ODYSSEY - The Eternal Voyage

THE ODYSSEY by Homer, translated by Edward McCrorie with an introduction by Richard P. Martin, Johns Hopkins University Press, paper, 418pp, $17. (This review is slated for publication in the spring issue of Dream Network Journal; www.DreamNetwork.net; March, 2008)

For several adult decades, with time ever scurrying along, Homer’s Odyssey has been among my favorite reads. Having little Greek and scarcely more Latin, my Homer has been limited to English versions. This is not much of a regret, as I have been fortunate to live at a time when there are excellent and accurate English Homers. Among my best loved are the Odyssey’s of Richmond Lattimore and Robert Fitzgerald, with Lattimore winning the laurels. But now, behind the interesting streamlined version by Stanley Lombardo, there comes a new Homer rendered into our native tongue by Edward McCrorie. McCrorie’s Homer has yet to replace either Lattimore or Fitzgerald with me, but it is a good Odyssey, worthy of its predecessors, possessed of an exceptional introduction and notes by Professor Richard Martin of Stanford University. While yet to utterly capture my heart, this version is appreciated as a welcomed opportunity to meet a familiar friend and relive his archetypal story anew.

In Spielberg’s film Amistad, actor Anthony Hopkins, playing John Quincy Adams, makes a closing speech before the Supreme Court, saying, among other things, that “we are who we have been”. For those of us born into the continuum of Western Civilization, Homer is an ancestor and one of the sages of culture who has contributed to the self knowledge and direction of generations.

Again, my way of introduction to any unfamiliar with the tale, the Odyssey is the perennial story of the human voyage into life’s unknown and perilously experience and subsequently undertaking the inevitable even more difficult and dangerous journey homeward—home, to the place of origin and far circling return. A journey involved in what may not be wholly of the body, but which is universally intimate to the immortal soul. Moreover, Odysseus, hero of the grand, romantic epic, is the quintessential survivor, the one who uses protean intelligence and inner resourcefulness to overcome each and every adversity.

Within the epic of the adventure of human wandering, of going forth and struggling to round the circle, are two particular experiences of sheer amazement and potential interest for readers here. First, for our purpose, the Odyssey contains one of the earliest records of reflection on the origin and interpretation of dreams, the so called Dream of the Geese from Book 19. I will indulge my love by quoting both from Lattimore and McCrorie the lines where Odysseus’ wife Penelope addresses her husband, disguised as a homeless beggar, back after twenty years of suffering hardship. The Queen speaks:

“(Lattimore) My friend, dreams are things hard to interpret, hopeless to puzzle out, and people find that not all of them end in anything. There are two gates through which the insubstantial dreams issue. One pair of gates is made of iron and one of ivory. Those of the dreams which issue through the gates of sawn ivory, these are deceptive dreams, their message is never accomplished. But those that come into the open through the gates of the polished horn accomplish the truth for any mortal who sees them. I do not think that this strange dream that I had came to me through this gate. My son and I would be glad if it did so.”

“(McCrorie) Dreams can be useless, my guest, and endlessly baffling. Surely they don’t all end for people as clear fact. Our dreams move like shadows through either of two gates, one of them made of horn, the other of ivory. Those that pass through the well-sawn ivory gateway tend to be guileful—the words they carry are empty. Those however that pass through the gateway of polished horn can bring you truth—when a human can see that. My frightening dream, I think, was not from the polished horn. How welcome to me and my child if it had been.”

In this instance, however, with her conscious mind clouded by the gloom of despair, what Penelope thinks is incorrect. The dream she related and here comments on did indeed come from the gods, pass through the gate of horn, and will emerge as waking reality, and soon.

Earlier in Odysseus’ sojourn, in Book 11, the reader will have traveled with the hero in a proto-shamanic journey to the underworld, to find and speak with the departed blind seer, Teiresies; the same Teiresies who will appear on the boards in the immortal tragedies of Sophocles. And there is an experiential relationship, a link, between these passages of encounter in the land of the dead and those relating to dreams. That link is prophecy and prophecy in Homer and thereafter is uncanny, mysterious and rooted in alterity.

“(McCrorie) The ghost of Teiresies came then, a prophet of Thebes, holding a staff of gold. He knew me and questioned, ‘Son of Laertes, nourished of Zeus, wily Odysseus, wretched man: why do you go from the Sun God-s brightness to look at the dead…”

And shortly, within the same Book, we encounter a moving example of the birth of humanism and the emergence into consciousness of the vulnerabilities of the human condition, when Odysseus listens to the shade of his departed mother explaining the terms of her death.

“(McCrorie) I too died and met my doom in the same way, not from the sharp-eyed Archer there in our great hall, aiming her gentle arrows in order to kill me. No long sickness came on, the kind that will often take the soul from the body, wasting and loathsome. Instead, I longed for you, my shining Odysseus, your counsel and kindness. That longing stole me from sweet life.”

Upon which follows the son’s heart wrenching response, given here in the Lattimore translation:

“So she spoke, but I, pondering in my heart, yet wished to take the soul of my dead mother in my arms. Three times I started toward her, and my heart was urgent to hold her, and three times she fluttered out of my hands like a shadow or a dream…” (1)

1.The Odyssey of Homer translated by Richmond Lattimore, Harper Perennial, a division of Harper Collins.

see also the previous Book Words postings:
http://BookWordsNumber1.blogspot.com
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hppt://BookWordsNumber3.blogspot.com