The Humbling of Odysseus



The Humbling of Odysseus

By CHRIS HEDGES

The New York Times

July 9, 2000

Odyssey

By Homer.

Translated by Stanley Lombardo.

The Iliad is a book about power and force. Those that inhabit its space abide by the warrior's code. Its heroes are vain, brave and consumed by the heady elixir of violence and the dark night of bereavement. The story is primarily that of one man, Achilles, who returns to the battlefield at Troy to attain kleos, the everlasting fame that will be denied to him without heroic death.

The Odyssey is different. It is also built around one character, Odysseus. But the hubris and inflexibility of the warrior fail to ward off the capriciousness of fate, the deadly indifference of nature; he also has trouble coping with the conventions of civilized life.

When Odysseus takes umbrage at more powerful forces and cannot resist revealing his name to the Cyclops, he condemns his men to death and himself to prolonged suffering.

It is his hero's heart that he must learn to curb before he can return to the domestic life he left 20 years earlier. The very qualities that served him in battle defeat him in peace. These dual codes have existed since human societies were formed; and every recruit headed into war would be well advised to read the Iliad, just as every soldier returning home would be served by reading the Odyssey.

Stanley Lombardo produced one of the most accessible modern translations of the Iliad in 1997, one that cut away a lot of the verbosity of more florid writers, like Richmond Lattimore, who can take two or three lines to explain the proper nuances of the Greek. Lombardo ditched common literary conventions and a line-by-line faithfulness in favor of perhaps the sparest English version of the poem -- one that brings us closer to the starkness of the original. He has brought his laconic wit and love of the ribald, as well as his clever use of idiomatic American slang, to his version of the Odyssey. His carefully honed syntax gives the narrative energy and a whirlwind pace. The lines, rhythmic and clipped, have the tautness and force of Odysseus' bow.

Take the opening lines of the epic. Nearly every translator sticks to the traditional Homeric invocation. Lattimore says, ''Tell me, Muse,'' and Robert Fagles, ''Sing to me of the man, Muse.'' But Lombardo opens with ''Speak, Memory.'' The decision to borrow the title of Vladimir Nabokov's autobiography is more than a poetic device. It underscores that the Odyssey is, at its core, about preserving memory. ''The man of many sorrows'' spurns immortality with the nymph Calypso and refuses to eat the lotus fruit that would obliterate all thought of home, so that he can embrace a rocky island, the troubles of domesticity and old age. The name Odysseus is tied to the Greek verb odussomai, which means, ''to suffer pain.''

Telemachus and Odysseus, unlike the characters in the Iliad, are capable of change. By the end of the journey Odysseus has learned how to dissemble, supplicate and plead to stay alive, just as his son has learned how to stand up for himself. ...

When Odysseus returns to Ithaca, disguised in rags, a goat herder tries to kick him out of his way. Odysseus seethes with rage but, in Lombardi's version, ''In the end, he controlled himself and just took it.'' This is a huge transformation for the commander whose first act after leaving Troy is the brutal pillage of the Cicones.

Homer, or the ancient poets whom we know as Homer, always leavens such moments, as Shakespeare does, with comedy, usually supplied by the deathless ones, the gods. ... Lombardo conveys the farcical whimsy of the immortals, so often used as a foil to the human race, with a light and deft touch. One can imagine a British classicist, or perhaps even an American one, blanching in horror at some of the slang slipped into the mouths of the immortals, but to the reader it makes the scenes real and convincing. ''Be a pal,'' the Cyclops Polyphemus says to Odysseus after downing a bowl of wine, ''and give me another drink.''

Lombardo, who teaches classics at the University of Kansas, has also sliced out some of the repetitive passages that encumber the original Greek. ... There is a danger, though, that such accessible translations will lull us into believing that the ancient Greeks were somehow like us. They were not. They embraced slavery and magic, and created a pantheon of divinities that lacked much in the way of a moral code. Odysseus himself has little regard for the truth.

But there is still much in Homer to admire and heed. Odysseus' story is that of a man who seems, in some metaphorical way, to land always on the same beach as he moves from mishap to mishap. He is gradually humbled as he gives up the rigidity that makes figures like Achilles so adept at fighting and so troublesome in peacetime. Once he learns how to stifle his own need to be exalted, restrain and suppress his king-like appetites and trust those who come from the lowest stations, he can enter again the world he left for war.

Odysseus arrives in Ithaca not in glory ... but as a beggar (under attack). The message is clear, and is repeated several times: Home can be just as dangerous as the battlefield.

The Iliad glorifies the cult of death. The Odyssey is a recall to life. When Odysseus greets the ghost of Achilles in Hades, he says that no man ''has ever been as blessed as you, or ever will be.'' Outside the walls of Troy this was true, but the phantom of Achilles the mightiest answers:

''Don't try to sell me on death, Odysseus,

I'd rather be a hired hand back up on earth,

Slaving away for some poor dirt farmer,

Than lord it over all these withered dead.''

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