Reading the Odyssey: on belonging, hospitality, manliness and exile.

Since the Odyssey is topical, as are immigration and masculinity, I thought I would publish this old piece I wrote after reading Emily Wilson's translation of it.

Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey is a sumptuous experience, at once nostalgic and new. “Nostalgia” is a longing for home and The Odyssey is an epic of home-coming. Reading this translation is a homecoming for me and other mongrel children of that mythic monster known as “the Western tradition,” but like Odysseus’ return to Ithaca, it is an ambiguous and troubling journey.

The familiarity of The Odyssey in this, my first full reading of it, begins with childhood journeys through Golden Treasury-style adaptations of its stories. But it runs deeper. Wilson translates the Greek poem into iambic pentameter, the familiar rhythm of English-language poetry that has been out of fashion for a century. The Modernists broke the pentameter a hundred years ago to free imagery and cadence from its lull and explore new territory. In the far-flung outer realms of English literary territory, contemporary poetry in English is usually written in free verse or even prose poetry, elliptical in its syntax and atomised in its rhythm. Reading an epic poem in iambic pentameter is another kind of journey home.

In Wilson’s translation, iambic pentameter is not a Charybdis threatening to pull down poetry and drown its images and impact, quite the opposite. It’s a brisk and rhythmic sea upon which insight, imagery and striking turns of phrase travel swiftly. Sailing it, Wilson brings new energy to Homer’s inventive metaphors. One of my favourites of these evokes Penelope lying in bed, writhing in anxiety after discovering that her son has left Ithaca and the suitors are plotting to kill him:

Her mind was like a lion caught by humans,
when they are clustering round him in a circle
trying to trap him.. (Book 4, 791-793)

Likewise, the image of Odysseus burying himself under leaves to sleep after arriving exhausted from near-drowning in Phraeacia:

As when a man who lives out on a lonely farm that has not neighbors
buries a glowing torch inside black embers
to save the seed of fire and keep a source—
so was Odysseus concealed in leaves. (Book 5 487-491)

This latter stands as a metaphor for The Odyssey itself, buried in a language most of us never read, staying warm under centuries of translation, adaptation and appropriation.

Keats famously compared reading the world’s first English translation of The Odyssey to conquistadors seeing the Pacific Ocean for the first time. For me, it was more like digging up the warm embers of a fire to get it lit again. Like Keats, I could not read this poem in Greek. The scant Greek I know is gleaned from reading Ezra Pound’s Cantos, which opens with a retelling of Odysseus’ visit to Erebus where he pours blood into a pit to hear Tiresias prophesy. Pound’s epic poem is scattered with words, phrases, images and scenes from Homer, including the imagined voices of the wily hero’s men who ask:

What gain with Odysseus
They that died in the whirpool
And after many vain labours
Living by stolen meat, chained to the rowing bench,
That he should have great fame
And lie by night with the goddess?

The answer? “Ear wax” (Canto 20)

This Odyssey is not just a delightful long poem in English: its accessible lyricism moistens the ground for social and cultural insight. Like all myths, it tells stories of political and moral import in a form that slides easily into the ear and the mind. In a New York Times article about the translation, Wilson notes the perception that translation isn’t considered intellectually serious because it is “communicating with the masses.” This is precisely what Wilson is doing with this new work by writing it in iambic pentameter and contemporary English. We are in her debt for that.

The Odyssey feels like a journey home visiting familiar characters, images and yarns, but the culture of hospitality that underpins the story interrupts that familiarity. The tension of the tale is strung on relationships between guests and hosts, the duties of hospitality owed, observed and transgressed. A stranger arrives: do you prepare good meat, pour libations and make them a comfortable bed on your porch, refraining from inquiry about your guest’s name and purpose until they have had a chance to rest? Do your guests loot and deceive, stay overlong and insult you. Do you trap them and keep them from continuing with their journey? As I read the poem, my mind returned again and again to my own country: a place where I was born an occupier having no name for the winds and river gods, living with my people like a gluttonous suitor consuming another’s inheritance and making a pretence of protocol. Like the suitors, contemporary Australia is not only an insolent guest but a rude and selfish host, refusing to share stolen wealth with those who’ve come across the seas, locking them up instead on an island prison. The resonance is striking.

