A Guide to the Odyssey: A Commentary on the English Translation of Robert Fitzgerald (10 page)

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.

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 speak 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.

¹³
Traces of different stages in the historical development of the Greek language, as well as dialectal variants, likewise coexist in the epic idiom, making it in some sense the idiom of no one particular time or place. (The details can, obviously, only be discussed with reference to the text in the original language.)

¹⁴
It is clear that by blinding Polyphêmos, the son of Poseidon, Odysseus earns the sea god’s enmity. This is the only offense against a god on Odysseus’ part so marked in the poem, and it becomes a crucial element in his life. Even after his return, he will have to go on a pilgrimage to make amends; only then, as Teirêsias informs him, will Poseidon be satisfied. Poseidon, a backer of Troy in
The Iliad
, was hardly likely to be well-disposed to Odysseus to start with. There were also the offenses that Odysseus committed at Troy, above all, the theft of the Palladium during the sack of the city, considered significant for
The Odyssey
by Jenny Strauss Clay in
The Wrath of Athena: Gods and Men in the Odyssey
(Princeton, 1983), a fascinating if unconventional reading of the poem. Odysseus would have been a well-known figure to audiences hearing
The Odyssey
for the first time, and not just from previous versions of his homecoming: he was made the subject of
The Odyssey
because he had a prehistory and stood for something. These other stories are always hovering around our Odysseus like a narrative penumbra, but it is still worth noting that Poseidon’s wrath, not Athena’s, is thematized in
The Odyssey
.

¹⁵
Sheila Murnaghan makes the further, subtle observation: “Telemachus’ reunion with Odysseus is the culminating moment of Telemachus’ growth to a point where he no longer needs Odysseus’ return” (
Disguise and Recognition in the Odyssey
[Princeton, 1987], p. 37).

¹⁶
Presentations of the example to Telémakhos which follow the one quoted are those by Nestor (III.208–17 and III.328–37), by Athena disguised as Mentor (III.250–54—she had assumed the form of Mentês the first time), and by Proteus, whose account is narrated by Meneláos (IV.554–73). That Orestês also killed his mother is mentioned in only one of these accounts, and then merely in passing (III.335–36).

¹⁷
Marylin Arthur Katz reminds us that the etymology of “Klytaimnéstra”—“renowned for being wooed”—would fit Penélopê as well or better (
Penelope’s Renown
, p. 45, citing the insight of K. Kunst, “Die Schuld der Klytaimnéstra,”
Wiener Studien
44 [1924–25], 18–32, 143–54, here p. 26). Actually, both Helen and Penélopê are more famous than Klytaimnéstra for being wooed if fame is measured in the number of wooers. The pact among the suitors of Helen (1) to abide by her choice and (2) to come to her husband’s aid if she is ever abducted is presented elsewhere in Greek legend among the necessary preconditions for the Trojan War; tradition has it that this pact was suggested by none other than Odysseus. Helen succumbed to Paris’ blandishments, and Klytaimnéstra to Aigísthos’. It is Penélopê alone who in the face of a great number of suitors prevents their success at wooing. From the man’s point of view, a good woman can only succeed at being wooed by permitting successful wooing to one man.

¹⁸
According to
The Odyssey
this took some seven years. An alternate tradition would eventually develop that after the sack of Troy, Meneláos didn’t simply regain Helen. According to this plot, the Helen at Troy turned out to have been a wraith, while the “real” Helen had long since been wafted to Egypt, where Meneláos had to go rescue her. See, for example, Euripides’
Helen
.

¹⁹
For a superb example, see Bernard Knox’s “Introduction” to
The Iliad
, especially pp. 23–43.

²⁰
For a recent highly intelligent and suggestive study, see Andrew Ford,
Homer: The Poetry of the Past
(Ithaca, 1992). On these “paths,” see Commentary,
Book VIII
. 79–80.

²¹
The episode (XIX.451–552) was known as “the bath” or “the bathing” (
ta Niptra
) in antiquity. One of the most famous modern analyses constitutes the first chapter (“Odysseus’ Scar”) of Erich Auerbach,
Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature
, tr. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, 1953), pp. 3–23, although later scholars would be rather more hesitant in drawing the global distinctions between Homeric and Biblical narrative styles that Auerbach does in his nonetheless stimulating discussion.