October 12, 2021

"Listen to this, now . . . . [Homer] was meant to be listened to."

 

[From the Writer's Almanac for Tuesday, October 12]



It's the birthday of the poet and translator Robert Fitzgerald (books by this author), born in Geneva, New York (1910), best known for his beautiful English translations of Homer's Odyssey (1961) and The Iliad (1974). He was also an influential classics professor at Harvard and he believed that Homer's work should be always read aloud. One of his students said, "Every Tuesday afternoon, he'd start [class] by saying to us, 'Listen to this, now [...] It was meant to be listened to.' The 12 of us would listen, very quiet around the blond wood table, our jittery freshman muscles gradually unclenching."

Robert Fitzgerald described Homer as:

"[A] living voice in firelight or in the open air, a living presence bringing into life his great company of imagined persons, a master performer at his ease, touching the strings, disposing of many voices, many tones and tempos, tragedy, comedy, and glory, holding his [listeners] in the palm of his hand."

October 10, 2021

"Always start with Homer's 'Odyssey'" — Mary Beard


Mary Beard recommends Homer:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/07/books/review/mary-beard-by-the-book-interview.html

What books got you interested in Ancient Rome and the classics?

 The first was Moses Finley’s “The World of Odysseus.” I had read quite a bit of Homer’s “Odyssey” at high school (some in Greek, but mostly in English!); but it was Finley’s book that made me see that you could think about the “Odyssey” historically and that there were big historical questions about what kind of society was being depicted, and whether it ever existed. . . . 

For readers new to the classics, what books make the best entree to the great works of antiquity?

Always start with Homer’s “Odyssey.” It is such a foundational text for so much of the rest of the Western cultural tradition, while at the same time questioning that tradition before it was born. It raises big issues about what we think “civilization” is, the long history of turning our enemies into “barbarians” and why it might be “us” who are the barbarians, not “them.” No wonder it has been so important for writers and artists such as Derek Walcott and Romare Bearden.





October 25, 2019

Ravana’s Mechanical Flying Peacock


In this essay, Justin Henry, a 2017-18 CAORC NEH Senior Research Fellow, discusses the origins and implications of Ravana's flying machine, a popular figure in Sri Lankan versions of the Ramayana epic. All photos are courtesy of the author.

https://www.caorc.org/post/2019/06/10/ravanas-mechanical-flying-peacock

“Ravana was a great king of Sri Lanka 8000 years ago,” he went on earnestly. “And, you know, he had an airplane powered by a mercury vortex engine. We had such technology in those days.”
This was not the last that I would hear of Ravana’s flying machine and its “mercury vortex” propulsion . . .


October 10, 2019

"finding human voices in the clay"

A review of a new book on "Gilgamesh," by Michael Schmidt:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/10/14/how-to-read-gilgamesh

How to Read “Gilgamesh”

The heart of the world’s oldest long poem is found in its gaps and mysteries.

November 5, 2017

New translator of “The Odyssey”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/02/magazine/the-first-woman-to-translate-the-odyssey-into-english.html

Since the “Odyssey” first appeared in English, around 1615, in George Chapman’s translation, the story of the Greek warrior-king Odysseus’s ill-fated 10-year attempt to return home from the war in Troy to Ithaca and his wife, Penelope, has prompted some 60 English translations, at an accelerating pace, half of them in the last 100 years and a dozen in the last two decades. Wilson, whose own translation appears this week, has produced the first English rendering of the poem by a woman.

June 5, 2017

Bob Dylan on Odysseus

from Dylan's Nobel Prize speech:

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2016/dylan-lecture.html

The Odyssey is a great book whose themes have worked its way into the ballads of a lot of songwriters: "Homeward Bound, "Green, Green Grass of Home," "Home on the Range," and my songs as well.
The Odyssey is a strange, adventurous tale of a grown man trying to get home after fighting in a war. He's on that long journey home, and it's filled with traps and pitfalls. He's cursed to wander. He's always getting carried out to sea, always having close calls. Huge chunks of boulders rock his boat. He angers people he shouldn't. There's troublemakers in his crew. Treachery. His men are turned into pigs and then are turned back into younger, more handsome men. He's always trying to rescue somebody. He's a travelin' man, but he's making a lot of stops.
He's stranded on a desert island. He finds deserted caves, and he hides in them. He meets giants that say, "I'll eat you last." And he escapes from giants. He's trying to get back home, but he's tossed and turned by the winds. Restless winds, chilly winds, unfriendly winds. He travels far, and then he gets blown back.
He's always being warned of things to come. Touching things he's told not to. There's two roads to take, and they're both bad. Both hazardous. On one you could drown and on the other you could starve. He goes into the narrow straits with foaming whirlpools that swallow him. Meets six-headed monsters with sharp fangs. Thunderbolts strike at him. Overhanging branches that he makes a leap to reach for to save himself from a raging river. Goddesses and gods protect him, but some others want to kill him. He changes identities. He's exhausted. He falls asleep, and he's woken up by the sound of laughter. He tells his story to strangers. He's been gone twenty years. He was carried off somewhere and left there. Drugs have been dropped into his wine. It's been a hard road to travel. 
In a lot of ways, some of these same things have happened to you. You too have had drugs dropped into your wine. You too have shared a bed with the wrong woman. You too have been spellbound by magical voices, sweet voices with strange melodies. You too have come so far and have been so far blown back. And you've had close calls as well. You have angered people you should not have. And you too have rambled this country all around. And you've also felt that ill wind, the one that blows you no good. And that's still not all of it. 
When he gets back home, things aren't any better. Scoundrels have moved in and are taking advantage of his wife's hospitality. And there's too many of ‘em. And though he's greater than them all and the best at everything – best carpenter, best hunter, best expert on animals, best seaman – his courage won't save him, but his trickery will.
All these stragglers will have to pay for desecrating his palace. He'll disguise himself as a filthy beggar, and a lowly servant kicks him down the steps with arrogance and stupidity. The servant's arrogance revolts him, but he controls his anger. He's one against a hundred, but they'll all fall, even the strongest. He was nobody. And when it's all said and done, when he's home at last, he sits with his wife, and he tells her the stories.
. . . When Odysseus in The Odyssey visits the famed warrior Achilles in the underworld – Achilles, who traded a long life full of peace and contentment for a short one full of honor and glory –  tells Odysseus it was all a mistake. "I just died, that's all." There was no honor. No immortality. And that if he could, he would choose to go back and be a lowly slave to a tenant farmer on Earth rather than be what he is – a king in the land of the dead – that whatever his struggles of life were, they were preferable to being here in this dead place. 
That's what songs are too. Our songs are alive in the land of the living. But songs are unlike literature. They're meant to be sung, not read. The words in Shakespeare's plays were meant to be acted on the stage. Just as lyrics in songs are meant to be sung, not read on a page. And I hope some of you get the chance to listen to these lyrics the way they were intended to be heard: in concert or on record or however people are listening to songs these days. I return once again to Homer, who says, "Sing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell the story."

