The sea that separates Odysseus from home was the lifeblood of ancient Greece. Homer’s story of return takes us on a journey that goes beyond geography
This is the first one, the big one, the ur-road movie: the Odyssey. Homer’s poem tells of Odysseus’s decade-long attempt to return to his home island of Ithaca – a “man of twists and turns driven time and again off course, once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy”. (Robert Fagles’ translation for Penguin, which I recommend.)
Heartbreaking tales of love, devotion, innocence – and philosophy. From Homer to Kafka, these works show humanity intimately observed by its best friend
Jill Ciment
Wednesday 26 August 2015
Man created dog, or dog created man, about 30,000 years ago somewhere in east Asia. Dogs witnessed us when we were still part very much part of the animal kingdom, marginal creatures foraging for a living, before we had stone tools, before we mastered agriculture, invented money, built cities, and polluted the earth. Dogs are like a first lover who knew us when: they know where we really come from, and who we really are.
They have shared our hearths and meals and affections for longer than any other animal. A 12,000-year-old grave in Israel contains the skeleton of a woman holding the skeleton of a puppy. We have even shared death with them. How could they not make their way into our imaginations?
While dogs have been bearing witness to our behaviour for 30,000 years, we have also been closely observing them. We are their first loves, too. We knew them when they were still wolves, before they tasted kibble, had their nails trimmed and their teeth brushed.
In my novel, Heroic Measures, one of the points of view belongs to Dorothy, a 12-year-old dachshund who stands 12 inches tall and weighs 10lb 2oz. Entering her consciousness seemed no different to me as a writer than visiting the minds of the older couple, Ruth and Alex, who have been Dorothy’s family since she was eight weeks old. Dorothy’s character is as idiosyncratic and individual as any human I have created.
Here are 10 favourite narratives told from a dog’s point of view.
Argos, Odysseus’s loyal hound, is one of the first dogs in western literature. After waiting 20 years for his master’s return, Argos must make a most painful decision. He realises that Odysseus is in disguise. If he greets his master, or if his master acknowledges him, Odysseus will be in mortal danger. Argos has to accept that after two decades of longing for this moment, he will only be rewarded with a glimpse of the man he loves.
All of London’s dog novels hark back to the courting stage of man and wolf, when we were still both beasts. London’s plots are really love stories - two wary beings learn to trust each other and fall in love. Buck, a huge St Bernard/shepherd mix, is kidnapped from his comfortable middle-class home, sold into bondage, and escapes. In the Alaskan wilderness, he discovers the bestial instinct within himself. Only late in life does Buck fall in love with a man, John Thornton, who saves his life. When he loses John to an Indian’s arrow, he returns to the wild and joins a wolf pack. London intends for Buck’s howl, “the song of the pack”, to be a dirge.
Poprishchin, a lowly clerk infatuated with his supervisor’s beautiful daughter, keeps a diary as he sinks into madness. He begins to suspect that his dog, Fidel, is having an affair with her dog, Meggy, and exchanging love letters. The first epistolary dog’s tale.
Narrated from the point of view of a dachshund mix, and presented as a children’s tale, this is a horrifying story of a beaten dog who joins the circus only to return to her original cruel master because she feels more comfortable being kicked than loved. Janet Malcolm, in her book, Reading Chekhov, writes that Kashtanka might be the great man’s most autobiographical story.
Sharik, a stray, finds himself adopted by a successful surgeon and thinks he has entered earthly paradise, only to discover that the doctor’s real intentions are to perform medical experiments on him. During one procedure, the doctor attaches a pair of human testicles to Sharik. To the doctor’s delight and the dog’s astonishment, Sharik transmogrifies into a primitive man. But though he looks like a man …
Franz Kafka, with a dog, in 1905. Photograph: Getty Images
The erudite dog who narrates this meditation on the origins of nourishment believes himself to be not “different from any other dog”, and yet he asks if it is possible for a creature to be “more unfortunate still” than he is. Kafka, like Plato, believed that the dog is the most philosophical beast in the world.
