COMMENTS & QUESTIONS

In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter the Odyssey through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.

Comments

ARISTOTLE

Unity of plot does not, as some persons think, consist in the unity of the hero. For infinitely various are the incidents in one man’s life which cannot be reduced to unity; and so, too, there are many actions of one man out of which we cannot make one action. Hence the error, as it appears, of all poets who have composed a Heracleid, a Theseid, or other poems of the kind. They imagine that as Heracles was one man, the story of Heracles must also be a unity. But Homer, as in all else he is of surpassing merit, here too—whether from art or natural genius—seems to have happily discerned the truth. In composing the Odyssey he did not include all the adventures of Odysseus—such as his wound on Parnassus, or his feigned madness at the mustering of the host—incidents between which there was no necessary or probable connexion: but he made the Odyssey, and likewise the Iliad, to centre round an action that in our sense of the word is one. . . . The story of the Odyssey can be stated briefly. A certain man is absent from home for many years; he is jealously watched by Poseidon, and left desolate. Meanwhile his home is in a wretched plight—suitors are wasting his substance and plotting against his son. At length, tempest-tost, he himself arrives; he makes certain persons acquainted with him; he attacks the suitors with his own hand, and is himself preserved while he destroys them. This is the essence of the plot; the rest is episode. . . . Epic poetry must have as many kinds as Tragedy: it must be simple, or complex, or ‘ethical,’ or ‘pathetic.’ The parts also, with the exception of song and spectacle, are the same; for it requires Reversals of the Situation, Recognitions, and Tragic Incidents. Moreover, the thoughts and the diction must be artistic. In all these respects Homer is our earliest and sufficient model. Indeed each of his poems has a twofold character. The Iliad is at once simple and ‘pathetic’ and the Odyssey complex (for Recognition scenes run through it), and at the same time ‘ethical.’ Moreover, in diction and thought he is supreme.

—from Poetics, translated by S. H. Butcher (1911)

JOHN KEATS

Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

Round many western islands have I been

Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne:

Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes;

He stared at the Pacific—and all his men

Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

—“On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”

S. H. BUTCHER AND A. LANG

There would have been less controversy about the proper method of Homeric translation, if critics had recognised that the question is a purely relative one, that of Homer there can be no final translation. The taste and literary habits of each age demand different qualities in poetry, and therefore a different sort of rendering of Homer. To the men of the time of Elizabeth, Homer would have appeared bald, it seems, and lacking in ingenuity, if he had been presented in his antique simplicity. For the Elizabethan age, Chapman supplied what was then necessary, and the mannerisms that were then deemed of the essence of poetry, namely, daring and luxurious conceits. Thus in Chapman’s verse Troy must ‘shed her towers for tears of overthrow,’ and when the winds toss Odysseus about, their sport must be called ‘the horrid tennis.’

In the age of Anne, ‘dignity’ and ‘correctness’ had to be given to Homer, and Pope gave them by aid of his dazzling rhetoric, his antitheses, his netteteé, his command of every conventional and favourite artifice. Without Chapman’s conceits, Homer’s poems would hardly have been what the Elizabethans took for poetry; without Pope’s smoothness, and Pope’s points, the Iliad and Odyssey would have seemed tame, rude, and harsh in the age of Anne. These great translations must always live as English poems. As transcripts of Homer they are like pictures drawn from a lost point of view.

—from the preface to Butcher and Lang’s translation of

the Odyssey (1917)

SAMUEL BUTLER

This translation is intended to supplement a work entitled The Authoress of the Odyssey, which I published in 1897. . . . I have nothing either to add to, or to withdraw from, what I have there written. The points in question are:

(1) that the Odyssey was written entirely at, and drawn entirely from, the place now called Trapani on the west coast of Sicily, alike as regards the Phaecian and the Ithaca scenes; while the voyages of Ulysses, when once he is within easy reach of Sicily, resolve themselves into a periplus of the island, practically from Trapani back to Trapani, via the Lipari islands, the Straits of Messina, and the island of Pantellaria;

(2) that the poem was entirely written by a very young woman, who lived at the place now called Trapani, and introduced herself into her work under the name of Nausicaa.

—from the preface to Butler’s translation

of the Odyssey (1900)

Questions

1. Aristotle praises Homer for focusing on specific and diverse events in the life of Odysseus, rather than attempting somehow to unify his adventures. How does this episodic treatment create a sweeping epic? By investing each scene with such vivid detail, does Homer make Odysseus’s life feel realistic? Can this stylistic technique be construed as modern?

2. How do Keats, Butcher, and Lang argue for a plurality of translations of the Odyssey? Does this constant retranslating of Homer’s work mirror its own oral history?

3. In literature, “unrealistic” events, distortions of actuality, and fantastic characters often make a point precisely by their deviations from the com monsense reality we think we live in. How, for example, do Polyphemous’s monstrous differences help to reveal Odysseus’s virtues, or at least, his definitive traits?

4. Are Odysseus’s defining traits admirable or deplorable?

5. Odysseus’s slaughter of the suitors and the servants who went over to them would be reprehensible in real life, no doubt. But does that mean we should be ashamed of enjoying it in literature? Do you think that this kind of violence in literature encourages people to be violent in their own lives?

6. Does Homer imply that the reader (or originally, the listener) should emulate Odysseus?

7. To what do you attribute the Odyssey’s 2,500 years of popularity?