Mention Homer now and most people will picture yellow, rather than bronze. But Homer Simpson’s comic status as a modern anti hero only makes sense with a knowledge, however vague, of the heroes in The Iliad and The Odyssey.
They underpin the last three thousand years of western culture. Achilles, Hector, Odysseus and Helen… these are the chess pieces that poets, painters and sculptors have been playing with ever since. Odysseus, the Trickster, is there at the dawn of classical literature – and then again, Romanised as Ulysses, at the dawn of Modernism. What a gift. Trust the Greeks.
Still, there is a reason no-one reads them anymore – at least, not for fun. It isn’t just our tragically withered attention spans, our preference for three minute rap videos over ten hour epic sagas. These books are really hard. They are not like Game of Thrones. They were already old when Homer first set them down, and at times they show their age.
They frustrate. Adapting the ‘Dactylic Hexameter’ in which they were originally sung, is the least of the translator’s worries. The Iliad – which many assume will be ‘about’ the Trojan War – turns out to be just one episode in what was originally at least a six parter – and is not even the series climax. It ends with Troy still emphatically unsacked.
How do you translate the juvenile tantrums of supposedly heroic warriors? The endless, partisan interference from squabbling gods? And how do you make palatable the endlessly repeated honorifics, the meandering, wayward narrative, the frankly superfluous biographical detail?
True, the Odyssey is easier, and has some episodes that are familiar from schooldays – the Cyclops, the Sirens, and, confusingly, the Trojan Horse, which makes no appearance in The Iliad at all.
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