and called out happily:
“Oh, Father,
surely one of the gods who are young forever
has made you magnificent before my eyes!”
Clearheaded Laërtês faced him, saying:
“By Father Zeus, Athena and Apollo,
I wish I could be now as once I was,
commander of Kephallenians, when I took
the walled town, Nérikos, on the promontory!
Would god I had been young again last night
with armor on me, standing in our hall
to fight the suitors at your side! How many
knees I could have crumpled, to your joy!”
While son and father spoke, cowherd and swineherd
attended, waiting, for the meal was ready.
Soon they were all seated, and their hands
picked up the meat and bread.
But now old Dolios
appeared in the bright doorway with his sons,
work-stained from the field. Laërtês’ housekeeper,
who reared the boys and tended Dolios
in his bent age, had gone to fetch them in.
When it came over them who the stranger was
they halted in astonishment. Odysseus
hit an easy tone with them. Said he:
“Sit down and help yourselves. Shake off your wonder.
Here we’ve been waiting for you all this time,
and our mouths watering for good roast pig!”
But Dólios came forward, arms outstretched,
and kissed Odysseus’ hand at the wrist bone,
crying out:
“Dear master, you returned!
You came to us again! How we had missed you!
We thought you lost. The gods themselves have brought you!
Welcome, welcome; health and blessings on you!
And tell me, now, just one thing more: Penélopê,
does she know yet that you are on the island?
or should we send a messenger?”
Odysseus gruffly said,
“Old man, she knows.
Is it for you to think of her?”
So Dolios
quietly took a smooth bench at the table
and in their turn his sons welcomed Odysseus,
kissing his hands; then each went to his chair
beside his father. Thus our friends
were occupied in Laërtês’ house at noon.
Meanwhile to the four quarters of the town
the news ran: bloody death had caught the suitors;
and men and women in a murmuring crowd
gathered before Odysseus’ hall. They gave
burial to the piteous dead, or bore
the bodies of young men from other islands
down to the port, thence to be ferried home.
Then all the men went grieving to assembly
and being seated, rank by rank, grew still,
as old Eupeithes rose to address them. Pain
lay in him like a brand for Antínoös,
the first man that Odysseus brought down,
and tears flowed for his son as he began:
“Heroic feats that fellow did for us
Akhaians, friends! Good spearmen by the shipload
he led to war and lost—lost ships and men,
and once ashore again killed these, who were
the islands’ pride.
Up with you! After him!—
before he can take flight to Pylos town
or hide at Elis, under Epeian law!
We’d be disgraced forever! Mocked for generations
if we cannot avenge our sons’ blood, and our brothers’!
Life would turn to ashes—at least for me;
rather be dead and join the dead!
I say
we ought to follow now, or they’ll gain time
and make the crossing.”
His appeal, his tears,
moved all the gentry listening there;
but now they saw the crier and the minstrel
come from Odysseus’ hall, where they had slept.
The two men stood before the curious crowd,
and Medôn said:
“Now hear me, men of Ithaka.
When these hard deeds were done by Lord Odysseus
the immortal gods were not far off. I saw
with my own eyes someone divine who fought
beside him, in the shape and dress of Mentor;
it was a god who shone before Odysseus,
a god who swept the suitors down the hall
dying in droves.”
At this pale fear assailed them,
and next they heard again the old forecaster,
Halithérsês Mastóridês, Alone
he saw the field of time, past and to come.
In his anxiety for them he said:
“Ithakans, now listen to what I say.
Friends, by your own fault these deaths came to pass.
You would not heed me nor the captain, Mentor;
would not put down the riot of your sons.
Heroic feats they did!—all wantonly
raiding a great man’s flocks, dishonoring
his queen, because they thought he’d come no more.
Let matters rest; do as I urge; no chase,
or he who wants a bloody end will find it.”
The greater number stood up shouting “Aye!”
But many held fast, sitting all together
in no mind to agree with him. Eupeithes
had won them to his side. They ran for arms,
clapped on their bronze, and mustered
under Eupeithes at the town gate
for his mad foray.
Vengeance would be his,
he thought, for his son’s murder; but that day
held bloody death for him and no return.
At this point, querying Zeus, Athena said:
“O Father of us all and king of kings,
enlighten me. What is your secret will?
War and battle, worse and more of it,
or can you not impose a pact on both?”
The summoner of cloud replied:
“My child,
why this formality of inquiry?
Did you not plan that action by yourself—
see to it that Odysseus, on his homecoming,
should have their blood?
