Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey: A Biography (Books That Changed the World)
Alberto Manguel
Language: English
Pages: 304
ISBN: 0802143822
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
the University of Louvain in Belgium makes this boast: ‘You see me, young man, I never learned Greek, and I don’t find that I have ever missed it. I have had a doctor’s cap and gown without Greek; I have ten thousand florins a year without Greek; I eat heartily without Greek; and, in short,… as I don’t know Greek, I do not believe there is any good in it.’16 This division had far-reaching consequences: from the seventeenth century onwards, Homer was being rigorously studied in English, German
English literature, with certain codes and conventions which he handled better than almost anyone, perhaps because he had invented many of them. ‘By perpetual practice,’ wrote Dr Johnson, ‘language had in his mind a systematical arrangement; having always the same use for words, he had words so selected and combined as to be ready at his call.’19 Pope’s style was never ‘external’ to him, never mechanical: it only seemed so in the eyes of certain of his readers who either demanded scientific
post against which to scratch your back.24 Joyce’s version of the king of Ithaca, the Dublin Jew Leopold Bloom, occupies a middle ground, neither that of the Tennyson hero nor that of the Dante adventurer. Being a Jew, he is endemically an exile, both inside and outside the Irish fold, a condition Joyce himself, as an Irish artist, experienced. But Bloom’s Jewishness brings him close to another Ulysses, the Wandering Jew of medieval legend. Between 1902 and 1903, Victor Bérard, one of the most
of Grove Atlantic for suggesting the book in the first place, and to Bruce Westwood and the staff of WCA, who were the first enthusiastic emissaries. A NOTE ON TRANSLATIONS AND EDITIONS To simplify the reading, I’ve preferred to use common versions of the Homeric names, ‘Ulysses’ rather than ‘Odysseus’ and ‘Achilles’ rather than ‘Akhilleus’. As Samuel Butler noted, ‘Neither do I think that Hekabe will supersede Hecuba, till “What’s Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba?” is out of date.’1 (Though in
secondary literature 75–6 and war 214, 218–27 see also Iliad Troy 213 and Schliemann 177–82 truth: and myth 35–6, 208 and beauty 67 Ulysses: and Achilles 14, 57–8, 171 and Athena 16, 17, 20, 22, 23 and Calypso 16, 17, 20, 124, 194, 198 character 55 and Circe 19, 96–8, 198, 205 and Cyclops 18–19, 87, 119, 198, 205 in Dante 198–200 as everyman 2, 228–37 in Giraudoux 207 and Hell 19, 57–8, 96–8, 211, 226–7 and Joyce 4, 193–6, 202–4 in Kazantzakis 200–1 and Penelope 16, 47, 164,