A Guide to the Odyssey: A Commentary on the English Translation of Robert Fitzgerald Read Free Page A

already in
The Odyssey
, gave rise to the widest range of interpretations and responses, many of the other players have also left their impress. Penélopê, even if a bit impatient and peeved in the first of Ovid’s
Heroides
(“Letters from the Heroines”), became for medieval readers of that very popular collection of poetic epistles the epitome of married chastity. And beyond: “Penelope” became synonymous with “faithful wife” in English and other European languages—with the obvious possibility that the term could be used sarcastically (as in Da Ponte’s libretto for Mozart’s
Così fan tutte
). Likewise, but with no blot on her scutcheon, her famous ruse has entered the proverbial: a “Penelopean web” is any work that will never be finished.
    Diametrically opposed to Penélopê, Kirkê (Circe) became the archetypal temptress. She is the ultimate progenitor of Ariosto’s Alcina and Tasso’s Armida in the Italian Renaissance, not to mention the various Spenserian temptresses inspired by them. Nor is her afterlife limited to the literary tradition; she too became proverbial. For example, Germans, many of whose proverbial expressions reflect the value their culture has placed on a classical education, maystill call a seductive woman a “Circe,” and they have even created a verb,
becircen
, to describe Circe-like erotic enchantment. Like Penélopê’s web, Circe’s cup has become proverbial: it is the draft, literal or figurative, which works enchantment, particularly of the erotic variety.
    Mentor too has a proverbial existence as the name of any adviser; indeed, so common is the appellation that in English we no longer even need capitalize the name.
The Oxford English Dictionary
suggests that its use as a common noun, which dates from the eighteenth century, is due largely to the important role Mentor played in the then wildly popular novel
Télémaque
by the French abbé Fénelon (1699). If so, this is yet another indignity inflicted on Telémakhos, who of all the characters in
The Odyssey
has had the least impact on literary and popular traditions. Historically, this is in large measure the result of his having virtually no profile in the Latin tradition, but it is also true that, without a careful and sympathetic reading, he runs the risk of becoming a rather uninteresting prig. Poor Telémakhos! The French novel of which he is the title hero is not only unread today but virtually unreadable, unless one is held by interminable discussions of virtue and theories of moral education.
    Less important characters in
The Odyssey
have had better luck. Nausikaa, like Telémakhos a virtual prisoner of the Greek tradition, had to wait until the recovery of Greek to work her charm in the West, but when she did, her champion was none other than Goethe, who sketched and completed parts of a drama about her failure to win Odysseus as a bridegroom. Soon thereafter Eumaios returned in twelfth-century dress as the Saxon slave Gurth in Sir Walter Scott’s historical romance
Ivanhoe
(1820), a story of absent lords, usurpers, and disguised returns which clearly shares more than a swineherd with
The Odyssey
. But the most surprising figure to enjoy a poetic afterlife in Odyssean spin-offs is Polyphêmos, the one-eyed Kyklops. Perhaps it was the very challenge of the task which inspired poets to present him hopelessly in love with the nymph Galatea. The mannerist tradition of the lovesick monster begins inGreek with Theokritos’ eleventh
Idyll
and makes its way to the European baroque in large part thanks to Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
, where the spurned lover kills Acis, his “rival” for Galatea’s affections (XIII.740–898).
    I referred earlier to the fact that knowledge of Greek and Greek texts virtually disappeared in western Europe in the Middle Ages, so that poets like Dante and Chaucer were dependent on the Latin tradition. Clearly, knowledge of
The Odyssey
depended on knowledge of Greek, but surprisingly, the