BOOK XIV
36: See note to XIII, 997.
414, 441, 452; In his first labor, Heracles killed the Nemean lion and clothed himself with its skin. See I, 1199; XIV, 1171.
423: Gibraltar, called by the ancient Greeks “The Pillars of Heracles.”
428-29: On Mt. Cithaeron occurred what is known as the “Choice of Heracles.” As he was meditating on the course his life should take, two women, Pleasure and Virtue, appeared before him, one offering a life of enjoyment and the other a life of toil and glory. He chose the latter. In Kazantzakis, the twelve labors of Heracles represent the arduous battle with material things which a hero must undergo in order to purify his spirit. The death of Heracles is also symbolic of this interpretation. His wife unwittingly gave him a robe steeped in poisoned blood. It clung to him and caused him such fearful suffering that he had himself carried to the summit of Mt. Oeta and burned on a pyre. He was taken to Mt. Olympus by the gods and there became a demigod. See XVI, 1118-21.
565, 581: The twelve axes are those which Odysseus strung with his bow in Homers Odyssey, Book XXI, just before he killed the suitors. In Kazantzakis’ Odyssey, these are equated with the twelve labors of Heracles. According to Kazantzakis, man has the illusion that the thirteenth and final ax or labor is that of immortality. In his Zorha the Greek (Simon and Schuster, 1953), Kazantzakis asks: “Does our unquenchable desire for immortality spring, not from the fact that we are immortal, but from the fact that during the short span of our lives we are in the service of something immortal?”
990: See note to VII, 1332-33.
1094-95 This was the hybrid fruit of his voyages, child of two parents, one of the flesh and the other of the spirit.
1171: See note to XIV, 414.
1179-96 See X, 552-55.
1385-90 Cretan distichs.
1391-93: See note to I, 1268.
BOOK XV
190: From folk legends. The Earth Bull is a heavy beast, like the hippopotamus, that growls in the bowels of the earth.
600-03 In Zorba the Greek, Kazantzakis asks: “Who was the sage who tried to teach his disciples to do voluntarily what the law orders should be done? To say ‘yes’ to necessity and to change the inevitable into something done of their own free will? This is perhaps the only human way to deliverance. It is a pitiable way, but there is no other.”
1204-09 See note to X, 1359-60.
1370-71 A Turkish folk tradition.
BOOK XVI
61, 68: See note to I, 1268.
204-05 See V, 691-703.
278: In Greece the sign of the evil eye is made by thrusting the outstretched fingers of a hand at a man’s face, in a contemptuous gesture.
671-73 See note to I, 1268.
985-87 Part of African tribe ritual.
1118-21: See note to XIV, 428-29.
BOOK XVII
178, 435, 668, 689-91: See note to I, 1268.
195-97 The slave is talking to the Old King, who is also on the elephant’s back.
240-44: A wedding song.
665: See note to I, 1235.
683-85 See note to I, 633-34,
687-88 See note to II, 603.
892-93 Very popular among the Greek peasantry is the komboloi, a kind of secular rosary with which a man often plays by clicking bead on bead as he walks or converses. The best are made of amber. See XX, 407-08, 579-82.
977-81 See note to IV, 66.
1294-95 In Greek folk tales a dragon coils about a well and eats all the maidens who come to draw water. He is often killed by St. George. See XIX, 230-31.
1295, 1303: See note to VII, 1332-33
BOOK XVIII
102-05: This happened in Knossos.
264-65: 323-24 See note to I, 1268.
427-83: There is a Buddhistic belief that the thirty-two signs of the perfect man, of the savior of the world, were schematized on the sole of Buddha’s foot.
498-99 The Tempter is part of Odysseus himself, and now merges with him once more.
639-46 Many incidents such as these in the life of Prince Motherth are taken from the life of Buddha. Kazantzakis has written a poetic drama entitled Buddha.
691-93 See note to X, 1359-60.
696-749 In a Byzantine legend, the three Magi visit the Christ child; to the first, he seemed like an old man with a white beard; to the second, like a man in the prime of life with a black mustache; and to the third, like a babe suckling its mother’s breast.
818-21, 832-39: See note to II, 603.
1117: See note to VII, 1332-33.
1208: In answer to several newspaper articles on “The Metaphysics of the Odyssey* by Miss Elli Lambridi, Kazantzakis wrote the authoress: “There are four stages through which, in my opinion, a man may pass: (1) good and evil are enemies; (2) good and evil are co-workers; (3) good and evil are one; (4) this one does not exist. In the first stage live all men of action; in the second, many men of theory (if these want to interfere in action, they will be forced, if their action is to bear fruit, to return to the first stage); the third stage is common to all the mystics of Europe and the East; the fourth, only to those of the East. . . . A few men, by continuing their onward march, may reach this abominable, inhuman—or divine—stage and live it beyond the objections of reason . . . . After many years of patient struggle Odysseus reached this lightning flash of vision. Thus his Odyssey, that is, his onward journey, was suddenly enlightened. What is meant by enlightenment? It blazed up and vanished in a lightning flash.”
BOOK XIX
99-106, 139-40: Buddha says that we must look upon the world as if we were seeing it for the first and last time; this he calls the “elephant’s eye.”
229: See note to I, 1235.
230-31: See note to XVII, 1294-95.
232: In folk tales, a blackamoor often guards treasure hidden in the earth.
668: In folk legends, these are magical aids.
670-75 In folk tales, Death’s mother often loves men and tries to protect them from her son.
1143-44 A custom in Egypt, that men might not harm the living with the evil eye.
1152, 1392: See note to I, 1268.
1354: See note to VII, 1332-33.
BOOK XX
407-08, 579-82: See note to XVII, 892-93.