As Wilson highlights in her introduction, the poem touches on the problems of colonisation and the justifications arrogant colonisers invent to give moral authority to their violent occupation of other people’s countries. The categories of guest and host, lawless and civilised are not exclusive or objective. Wilson acutely observes that the Greek word xenos, from which we derive the English “xenophobia,” “can mean both ‘stranger’ and ‘friend’” (Introduction 23). Loyal Eumaeus explains the orthodoxy that motivates rituals of welcome:

… One must honor guests
and foreigners and strangers, even those
much poorer than oneself. Zeus watches over
beggars and guests and strangers
What I have to give is small, but I will give it gladly. (Book 14 54-58)

Wilson observes, “The tension between strangeness and familiarity is in fact the poem’s central subject.” She describes the poem’s word-for-word repetition of Dawn’s daily arrival, the epithets used to characterise people, gods and objects and the sequences of preparation and action as an assurance to readers or hearers that “once we know the patterns, the world will follow a predictable rhythm.”

But not so any longer.

The world of the Odyssey is an imagined home that we will never reach: a habitus of rituals, relationships and protocols rooted in shared natural, social and cosmological observations. For all our pride in and affection for it, the Western Tradition feels hollow for Anglo Australians and this generates panic and emptiness. We are exiled for the term of our natural lives from bodily participation in the rituals and practices of the old world, from reading our inheritance in the landscapes that made it. Worse, we live out our exile in country that is home to First Nations, bringing on them even more terrible cultural dispossession than we ourselves have suffered.

Reading this poem and reflecting on this exile brought to mind Kae Tempest’s Brand New Ancients, an urgent, tender and ambitious reflection on the contemporary need for stories, myths and rituals. Tempest sees around him the violence and despair of lonely journeys in search of a cultural home. He composes a long poem to recreate the belonging of myth, recognising that the vacuum of this belonging must be filled, is being filled, with sub-cultures of violence and tribalism:

And so they become the bad guys,
angry, disenfranchised,
mansized
punch-happy fists, sad eyes—
but between them was decency,
between them a bond,
a shared weakness
that made them both strong.
If you see them, hoods up,
prowling the pavement at night
you’ll walk quickly away,
skin prickling with terror
but they know love, though,
and they know laughter,
know each other as brother,
friend, father.
Equals. Gods in their synagogues,
an eye for an eye,
priests sharpening their steeples.
A two-man nation,
with its own rules and conventions.

 The violent men from which passers-by recoil in Brand New Ancients share with each other a decency and a brother-bond that evokes the relationships of The Odyssey. Their violence, too, is not out of keeping with The Odyssey, which in Wilson’s translation can be starkly violent. After the slaughter of the suitors, blood must be laboriously sponged from Odysseus’ good furniture. He makes the doomed slave-girls carry and stack the bodies of the suitors outdoors before the girls themselves are hanged slowly, their feet twitching.

I read The Odyssey at the same time as reading Bella Li’s Argosy, a composite of prose poetry, verse and collage that also evokes mythic journeys and violence. The first half, “Perouse, ou, Une semaine de disparitions” brings strangers to new lands, with undertones of colonial violence. In Li’s artworks, eerie colonialists with the heads of birds evoke the strangeness of foreigners. Giants and gods with shells and sea creatures for faces emerge from the horizon, like a reckoning. In the first poem of the volume’s second part, “Isidora: a Western” there comes “over the horizon, a tide of violence, slowly loosed.” The loosening has been slow, begun in colonial times, returning now in the hearts of feckless young men, in a thirst for violent story-telling and in the indiscriminate lashing out of extremism.

All of which goes to show that we need these poems. We need them to help us make sense of ourselves in our homeless wandering and the moral challenges of history’s violent tides. We need the endurance of The Odyssey, two millennia later, to get a perspective of distance on ourselves and reflect on what legacy we ourselves will leave, both as individuals and as a society. Reading such an old poem triggers wondering about the stories that we will leave for readers or listeners in future millennia. With that wonder in mind, we’d do well to heed Penelope’s warning that our immoral actions, invasion, incarceration, lack of hospitality, will live far longer than we do:

… Human beings have short lives
If we are cruel, everyone will curse us
during our life, and mock us when we die.
The names of those who act with nobleness
are brought by travellers across the world
and many people speak about their goodness.” (Book 19 330-335)