Conclude it as you will.
There is one proper way, if I may say so:
Odysseus’ honor being satisfied,
let him be king by a sworn pact forever,
and we, for our part, will blot out the memory
of sons and brothers slain. As in the old time
let men of Ithaka henceforth be friends;
prosperity enough, and peace attend them.”
Athena needed no command, but down
in one spring she descended from Olympos
just as the company of Odysseus finished
wheat crust and honeyed wine, and heard him say:
“Go out, someone, and see if they are coming.”
One of the boys went to the door as ordered
and saw the townsmen in the lane. He turned
swiftly to Odysseus.
“Here they come,”
he said, “best arm ourselves, and quickly.”
All up at once, the men took helm and shield—
four fighting men, counting Odysseus,
with Dolios’ half dozen sons. Laërtês
armed as well, and so did Dólios—
greybeards, they could be fighters in a pinch.
Fitting their plated helmets on their heads
they sallied out, Odysseus in the lead.
Now from the air Athena, Zeus’s daughter,
appeared in Mentor’s guise, with Mentor’s voice,
making Odysseus’ heart grow light. He said
to put cheer in his son:
“Telém
akhos”
you are going into battle against pikemen
where hearts of men are tried. I count on you
to bring no shame upon your forefathers.
In fighting power we have excelled this lot
in every generation.”
Said his son:
“If you are curious, Father, watch and see
the stuff that’s in me. No more talk of shame.”
And old Laërtês cried aloud:
“Ah, what a day for me, dear gods!
to see my son and grandson vie in courage!”
Athena halted near him, and her eyes
shone like the sea. She said:
“Arkeísiadês,
dearest of all my old brothers-in-arms,
invoke the grey-eyed one and Zeus her father,
heft your spear and make your throw.”
Power flowed into him from Pallas Athena,
whom he invoked as Zeus’s virgin child,
and he let fly his heavy spear.
It struck
Eupeithês on the cheek plate of his helmet,
and undeflected the bronze head punched through.
He toppled, and his armor clanged upon him.
Odysseus and his son now furiously
closed, laying on with broadswords, hand to hand,
and pikes: they would have cut the enemy down
to the last man, leaving not one survivor,
had not Athena raised a shout
that stopped all fighters in their tracks.
“Now hold!”
she cried, “Break off this bitter skirmish;
end your bloodshed, Ithakans, and make peace.”
Their faces paled with dread before Athena,
and swords dropped from their hands unnerved, to lie
strewing the ground, at the great voice of the goddess.
Those from the town turned fleeing for their lives.
But with a cry to freeze their hearts
and ruffling like an eagle on the pounce,
the lord Odysseus reared himself to follow—
at which the son of Kronos dropped a thunderbolt
smoking at his daughter’s feet.
Athena
cast a grey glance at her friend and said:
“Son of Laërtês and the gods of old,
Odysseus, master of land ways and sea ways,
command yourself. Call off this battle now,
or Zeus who views the wide world may be angry.”
He yielded to her, and his heart was glad.
Both parties later swore to terms of peace
set by their arbiter, Athena, daughter
of Zeus who bears the stormcloud as a shield—
though still she kept the form and voice of Mentor.
THE POEM OF ODYSSEUS
BY D. S. CARNE-ROSS
The Odyssey is The Iliad’s wife, Samuel Butler observed in his schooldays, a quip that is quite to the point, for whether or not the same poet composed both poems (a question that is never likely to be settled), the poet of The Odyssey knew The Iliad very well. If we call The Iliad a war poem, or with Simone Weil the poem of force, The Odyssey is a postwar poem. Menelaos, who should be at ease in his great house, still grieves for the comrades he lost at Troy. We see Odysseus recovering from his long military service, putting himself together again, and learning the more difficult arts of peace, above all how to deal with women. In The Iliad women play a small though memorable part; in The Odyssey they are everywhere—even the man-eating sea devil Skylla is female. Odysseus has, when we first see him, to free himself from the amorous bondage of the goddess Kalypso, earlier on in his story from the deadly-dangerous but alluring witch Kirke. More testing still at least to our romantic eyes is Nausikaa, the most attractive girl in classical literature. In the second half of the poem we find him, many rungs higher on the social scale, with his comrade-in-arms the great goddess Athena. “Two of a kind, we are,” she says fondly. And above all there is his wife, Penelope, whom he must wean from the cocoon of lonely grief that she has defensively spun around herself before he can reknit their marriage.
