Snag The Odyssey Curated By Homer Available As Volume

Therapy
“By hook or by crook, this peril too shall be something we remember, ”

During covid lockdown, my husband and I decided to study Ancient Greece, Each night after dinner, we listened to a half an hour lecture or read from a classic text, Its become a habit or rather a household ritual in which even our dog partakes, She has a chair she sits in while we listen, We studied history, philosophy, mythology, and when omicron threatened, we decided to reread Homer, It has been magical, therapeutic even, On Saturday, we finished the Odyssey,

Living in such trying times makes me long for something of lasting quality, Emily Wilsons exquisite translation of Odysseuss tumultuous tenyear journey home from Troy helped me grapple with the precariousness of the human condition and our own mortality.
We listened to Claire Danes read and simultaneously read along, Homer is meant to be heard, and Danes gives an outstanding performance, Our understanding of the text was enhanced by interspersing Elizabeth Vandivers excellent lectures throughout our reading, Our journey with Odysseus, Penelope, and Telemachus provided a needed uplift for us as it has for others over the past,years, Highly recommend.

Thanks to Bruce Katz for recommending Emily Wilson's translation, The first line in Emily Wilsons new translation of the Odyssey, the first by a woman scholar, is “Tell me about a complicated man, ” In an article by Wyatt Mason in the NYT late last year, Wilson tells us

“I couldve said, Tell me about a straying husband.
And thats a viable translation, Thats one of the things the original language saysBut I want to be super responsible about my relationship to the Greek text, I want to be saying, after multiple different revisions: This is the best I can get toward the truth, ”

Oh, the mind reels, This new translation by Emily Wilson reads swiftly, smoothly, and feels contemporary, This exciting new translation will surprise you, and send you to compare certain passages with earlier translations, In her Introduction, Wilson raises that issue of translation herself: How is it possible to have so many different translations, all of which could be considered “correct”

Wilson reminds

us what a ripping good yarn this story is, and removes any barriers to understanding.
We can come to it with our current sensibility and find in it all kinds of foretelling and parallels with life today, and perhaps we even see the genesis of our own core morality, a morality that feels inexplicably learned.
Perhaps the passeddown sense of right and wrong, of fairness and justice we read of here was learned through these early stories and lessons from the gods.
Or are we interpreting the story to fit our sensibility

These delicious questions operate in deep consciousness while we pleasure in learning more about that liar Odysseus, described again and again as wily, scheming, cunning, “his lies were like truth.
” He learned how to bend the truth at his grandfathers knee, and the gods exploited that talent when they helped him out, The skill served him well, allowing him to confuse and evade captors throughout his ordeal, as well as keep his wife and father in the dark about his identity upon his return until he could reveal the truth at a time of maximum impact.


There does inevitably come a time when people react cautiously to what is told them, even to the evidence their own eyes, The gods can cloud ones understanding, it is well known, and truth is suspected in every encounter, These words Penelope speaks:

"Please forgive me, do not keep
bearing a grudge because when I first saw you,
I would not welcome you immediately.

I felt a constant dread that some bad man
would fool me with his lies, There are so many
dishonest, clever men, . . "

Particularly easy to relate to today are descriptions of Penelopes ungrateful suitors like Ctesippius, who "encouraged by extraordinary wealth, had come to court Odysseus wife.
" Also speaking insight for us today are the phrases "Weapons themselves can tempt a man to fight" and "Arms themselves can prompt a man to use them.
"

There is a conflicted view of women in this story: "Sex sways all womens minds, even the best of them," though Penelope is a paragon of virtue, managing to avoid temptation through her own duplicitousness.
She hardly seems a victim at all in this reading, merely an unwilling captor, She is strong, smart, loyal, generous, and brave, all the qualities any man would want for his wife,

We understand the slave girls that Odysseus felt he had to “test” for loyalty were at the disposal of the ungrateful suitors who, after they ate and drank at Penelope's expense, often met the house girls after hours.
Some of the girls appeared to go willingly, laughing and teasing as they went, and were outspoken about their support of the men theyd taken up with.
Others, we get the impression from the text, felt they had no choice,

Race is not mentioned but once in this book, very matteroffactly, though the darker man is a servant to the lighter one:

"Odysseus had a valet with him,
I do remember, named Eurybates,
a man a little older than himself,
who had black skin, round shoulders, woolly hair,
and was Odysseus's favorite our of all his crew
because his mind matched his.
"

Odysseuss tribulations are terrible, but appear to be brought on by his own stubborn and petulant nature, like his taunting of the blinded Cyclops from his own escaping ship.
Cyclops was Poseidons son so Odysseus's behavior was especially unwise, particularly since his own men were yelling at him to stop, Later, that betrayal of the mens best interests for his own childish purpose will come back to haunt Odysseus when the men suspect him of thinking only of himselfgreedinessand unleash terrible winds by accident, blowing them tragically off course in rugged seas.


We watch, fascinated, as the gods seriously mess Odysseus about, and then come to his aid, We really get the sense of the gods playing, as in Athenas willingness to give Odysseus strength and arms when fighting the suitors in his house, but being unwilling to actually step in to help with the fighting.
Instead, she watched from the rafters, Its hard not to be just a little resentful,

Wilsons translation reads very fast and very clearly, There always seemed to be some rampup time reading Greek myths in the past, but now the adventures appear perfectly accessible, Granted, there are some names youll have to figure out, but thats part of being “constructively lost,” as Pynchon says,

A sitelinkbookbybook reading of this new translation will begin Marchst on the Goodreads website, hosted by Kris Rabberman, Wilsons colleague at the University of Pennsylvania.
To prepare for the first online discussion later this week, Kris has suggested participants read the Introduction, If interested readers are still not entirely convinced they want this literary experience now, some