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Monday 1 December 2008

Homer’s The Iliad and the Odyssey: a Biography

A tale of two timeless epics

Tom Holland

An ambitious project — but one for which the author is perfectly qualified. This is recognisably the work of a compulsive translator and anthologiser: for like a literary bloodhound, Manguel has only to pick up the scent of a theme, and he is off pursuing it through a dizzying variety of languages and genres. Naturally, there are those that lead him along the grand thoroughfares of literary history: from Homer to Virgil, from Virgil to Dante, and so on. But there are also those that take him in less expected directions. In one particularly brilliant passage, an analysis of the language that Homer uses to describe the dead in the Odyssey ends up crowding the page with poets summoned from any number of different periods: Milton and Verlaine, Shelley and Hopkins. It is as though Manguel has cast his own book as the trench that Odysseus filled with blood, so that the departed might have their voices restored to them.

Manguel’s justification for the occasional jettisoning of chronology, however, is reminiscent less of Homer than of a fellow Argentinian. ‘Readings influence one another back and forth across time,’ he explains, ‘and we mustn’t accuse St Augustine of anachronism for studying Homer under Goethe’s guidance, or Heraclitus for allowing himself to be prejudiced by the commentaries of George Steiner.’ This is such a close echo of Borges as to read almost like a parody — and indeed there are passages throughout this book where Manguel’s taste for the recherché can result in a similar effect. Why, for instance, devote an entire chapter to ‘Homer in Islam’ when the Caliphs, notoriously, disdained ever to translate the poetry of the Greeks? The answer, I suspect, is because it enables Manguel, once again, to strike an affectedly Borgesian pose: to point out how ‘books become entwined and intermingled, so that we no longer know . . . where Homer ends Ulysses’ adventures and the author of Sindbad takes them up again.’

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