A Guide to the Odyssey: A Commentary on the English Translation of Robert Fitzgerald
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The Odyssey, which literally brings Odysseus back from the dead after ten years, almost seems calculated to be the perfect story for our time, when stories about those missing in action fill the popular press. The poem offers a way of healing, both for those who come back and for their families. And there are many moments when we see The Odyssey healing wounds opened by The Iliad. Early on there is the magical, somewhat mysterious visit by Telémakhos to Meneláos and Helen in Sparta. The woman whose abduction started the Trojan War is now back home, at her husband’s side. Questions of guilt and responsibility are glanced at ever so slightly and always politely, and Helen herself administers a drug that can ease the suffering of memory. The action of retaking Odysseus’ home offers roles for all those who stayed behind. Telémakhos, though too young to have participated in the Trojan War, can fight at his heroic father’s side and win renown. Odysseus’ loyal retainers can do the same. The suitors can fight but can hardly win glory; they missed their chance for recuperation into the postwar polity by pursuing the wife of the absent general. The final book of The Odyssey offers two moments of closure to this theme. First, in the second underworld scene, the dead from both conflicts (the one for Troy, the other for Odysseus’ hall) meet. This is not a happy moment for the suitors’ shades: they are condemned by the ghosts of the Trojan heroes to a perpetual belated status. But in the final skirmish, warriors from three generations can stand shoulder to shoulder, and Telémakhos is now not too late to join his father and his grandfather, the latter a veteran from an even earlier set of conflicts.
* * *
What about memory in the poem itself? The Muse, invoked at Book I.1, is, as repository of the community’s memory and the acknowledged source of the bard’s song, the guarantee that The Odyssey draws on and transmits communal truth. The Muse represents sung tradition itself and guides the epic singer in the right paths as he chooses elements from the vast ocean of memory and song.20
Along with the invocation to the Muse, which is the traditional appeal to and seal of memory, there are specific epic features woven deeply into the narrative pattern of The Odyssey which may be taken as metaphors for the interpenetration of past and present. A visit to the land of the dead and the ghosts of characters past appears in all epics in one form or another; it is the ultimate epic scene of commemoration. In The Odyssey, Odysseus evokes and addresses a select group of ghosts in Book XI, and the narrator takes us for a reprise in Book XXIV. It is the function of epic to memorialize the history of a people, and these “descents” to Hades keep the exploits of forebears alive. In such moments the poet records a supreme adventure of his hero and at the same time has him acknowledge the heroic achievements of predecessors. Previous heroes, such as Heraklês, Iason, or Akhilleus, were already the subject of song, and by including them in this way in his poem, the poet also keeps the older songs alive, adding his to their company. The fact that less famous forebears and their exploits are constantly evoked as examples for emulation (or avoidance) further keeps the past a living part of the present.
The Odyssey gives us another image of memory which is no epic commonplace, but one specific to hero and poem. In perhaps the most famous and oft-praised episode in The Odyssey,21 the disguised Odysseus’ identity is discovered and his own strategy put at risk when his old nurse Eurýkleia, washing his legs in the footbath Pénélopê had ordered for the Cretan visitor, feels a scar on his thigh. She knows this scar, from the past, and it tells her that the man above her is the same man who left the house some twenty years before. Indeed, she knows this scar from a still more distant past, Odysseus’ boyhood. Moving the narrative the way I have just described Eurýkleia’s mind as moving, Homer leaps back from the moment of discovery, before the discovery becomes word, to the story of how Odysseus received the original wound: on a boar hunt on Parnassos when visiting his maternal grandparents.