Hence it is that The Odyssey has often been called the first novel, for our own great narrative genre has much to say about the relations of the sexes, and is rich in the social nuances and psychological delicacies where Homer in his antique way is no less at ease. Readers have often wondered how a poem composed almost three millennia ago can offer so fine a register of moods and emotions and possess the “almost Jamesian precisions” that Pound saw in it. At all events a very different poem from The Iliad, a huge tragic masterpiece that must be taken on its own terms before it will speak to ours. The Odyssey is an amenable poem open to all comers in search of delight, and from antiquity onwards has lent itself to a wide range of interpretation. And yet, strangely it must seem, we have had no really satisfactory translation, certainly nothing to stand beside Pope’s Iliad, “that poetical wonder,” as Johnson called it. In 1961 Robert Fitzgerald’s Odyssey appeared. Here at last was a translator who could “lift the great song again,” to borrow words from the prelude to his version, because he caught the music of Homer’s Greek and heard the way his characters speak to each other. This is our classic version, effortlessly surpassing its several successors.
PRELUDE AND THE VOYAGES
We first hear of Odysseus in the opening scene of the poem as the gods gathered in council listen to Athena complain of the way they have neglected the great hero. The Trojan War ended years ago and he should have been back home; instead he has been detained by a minor goddess, Kalypso, in her island of Ogygia. Zeus, a Zeus more concerned with justice on earth than the somewhat pococurante supreme deity of The Iliad, assures her that he has Odysseus well in mind—the divine messenger Hermes is to go to the island and see to it that he is allowed to set out for home. We expect at this point to turn directly to the hero of the poem, but instead we follow Athena to Ithaka, where, disguised as a family friend called Mentes, she proposes to send Odysseus’ son Telemakhos on a mission abroad to seek news of his father. The goddess is displeased by what she sees in Ithaka, a crowd of men living it up and behaving as though they owned the place. They “‘are here courting my mother,’” Telemakhos tells her, “‘and they use/our house as if it were a house to plunder.’” Bad behavior, we agree, but the poet takes a graver view. He is in love with civilization, with the courtesies and seemly usages that could not play much part in wartime. He delights to be able to report that even in this disorderly menage a few decent practices still prevail. As Telemakhos sits down with his guest, a maid
brought them a silver finger bowl and filled it
out of a beautiful spouting golden jug,
then drew a polished table to their side.
The larder mistress with her tray came by
and served them generously. A carver lifted
cuts of each roast meat to put on trenchers
before the two.
These lines will be repeated a number of times in the poem. Even in Kirke’s house in the woods the same civilities are observed (Book 10, 411 ff. in Fitzgerald’s translation, with some variations). The ceremonies of civilization do not mean much to us today; we tend to see them as insincere, a gloss laid over the realities of human relations. To Homer they are very beautiful and their violation a more serious matter than we can imagine.
If there is a touch of a Bronze Age Miss Manners about the poet of The Odyssey, and some justification for calling his poem the first novel, it must be said that it reaches well beyond the competence of that instructive lady and beyond the normal reach of the novel. There the natural world acts primarily as a background (in Jane Austen, bad weather means that a lady taking a walk may get the hem of her dress wet) against which the complexities of human relations can be explored. Being a poem The Odyssey cannot but be open to the forces of nature and the fierce west wind can go shouting over the wine-dark sea. We feel that when a novelist lets nature speak
out in this way he is poaching on the poet’s preserve, as Hardy does in the pastoral episode at Talbothays dairy in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, beginning a chapter with “On a thyme-scented, bird-hatching morning in May.”
And there is another large region that The Odyssey claims as its own, one ignored by the poet of The Iliad and open only to the novelist if he first transforms it for his own sophisticated purposes: the region of faerie and folktale and fable—the world of myth. Myth the novel can hardly do without. In The Europeans Henry James re-creates an earlier America that is recognizably Eden, an Eden corrupted by the arrival of two Europeanized snakes, the Baroness Münster and her brother. In Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff is seen as a goblin, a demonic creature of the wild heath, but he must play his part in a household that was orderly before he came there. The mythical element is a pattern or design traced lightly beneath the realistic action. In Odysseus’ adventures, however, where he has to deal with goddesses and ogres and a wind king who lives on a floating island, the mythical or folktale structure is dominant. Not that we are taken into the nursery to listen to these tales. It is not in the light that never was on sea or land that we meet these strange personages; they are set before us matter-of-factly, standing beneath what Kinglake called the strong vertical light of Homer’s poetry.
The Odyssey: The Fitzgerald Translation Page 43