Five Ways of Regarding Homer
I
Are you going to Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey?
No, but I’ll re-read the book.
[With thanks to Guy Davenport, Geography the Imagination (New York: Pantheon, 1991), 333-4.]
We now have the recent translations by Emily Wilson, see attached review of her essays.
II
Reviews of the block-buster warn of its violence. The poem ends with an injunction with which the world of 2026 needs.
Odysseus and his gallant son charged straight at the front lines,
Slashing away with swords, with two-edged spears and now
They would have killed them all, cut them off from home
If Athena, daughter of storming Zeus, had not cried out
In a piercing voice that stopped all fighters cold.
‘Hold back, you men of Ithaca, back from brutal war!
Break off – shed no more blood – make peace at once!’
Book 24, ‘Peace,’ Lines 581-5.
Modern verse translation by Robert Fagles, (London: Penguin, 1996).
III
Ithaka by C.P. Cavafy.
As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.
Hope your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbors you’re seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to learn and go on learning from their scholars.
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaka gave you the marvellous journey.
Without her you wouldn’t have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.
From C.P. Cavafy: Collected Poems. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Translation Copyright ©1975, 1992 by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Reproduced with permission of Princeton University Press.
[Ithaca is also the title to the documentary about Julian Assange whose father recited Cavafy’s poem to encourage supporters to persist in their battles.]
IV
M.I. Finley, The World of Odysseus (1956) (London: Chatto & Windus, 1977), “Appendix I” reply to critics.
Finley demonstrates that ‘The Trojan War’ could not have taken place when or where it is supposed in Homer’s The Iliad. His significant contribution is to make us aware that whoever wrote the poems has (have?) gifted us a re-imagining of realms of experience, legend and dreaming, far more than any war correspondent, even one with the narrative power of Julius Caesar.
V
WHEN ‘OMER SMOTE ‘IS BLOOMIN’ LYRE
By Rudyard Kipling
When ‘Omer smote ‘is bloomin’ lyre,
He’d ‘eard men sing by land an’ sea,
An’ what he thought ‘enlight require,
E went an’ took – the same .as me!
The market-girls an’ fisherlllen·,
The shepherds an’ the sailors too,
They ‘eard old songs turn up again,
But kep’ it quiet -same as·you!
They knew ‘e stole; ‘e knowed they knowed.
They didn’t tell, nor make a fuss,
But winked at ‘Omer down the road,
An’ ‘e winked back- the same as us.
Thanks to Peter and Humphrey