A scar is the reminder and the remnant of a wound, and the individual marking of a body. Odysseus’ scar as it is rubbed and recognized by his nurse provides Homer the opportunity not just to recall one incident in Odysseus’ past but to return to the very roots of his name. For before fulfilling the narrative promise he has made by mentioning the hunting episode, Homer leaps to the time of Odysseus’ naming, when Autólykos, Penélopê’s father, was visiting Ithaka. Eurýkleia—the person holding Odysseus’ leg over the wash-tub in the narrative present but perhaps forty or forty-five years younger—placed the baby on his grandfather’s lap and is reported to have said, “It is for you … / to choose a name for him” (XIX.473–74). Drawing on his own experience of “odium and distrust” (XIX.480), Autólykos, via a wordplay, names his grandson Odysseus. (For the details, see notes on XIX.328, XIX.477–81, and XIX.480, the second for a possible additional wordplay involving the Greek for “wound.”) As the process of naming described makes clear, one’s name is meant as a sign of one’s identity. One bears one’s name as one bears a scar, sign of the original wound. Homer has created a wound in the narrative body of The Odyssey, so to speak, in order to go back to Odysseus’ naming, the formative moment of his identity.
There is at least one more identifying characteristic of Odysseus—and the Odyssean Homer—to be discovered as we by reading rub our figurative hands back and forth over the textual wound. Before returning to the narrative present to describe Eurýkleia’s and then Odysseus’ reaction to this unexpected discovery, Homer’s narrative moves to a detailed description of the boar hunt on which the young prince received the wound. As soon as Odysseus arrives back at Ithaka, so Homer tells us, his parents “[want] all the news / of how he got his wound” (XIX.538–39). In what is biographically, according to The Odyssey, Odysseus’ earliest narrative, “he spun out / his tale, recalling how the boar’s white tusk / caught him when he was hunting on Parnassos” (XIX.539–41). As much as odium, a wound on the thigh, and the name “Odysseus” constitute the hero’s identity, so does his readiness to “spin out” memorable tales.
Interrupting the present to bring to light the past through tale-telling is not only a characteristic trait of Odysseus: it is the task of the epic singer in all his endeavors, and it is a defining characteristic of the poet of The Odyssey, who has so constructed this work that Books IX-XII constitute a similar but larger-scale narrative flashback. In these books, Homer’s singing and Odysseus’ recounting voices are one. In telling tales, both singer and hero are meant to be transmitting the past, thereby serving and preserving memory. What is left open to doubt is how much of what is passed on as “memory” is in fact invention. Odysseus is presented as a perennially lying narrator, most evidently in the series of tales in and by which he first assumes a Cretan identity and then alters it in subsequent tellings. Who knows exactly when faithful memory stops and exaggeration or even fabrication starts in the tale of exotic travels that Odysseus told to the Phaiákians? Indeed, if Odysseus has always been Odysseus, how are we to be sure that what he told his parents about the “boar’s white tusk” was the unvarnished truth?
But the tale told as memory is memory. As such, it can grow and change to meet the needs of the present, just as Odysseus’ scar is now an adult version of the scar that first formed over the original wound. Written documentation not only kills the faculty of memory, as Plato’s wise king pointed out, it also falsifies memory in two senses: it can prove it false and, by holding it to a literal truth, can render it less suitable for the present. For the present needs its own past, and it is that past that the epic Muse always provides.
A FINAL WORD BEFORE READING
It is the business of Homeric scholars and literary critics to make fine distinctions. Some scholars distinguish among multiple historical levels they have discovered in Homer’s texts; others make a distinction between an oral and a literate Homer, or between the author of The Iliad and that of The Odyssey. As students and scholars we can, and should, explore all the byways of the Homeric question. As readers, however, it is our duty to be sure that we subordinate the results of our study to
our appreciation of the text before us.22 Whatever our views on the history of the poems’ genesis, and however often we may pause to observe the traces of that history in the text, there are good reasons to read and interpret the text we have as a whole.
