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

reverse seems also to have been true:
The Odyssey
played an important role in the reintroduction of the study of ancient Greek in Renaissance Europe. Petrarch (1304–1374) owned a manuscript of
The Odyssey
, but it was a closed book to him. Having Homer so near and yet inaccessible pained him, and he and Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) hired the Greek Leonzio Pilato to translate
The Odyssey
into Latin in the 1360s.
    Pilato’s translation was neither distinguished nor influential, but the Italian poets’ patronage of him accelerated the interaction of Italian humanists and Byzantine Greeks. In shortly over a hundred years, Italian humanists had learned enough Greek from their Byzantine contemporaries to introduce ancient Greek into the curricula of some of the more advanced Italian academies (e.g., Florence) and to read Horner and other Greek originals in growing numbers. Increasing concern with Greek texts in Greek inspired more humanists to acquire books from the hoard of manuscripts in Constantinople, a transference of cultural goods which proved fortuitous, since in 1453 the Turks finally succeeded in taking Constantinople, ending a tradition of Greek scholarship, much of it devoted to Homer, that ran back all the way to the Alexandrian scholars. From Italy, scholarly study of Greek literature spread across western Europe, and it was on the basis of the manuscripts gathered from the remnants of the Byzantine empire, at first primarily in Italy, that the first Greek texts were printed (
The Iliad
together with
The Odyssey
in Florence by 1488; see illustration number 10).
    However, Pilato’s was not the first translation of
The Odyssey
madeon the Italian peninsula. Not that it remained extant so long that Petrarch could have used it, but around 220 B.C.E . Livius Andronicus had effected for his Roman students a prose translation of
The Odyssey
, a work which can justly be credited with laying the foundation of Classical Latin literature and certainly of establishing the tradition that this literature model itself on Greek literature. Livius Andronicus’ version was successful in that it was quickly surpassed in stylistic refinement. Almost at once, Greek literature was not just seen as the stuff from which translations were made but was imitated in ever more creative ways. I have already spoken of many uses of themes or characters from
The Odyssey
in Roman literature, and that discussion came nowhere near exhausting the possibilities. Ovid, describing his trip into exile from Rome, compares his woes with those of no figure more frequently than Odysseus. I have also mentioned how Vergil modeled large parts of
The Aeneid
on
The Odyssey
, from scenes (the hero addressing his companions at the height of a storm; the hero rebuffed by the shade of one he had aggrieved and whose death he had, indirectly, caused) to structural elements (the hero’s inset narrative of his own travels and travails).
    In more modern times, retellings of all or parts of the actual
Odyssey
have been relatively infrequent. Odysseus’ return is the subject of Monteverdi’s Il ri
torno d’Ulisse in patria
, written for the Venice opera season of 1641, as it is of Gabriel Fauré’s rarely performed
Pénélope
(premiered in Monte Carlo in 1907). Poor Telémakhos again: he was banished from the libretto for the sake of a sharper focus on the married lovers. Even more recently (1954), there is a film version of the entire epic, with Kirk Douglas as a swashbuckling Odysseus. But without doubt the most significant and influential “remake” of
The Odyssey
in the twentieth century, and arguably since Vergil’s
Aeneid
, is James Joyce’s modernist masterpiece,
Ulysses
(1922). Joyce does not so much retell the story of
The Odyssey
as use the Homeric original as a deep subtext for both structure and characters. The reader’s knowledge of
The Odyssey
is taken as a background against which Joyce expects him or her toread the events of a day in Dublin,