629-32: Odysseus remembers the bastard sons of the Doric barbarians and the Spartan women. See IV, 743-98.
643-45 See note to II, 603.
BOOK XXI
761: A cross made of wax is placed between the lips of a dead man that vampires may not transform him also into a vampire.
BOOK XXII
278-82: According to folk legends, the Kingdom of Death begins here.
822: See note to X, 1361.
1063-66 See note to VIII, 532-34.
1078: In some Grecian villages on the night after the wedding, it is customary for the bridegroom to display on the balcony of his home his bride’s bloodstained bedsheet as proof of her virginity.
1421: According to Greek folk legend this herb will arouse love in the woman to whom it is given.
1465-76 See note to VII, 1332-33.
BOOK XXIII
38-58, 136-45, 1284-86: See note to IV, 66.
372-76: See note to I, 1268.
920: See note to X, 1359-60.
1260: See I, 634.
BOOK XXIV
8; A monstrous mythical tree which is all trees in one.
135: See note to I, 604.
375-79, 432-39, 595-96, 623-24: See note to I, 1268.
543: See note to VII, 1332-33.
746-48 In his poetic drama, Odysseus, Kazantzakis describes how Odysseus chokes to death his faithful dog, Argus, to prevent him from betraying his master to the suitors by his joyous barks of welcome.
940: In ancient Orphic beliefs, the River Lethe in Hades flows from the dead roots of a white cypress tree. A dead man finds the tree with the help of an amulet he wears, and is guided to the Elysian fields.
1052: That is, Prince Motherth.
108
7: That is, Apollo, the Greek god most opposed to oriental mysticism.
1190-91 See note to I, 640.
1255-56: See note to VII, 1332-33.
1302-05: See XVIII, 81-114.
1363: That is, the Tempter, to whom Odysseus himself had given birth. See note to XVIII, 498-99.
About the Author
NIKOS KAZANTZAKIS has been acclaimed by Albert Schweitzer and Thomas Mann as one of the great writers of modern Europe. He was born in Crete in 1883 and studied at the University of Athens, where he received his Doctor of Law degree. Later he studied in Paris under the philosopher Henri Bergson, and he completed his studies in literature and art during four other years in Germany and Italy. Before World War II he spent a great deal of his time on the is land of Aegina, where he devoted himself to his philosophical and literary work. For a short while in 1945 he was Greek Minister of Education. He was president of the Greek Society of Men of Letters, but spent most of the later years of his life in France.
He is best known in the United States and England as the author of three enthusiastically acclaimed novels, Zorba the Greek, The Greek Passion, and Freedom or Death, but he was also a dramatist, translator, poet, and travel writer. The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, which he worked on over a period of twelve years, is considered to be his crowning achievement. He died in October 1957.
For a full account of Kazantzakis’ life and work, and of The Odyssey in particular, see the Introduction to this volume.
About the Translator
KIMON FRIAR is an American scholar, poet, and translator of Greek descent who now lives principally in Greece. He has taught at Adelphi and Amherst colleges and at the State University of Iowa, New York University, and the Universities of Minnesota, Illinois, Indiana, and California (Berkeley). Recently he inaugurated the Kazantzakis Chair at San Francisco State University. From 1943 to 1947 the was director of the Y.M. and Y.W.H.A. Poetry Center in New York. His translations, poetry, and criticism have appeared in a number of anthologies and in the Atlantic, Poetry Magazine, the New Republic, Saturday Review, and other magazines. He is the coeditor (with John Malcolm Brinnin) of an outstanding anthology, Modern Poetry: American and British. He is the translator of Modern Greek Poetry and the forthcoming Contemporary Greek Poetry: The Postwar Tradition. Mr. Friar has received many awards, including grants from the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Ingram Merrill Foundation Award.
Kimon Friar met Nikos Kazantzakis in Florence in 1951, and the two men sensed an immediate affinity for each others work and aims. In 1954, with the aid of a Fulbright Research Fellowship in Modern Greek Literature at the University of Athens, Friar began his monumental translation of The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel His four years of continuous work on the translation carried him on what seems another Odyssey, for he worked on it in the American midwest, in New York, Antibes, Yugoslavia, Athens, throughout most of Greece and the Greek islands, and in much of South America.
About the Illustrator
GHIKA (NICHOLAS HADJI-KYRIACO GHIKA) is probably the most distinguished of contemporary Greek artists. Painter, draftsman, and stage designer, he was born in Athens in 1906, studied in Paris, and had his first one-man show there in 1927. In addition to subsequent shows in Paris, his work has been seen in one-man or group exhibitions in London, Venice, Brussels, Athens, and other European cities. His first American show was held at the Alexandre Iolas Gallery in New York in 1958.
* Of interest to readers of the Odyssey are Odysseus, Theseus, Christ, Buddha, and Prometheus, a trilogy.
† In the United States and in England Kazantzakis is best known by his novels Zorba the Greek, Freedom or Death, and The Greek Passion (entitled Christ Re-crucified in England).
* I am indebted to the section on Bergson in Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy.
* See “Business of Evolution,” by Joseph Wood Krutch, in The Saturday Review, March 15, 1958.
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Copyright © 1958 by Helene Kazantzakis and Kimon Friar
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including the right of reproduction
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This Touchstone Edition, 1985
Translation Amended by Kimon Friar
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Kazantzakis, Nikos, 1883-1957.
The Odyssey: a modern sequel.
(A Touchstone book)
I. Friar, Kimon. II. Title.
PA5610.K39033 1985 889′. 132 85-11755
ISBN 0-671-20247-2 Pbk.
ISBN13: 978-1-4767-0685-6 (eBook)
The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel Page 135