Paradoxically, this seemingly ahistorical approach will replicate at least in one important aspect the experience of Homer’s first audience. As we now understand the system of oral poetry, the singer is always involved in re-creating the poem for his audience. The singer believes he is singing it exactly as he did before, and as others sang it before him, while the members of the audience believe they are hearing it exactly as they and their forebears heard it before (no matter if in the situations where modern scholars can run tests, it is clear there have been extensive changes). No one would say, “But this telling varies in this or that detail from the last time I heard it,” and no one could claim that “three generations ago the story ran otherwise.” Given our text-based overview of the tradition, we might well be in a position to make such observations, and as students of the tradition we must. As archeological readers, we can discriminate among the various levels in the textual dig before us. Reflection on the layering lets us read another, more than Homeric text: the text of the tradition. Yet the final demand made of the archeological reader is to put down his or her trowel and, with knowledge, perceive that the most authentic and most Homeric way to appreciate Homer is to believe that the teller of the tale now before us is Homer, the only Homer, who tells the tale as it has always been told.
For readers of this English translation, Robert Fitzgerald is Homer, and The Odyssey has always been the Fitzgerald translation, just as, for readers of any other translation, in any language, that is their Homer, and they must believe that The Odyssey has always been that translation. That is the essence of the oral tradition, which has always incorporated into itself all previous stages and reintegrated them into a whole, no matter what anachronisms or apparent contradictions remain. As Homeric readers we can operate in like manner when faced with the tensions between early Greek concepts of the gods, justice, gender, age, war and peace on the one hand, and our own on the other. We can, indeed we must, endeavor to hold in our minds the entire former series, but such reconstructions are always grounded in our own contemporary judgments and perceptions. This tension, like the tension between one telling of the story and the next, or between the Greek Odyssey and any translation, ultimately becomes part of our Odyssey. One of the aims of the commentary which follows is to make that tension as productive as it can be.
NOTES
1 W. B. Stanford, The Ulysses Theme: A Study in the Adaptability of a Traditional Hero, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1963; rev. 1968).
2 For a fuller account of this scene and this rather audacious argument, see Ralph Hexter, “What Was the Trojan Horse Made Of?: Interpreting Virgil’s Aeneid,” Yale Journal of Criticism 3.2 (Spring 1990), 109–31.
3 Nikos Kazantzakis’ Odyssey (1938), which Stanford discusses along with Joyce’s Ulysses in The Ulysses Theme, pp. 211-40.
4 (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990), p. 14.
5 I have not mentioned representations of scenes and characters from The Odyssey in the visual arts. An interested reader might begin by consulting Appendix F in Stanford’s The Ulysses Theme, pp. 324–27 (to which should be added, for ancient representations, Odette Touchefeu-Meynier, Thèmes odysséens dans l’art antique [Paris, 1968]).
6 There was one ancient testimony to Homer’s “illiteracy”: in the first century C.E., Josephus wrote, “They say that not even Homer left his poems behind in writing, but that they were transmitted by memorization, and put together [later] out of the songs, and that they therefore contain many inconsistencies” (contra Apion 1.2.12; trans. from A. Wace and F. Stubbings, 241). F. A. Wolf appealed to this, but many scholars remind us that Josephus is here and elsewhere involved in tendentious arguments: as a Hellenized Jewish historian writing in Greek, he was intent on establishing the superiority and authority of the Mosaic texts over Homer. Nonetheless, even though it is not possible to say how such (as we now believe accurate) information could have been transmitted to him, it would be rash to deny that Josephus’ barb might reflect traditional information, or at least contemporary speculation. That it so runs against every other assumption of Hellenistic and late antique scholarship on Homer to my mind increases the possibility that it is not simply Josephus’ invention. Of course, any unprejudiced reader of The Iliad or The Odyssey, noting the singing of Akhilleus in the former and the multiple bards in the latter, might conjecture that this was a picture of Homer’s own creative mode. Whatever the truth of Josephus’ testimony, it is significant that it was an eighteenth-century scholar who first picked up on it.
7 L’Epithète traditionelle dans Homère: Essai sur un problème de style homérique (Paris, 1928); English translation “The Traditional Epithet in Homer,” in Milman Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry, ed. Adam Parry (Oxford, 1971), pp. 1–190.
