The Odyssey, By Homer; translation by Robert Fagles

The Iliad and The Odyssey are, by my estimation, the two most fundamental pillars of the Western dramatic and literary canon. Everything ultimately emanates from them however directly or indirectly it may be. Both literature — and the movies, to a greater or lesser extent — have evolved from these two grand poems. You could draw a straight line if you wanted from Odysseus to John Wick. 

Of course, so much of the reader’s experience of The Odyssey comes down to the translation. A few years ago, I read Emily Wilson’s 2018 translation. It is conversational and accessible but very different from Fagles. Fagles translation though less playful is more immersive. It digs deeper into character and doesn’t spare the reader any of the gore. In the after matter of the book Fagles admits to taking liberties with his interpretation in keeping with the spirit of his overall literary purposes while doing what he could to remain faithful to Homer’s vision. This makes it a very different experience than what you get from Wilson. This is yet another amazing quality about the poem. It’s incredible how pliable it is.

Odysseus is known to be both a man of the mind and a man of action. But he is sometimes a bit too clever for his own good, even when he doesn’t have to be. He likes to out-plot and outwit his competition, always convinced he’s a little bit smarter than whatever it is he’s up against. His intelligence however is always pragmatic. It’s never esoteric. He is not philosophical or reflective. The Greeks, (or more specifically the Achaeans) of the 8th century BCE lived in a very fixed relation to who and what they were in the world. The first question anybody asks any kind of stranger in the poem is where he came from and who his family are. It’s understood that your fortunes wax and wane but you as person — the substance of who you are — never changes. This eliminates all need for self-reflection. A human being is not looked upon as a being whose chief responsibility is personal insight and the overall development of his individualism. This makes everyone in the poem essentially simple. The unconscious does not exist in them, except perhaps in the form of a god making him do things that either follow or violate his essential nature. It’s funny, for example, how so much of the delay in Odysseus’s return home is due primarily to a couple of beautiful women who take a sexual interest in him. He seems to have a harder time overcoming their influence and getting away safely. Circumstances play a part in this, but the poem never suggests that it might largely be due to simple sexual attraction and the appeal of infidelity. To suggest such a thing would make our hero seem small. 

There is an also a very different relationship to God here. Obviously, it’s not monotheistic. There is no god coaxing you toward perfection. There are only hosts of gods who are sometimes at odds with each other who play sometimes arbitrary and competing roles in people’s lives. The chaos of a character’s life is often seen by that character as the result of some dysfunctional relationship with a god. Sometimes that character understands the problem as being the result of past behavior which calls for a redemptive act, usually the sacrifice of some animal. But either way it’s an external issue and not an internal one.

The Odyssey is much more personal than The Iliad and women play a much greater role. Penelope doesn’t do much but she is the fulcrum upon which the whole story rests. She is remarkable. Not just in her ability to remain steadfast and faithful, but in her overall ability to play the situation. For decades she lives with not knowing whether she still has a husband and whether it would be a good idea to finally give into one of her suitors. She proves a genius at keeping her options open all the way to the end. 

What the poem definitely has in common very much with Western people now (and perhaps all peoples) is the idea of the hero being embodied in a person who will someday arrive and correct a gross injustice. It’s amazing after all this time how much we still need to see this, especially in the movies, which in some ways feels like a more direct ancestor to The Odyssey than print. The poem was meant to be performed after all. Bloody revenge and the restoring of the world once again to its rightful balance is a dream that never dies.

But more than anything the poem seems to be about how intolerable ambiguity is. Not knowing is worse than knowing that the worst has happened. For so long the characters in the poem live in a state of suspension with no idea of where they stand in the world, what their future holds, and what their prospects are. They suffer with this endlessly, begging the gods to tell them what their situation is one way or the other. The promise in the poem is that a fixed world can be discovered or rediscovered, that there is an answer. Today, we’re not as sure. Things look far more complicated. Did we invent a subconscious as a substitute for God or is it simply a discovery? And could it be that the discovery isn’t true? Such questions affect our relationship to the universe in ways that are profoundly different from the Achaeans. Though there are still so many similarities, life and literature are not the same.