ROVIN'
AND RAVIN' WITH MIKE
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"The guy was really crazy, man," the neighbor told me, raving a little
bit himself, about a film he had seen on television and liked so much that he
had bought it on video. "He just kept wandering around, but he always came
out on top, even when he went up against this one-eye dude, and…."
Finally, I asked him the name of the film. "I don’t know what it means,
but it’s called The Odyssey."
As
I write this, the 2001 mission of NASA‘s Mars Exploration Program is heading to its red destiny, bearing the
name of that film, Odyssey, which, by the way, is one of the most
important literary works of all time. Just last year, another film version of
the epic, O
Brother! Where Art Thou?,
moved the timeless story to Mississippi in the 1930’s. And this year, of
course, we are thinking a lot about the 1968 film, 2001:
A Space Odyssey.
Not too bad for the work of Homer, a "dude" who may or may not have
been one person—he might even have been a woman (an endearing but absurd
theory put forth by Victorian translator, Samuel Butler). We know nothing about
him (or her) except that two magnificent epic poems, The Odyssey and The
Iliad, as well as some fragmentary minor poems The Homeric Hymns are
attributed to her (or him). Scholars do think that the author/s known as Homer
lived and worked in about the eighth century B.C.
The Iliad,
the
story of the legendary Trojan War, focuses on the Greek hero Achilles. The
Odyssey follows up the war with the story of the wanderings of Odysseus
(Greek, Ulysses in Latin sources) back to his home. The Roman poet Virgil retold
Homer’s story (there were no copyright laws in those days) from the point of
view of the Romans (who believed they were descended from the Trojans) in The
Aeneid, the story of the Trojan Aeneas. This is the version of the story of
the Trojan War, by the way, best known to Europeans during the Middle Ages and
the Renaissance, which is the reason Dante put Ulysses/Odysseus in Hell.
Although there is an ongoing tradition that "Homer" was blind, we
really know nothing about who, even how many, wrote the works attributed to
Homer. One twist in the speculation about Homer has been the ongoing
archaeological discoveries that have verified so much detail in the stories of
Homer.
The defining novel of twentieth-century literature, James Joyce’s Ulysses
(1922), like the film O Brother!, updates the story of The Odyssey
to the twentieth century, replacing the noble Greeks with very down-to-earth
modern people. The defining experience of the United States during my generation
was the Vietnam War; a few years ago, psychiatrist Jonathan Shay, who had worked
with veterans of that war suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder drew
upon that experience and the story of The Iliad to produce Achilles in
Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (1994).
In
fact, Homer has always been with us, whoever he/she/they might have been. In the
Middle Ages, Benoit de St.-Maure wrote Le Roman De Troie, and Boccaccio
wrote Il Filostrato on a similar theme. Geoffrey Chaucer wrote of the
Trojans Troilus and Criseyde, and a couple of centuries later (with the
English language’s typical forwarding of stress changing the lady’s name),
Shakespeare wrote a dark, cynical play about the same couple, Troilus and
Cressida.
The texts of many of these
classics can be found in the online literary collections I recently raved about
in "Our
Musty, Dusty Online Libraries." For translations of Homer's
poems, you can read Alexander
Pope's rhymed couplets or Samuel
Butler's bland but readable prose. The Homer of English writers and readers for a long
time was George Chapman's classic
translation, a stately version that contrasts with Andrew
Lang's rather trivialized version. Also online you can "Enter into a World of Epic Discovery"
in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and explore "The
Homeric Problem,"
that is, "whether Homer, the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey,
truly existed.
In
the United States, we now can access online versions of Joyce’s Ulysses
(from a Canadian site). You can peruse the outline of a course
based on Achilles in Vietnam. And here, you can read two poems from the
nineteenth century showing the ongoing attraction of Homer’s tales:
On
First Looking into Chapman's Homer
By 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.
From
Ulysses
By Alfred, Lord Tennyson
There lies the port; the vessel
puffs her sail;
There gloom the dark, broad seas.
My mariners,
Souls that have toiled, and
wrought, and thought with me, --
That ever with a frolic welcome
took
The thunder and the sunshine, and
opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads, --
you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honor and his
toil.
Death closes all; but something
ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet
be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove
with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from
the rocks;
The long day wanes; the slow moon
climbs; the deep
Moans round with many voices.
Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer
world.
Push off, and sitting well in
order smite
The sounding furrows; for my
purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the
baths
Of all the western stars, until I
die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash
us down;
It may be we shall touch the Happy
Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom
we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides;
and tho'
We are not now that strength which
in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which
we are, we are, --
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Make weak by time and fate, but
strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and
not to yield.
Keep your feet dry, your heart full of noble thoughts, and as you look to the
skies where the Odyssey roves toward Mars, don’t forget to celebrate on
earth and online all the Homers who
enrich our lives.
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