8 I do not address here the impact this process may be imagined to have had on the quality of the poetry, especially since it is considered rash to tender aesthetic judgment at all, much less of art formed over and for multiple generations in the distant past. On the one hand, given the banality of so much popular narrative, and so much poetry, today, we might well see the advantage of instituting a rule that nothing be permitted that has not been approved, without exception, by eight or ten successive generations of audiences. On the other hand, over the years strict classicism has fallen into bathos and banality as often and as drearily as original effusions. The difference may be that the elements of traditional poetry—episode, formula, simile—had to appeal to an audience, had to be popular, in the fullest sense of the word; pleasing the work’s author or some academic rule was not enough.
9 For example, in The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present (New Haven, 1986). More recently, Gregory Nagy has proposed that the particular achievements of Greek archaic poetry, from Homer to Pindar, should be ascribed to a progressive “Panhellenization” of the repertory, in other words, to the establishment of a truly Greek canon, a process which took place largely under conditions of continued oral performance. “‘Homer’ and ‘Hesiod’ are themselves the cumulative embodiment of this systematization … of values common to all Greeks …—the ultimate poetic response to Panhellenic audiences from the eighth century onward” (“Hesiod,” in T. J. Luce, ed., Ancient Writers, vol. I [New York, 1982], 46). Nagy’s highly persuasive thesis is worked out with great sophistication and immense learning in Pindar’s Homer: The Lyric Possession of an Epic Past (Baltimore, 1990).
10 Much later, in the nineteenth century, when the so-called “higher criticism” of the Bible divided the “Old Testament” into strands labeled J, E, P, and D, each reflecting and promoting a peculiar, or group, tendency, Homeric scholars went beyond separating the poet of The Iliad from that of The Odyssey to full-scale “analysis,” whereby each epic was broken up into “lays” and, particularly as analysis developed through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, a later redactor was posited to have created the version of The Odyssey we possess. The observations of the original analysts and today’s neoanalysts have occasioned many important insights into the structure and texture of The Odyssey. This complex debate cannot be addressed in detail here, and it doesn’t need to be, for “archeological reading” can accommodate analytical as well as unitarian accounts of the creation of The Odyssey.
11 Bernard Knox’s “Introduction” to Homer, The Iliad, tr. Robert Fagles (New York: Viking Penguin, 1990), p. 44.
12 If, as Gregory Nagy has argued, above all in The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry (Baltimore, 1979), the stories of The Iliad (the wrath of Akhilleus) and The Odyssey (Odysseus’ homecoming) were traditional choices for bards before the particular textual incarnations that have come down to us, then it is possible to s
peak not only of The Odyssey as post-Iliadic but of The Iliad as post-Odyssean. Some of the interpretive ramifications of this paradoxical state have been developed by Pietro Pucci in Odysseus Polutropos: Intertextual Readings in the Odyssey and the Iliad (Ithaca, 1987).
The Iliad and The Odyssey are reciprocally allusive creations of one poet according to George Goold, who argues that Homer himself wrote down his verses and inserted successive additions to fixed texts of both epics over the course of his career. Goold explains the contradictions and evident joins in each poem by claiming that, since writing at this time was so laborious, Homer regarded what he had once written as unalterable: he frequently added material, even to earlier additions, but refused to cut or revise what he had once fixed in letters (“The Nature of Homeric Composition,” Illinois Classical Studies 2 [1977] 1-34; see esp. 17 on the difficulty of writing). Most scholars have not embraced this view, however novel; they continue to focus on successive oral performances as the context for the gradual concretization of the poems. Once the poems began to be textualized, by whomever, some of what Goold describes may have occurred. The extreme reverence to words once written strikes me as characteristic of an epigone, not an original creator, no matter how hard the physical procedure of writing. But perhaps that is only a modern prejudice. The question of who Homer was remains.