May 24, 2017

"Some Other Odysseus"

From the fun website "Sententiae Antiquae":

https://sententiaeantiquae.com/some-other-odysseus/





https://sententiaeantiquae.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/odysseus-riding-turtle.jpg
Odysseus Rides a turtle (6th Century BCE Black Figure Skyphos)

When Odysseus reveals himself to Telemachus in book 16, his son at first balks, certain that this man in front of him is a god or some delusion.  Odysseus responds memorably (16.204):

“No other Odysseus will ever come home to you”
οὐ μὲν γάρ τοι ἔτ’ ἄλλος ἐλεύσεται ἐνθάδ’ ᾿Οδυσσεύς,

I have long discussed this with my students as doing double work in the Odyssey:  (1)it speaks to concerns of identity and sameness and the difficulty of knowing who anyone is at any time; and (2) it also allows our narrator to ‘wink’ at the audience who have been treated to a bit of a carnival ride during the epic as they figure out which Odysseus this is who is going to come home.
Ancient myth and literature present us with many different Odysseis (the plural of Odysseus) and one of the great achievements of our Odyssey may just be the creation of a complex hero within and against these parameters.  Close readings of the epic can find that there are hints of these other traditions, these other Odysseys and Odysseis everywhere.

So, occasionally we will be posting on this theme:

1. First we discussed how Aeschylus had Odysseus dying from complications associated with being defecated upon by a bird.
2. Then we noticed that the epic mentions that Odysseus has a sister
3. We also considered how Telemachus’ bath in book 4 led to a grandson for Odysseus in the Hesiodic tradition.
4. Here’s a rumination on the politics and geography in the Odyssey
5. And a beginning count of Odysseus’ children
6. The Evidence for Odysseus’ Children, Part 1: Eustathius, Hesiod and Dionysus of Halicarnassos
7. Odysseus’ Children with Penelope (yes, more than one!)
8. An Epigram from the Greek Anthology about Odysseus seeing his mother, Antikleia
9. Odysseus’ Children, Part 3: The Sons of Kirke, (except Telegonos)
10. The Sons of Odysseus, Part 4: Telegonos
11. The Sons of Odysseus, Part 5: Kalypso’s Brood
12. Odysseus Tries to Stab Diomedes in the Back
13. Odysseus’ Children Part 6

April 17, 2017

A Father and Son's Final Odyssey

In the last year of my dad’s life, we retraced Odysseus’ voyage and learned what Homer teaches about life’s journeys and what it means to yearn for home.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/24/a-father-and-sons-final-odyssey



October 10, 2016

"the oldest melody in existence"

http://www.classicfm.com/music-news/videos/oldest-song-melody/

The lyrics are very difficult to translate, but one academic has come up with this rendering of them:

‘Once I have endeared the deity, she will love me in her heart,
the offer I bring may wholly cover my sin, 
bringing sesame oil may work on my behalf in awe may I'

Gilgamesh and tyranny


Danielle Allen in the Washington Post:

The world’s oldest surviving text is about how to deal with a problem like Donald Trump. In the “Epic Gilgamesh,” which dates to 2100 B.C., the people of the city of Uruk in Mesopotamia lift their voices to the gods in complaint about their king, Gilgamesh. In David Ferry’s marvelous translation, the people of Uruk lament: “Neither the father’s son nor the wife of the noble is safe in Uruk; neither the mother’s daughter nor the warrior’s bride is safe.”

The people first try to protect themselves by seeking a double for Gilgamesh, someone who is in some important sense like him, who can contend with him and who can keep him in check. . . . In the epic, the double’s name is Enkidu, and it is Enkidu who finally blocks Gilgamesh from entering a bridal chamber ahead of the bridegroom. . . . In the epic “Gilgamesh,” the tyrant becomes a good king only when he comes to recognize that in his own mortality he is no greater than the lowliest peasant. Reflecting on death, he says, “And then I saw a worm fall out of his nose. Must I die too?” Assimilating this lesson, Gilgamesh is at last able to rein in his passions, develop virtues and become a beneficent king.