the way that Telemachus talks to Penelope or his hanging of the maids or Odysseus being more than willing to stay with Circe for a year it is obvious that this is a deeply male world. We are all individuals, all human, all born in a culture and in history. The piteous state of Laertes causes Odysseus to burst into tears, than to immediately engage in internal debate whether or not to test him, which, of course, he does.
This culminates in one of the last books where he views his father, Laertes, for the first time in twenty years. One that has befuddled me for the past two weeks. Many times throughout the book, either Telemachus or Penelope explains that the fact that Odysseus has disappeared is a problem. Just find the one that grabs you by your reader's neck and pulls you in.The Odyssey is essential, charming and occassionally astounding.
Their punishment is a slower, more torturous death than that of the suitors. I just finished reading Fagles' translation and was completely enthralled. For being appropriately distraut over the death of his wife and the disappearance of his son for twenty years.See what I mean about the characters being both familiar and strange in their psychologies.But for me, this is heart of the value of the book. The fact that his fame does not have a known ending seems to not only put Penelope in a difficult position vis-a-vis the suitors but to somehow diminish Telemachus in the eyes of the world.
These maids were little kids when Odysseus sailed off to Troy; they may well have had no memory of him whatsoever. But there are wide and wild variations. I read the Fitzgerald a long time ago and enjoyed it very much. It may not even be inordinate. The varieties of ways that the human, the individual, the cultural and the historical can mix in one person is not infinite. Or maybe get several and read them at different times. Again, I cannot recommend highly enough that you worry not about the translation issue and focus which translation is the most readable to you. The maids may have been seduced or raped or somewhere inbetween.
I want to talk about some of my reactions to the book. He himself is a puzzle, one that has bewitched and befuddled our cultural tradition for centuries. It is almost as if the Greeks saw the fame of an individual as we see their personality- it is a guide to their behavior and gives stability and meaning to all they do.Then there is the occassional shock of how the women are viewed throughout the book. The suitors have been acting with criminal disregard in the house for years. It is not for nothing that Odysseus is referred to many times as the man of twists and turns. And then write me a comment to explains your understanding of the issues I bring up or some of your own.
It seems that the biggest problem with many Homer readers is boredom. This particular translation is very readable, and doesn't bore you, well it didn't bore me. That's a pity, since the Odyssey was written a very long time ago, and is still widely considered a pretty ingenious congee of the ancient mind. It has been translated many a number of times. So you can get to know the Odyssey without any unnecesary/hard-to-understand Victorian era florishes that were peculiar for some of the earlier translations. I hope that some of the younger viewers will come to enjoy this undispitable classic of the world literature.
The kindle edition is linked to the Fagles translation, but that is not what you will get. The Pope translation is what you will get for kindle -- not at all the same thing.Patricia
Nevertheless, I think the story lags for about a hundred pages after Odysseus returns home -- although it might be too much to expect what was originally an oral story to get to the point. I personally preferred The Iliad, but this still gives in invaluable look into the mindset of a soldier in the Ancient World. Odysseus is not all that heroic when viewed through a modern lense, and that's part of what makes the work so interesting. However, when the plot does pick up again, it really picks up -- with an extremely gory scene should strike most modern readers as extremely disturbing. Overall, I have no choice but to recommend this -- it's just to0 important not to pick up.
But none of those, in my opinion, can be compared with the translations of both poems by Robert Fagles that were published at the end of the last century. In his book "The Joy of Reading", Charles Van Doren had this to say of Fagles's translation: "Translations of both epics by Richard Lattimore are said to be closer to the Greek than most others but perhaps as a result they are not easy to read. A more passionate version of The Iliad by Robert Fitzgerald seemed preferable when it appeared thirty years ago. His Iliad is powerful, almost overwhelming, his Odyssey utterly charming, and I recommend them to anyone who wishes to read--or reread--Homer's two great epics. I can't imagine any reader not being transported by Fagles into Homer's magical world."
|