At the end of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, the insect-being that had been the man Gregor dies, much to the relief of his family who never reconciled with his horridness. Our narrator in Investigations of a Dog summits on the point of isolation and silence and never really descends. Kafka seems to be saying that knowledge unshared distances us from one another as much as it enlightens.
His biographer Elias Canetti writes:
"The uniqueness of his work, in which emotions hardly appear, though literature otherwise swarms with them, volubly and chaotically. If one thinks about it with a little courage, our world has indeed become one in which fear and indifference predominate. Expressing his own reality without indulgence, Kafka was the first to present the image of this world."
A shot rings out on a farm in rural Illinois – one neighbour has murdered another. Late in the novel, Maxwell allows the murderer’s dog a point of view. The dog has witnessed her human in his most heinous state, but of course she never passes judgment on him.
A grieving man, Joe, is walking Victor, his dead wife’s dog, when they are approached by an aggressive dog twice Victor’s size. The man scares off the mongrel and Victor thinks: “What devotion! Almost canine.” But safe once again, Victor remembers that Joe never wanted him. If not for the wife, Victor would still be in the pound. In a moment of doggy insight, Victor tells Joe that he loved his dead mistress more than Joe loved his dead wife.
King, the dog and guardian of a homeless couple, narrates this story dramatising 24 hours of precarious survival on a scrap heap somewhere near a motorway in France. The term “dog-eat-dog society” has never been more cleanly defined.
The title says it all. A wonderful collection of doggerel. Disclaimer: Sadie, the dachshund whom my character, Dorothy, was based on, has a poem in it.
You know I’d like to be doing a post called Holiday Books 2020 but that’s not happening for me this year, hence I’ve gone with a gloomier theme for the title. I’d like to think there’s a book for everyone in this list, but that’s perhaps not wholly true since there is a male-bias and certainly no, dare I say it, chicklit. I keep telling Siggy to start a blog so she can wax lyrical about the latest Emily Barr, Pudding Club or Shopaholic book, but she’s not biting.
This year I read around 40 books – it might have been more if some of them hadn’t been so long! And of course I didn’t get an opportunity to do any reading on holiday, because I had no real holiday this year. Poor me. Anyway, here’s a list of the Top 4 books I’ve read this year with links to longer reviews in some cases (I would’ve done a Top 5 if I’d read fifty – blame Stephen / Owen King and Margaret Atwood):
Three millennia after its composition, there are many obstacles to understanding this pillar of western literature – but the effort is worth it
Sam Jordison
Tue 9 Feb 2016
When I first read Homer, I did not experience the same sublime ecstasy as Keats. No wild surmise for me! Instead, I experienced mild disappointment, considerable confusion and strong annoyance.
That all changed - but for now, let’s focus on the negative. The poem is challenging. I understand why people are so keen to evangelise this incredible artistic achievement, but I also worry that the praise we are all so keen to heap on the poem does few favours to people tackling the Iliad for the first time. People who have been told to expect the ultimate poetic experience – and discover instead a world of hurt.
The most obviously painful experience is the infamous catalogue of the ships in Book Two: three hundred brutal lines naming 50-plus Greek captains and hundreds of related cities and islands – this quickly followed by a similarly challenging 100-line catalogue of Trojans. These passages can be a grind – but at least they have the virtue of eminent skipability. You can sail past it easily enough without feeling you’re missing any of the poem’s more significant landfalls.
Other issues are not so easily avoided. We are given a back story about the parentage and homeland of just about every character we meet, and they themselves love to expound on their parentage and hearth and sheep and other such tiresome details in their speeches. Characters often have alternate names, generally in the form of patronymics – Agamemnon will often appear as Atreides (meaning “the son of Atreus”) for example.
At first read, the control the gods exert over characters’ destinies makes it feel like there’s next to nothing at stake. There’s a scene early on where it looks as if the whole war can be brought to a swift conclusion when Menelaos enters a duel with Paris, the man who stole Helen from him and so launched all those laboriously listed ships. But the duel is inconclusive because Aphrodite conceals Paris in mist, grabs him and puts him back in his bedroom. It’s infuriating. Likewise, Athena grabs Achilles by the hair at a crucial moment, and Zeus is forever tipping his scales this way and that to decide the outcome of battles. Small wonder that Achilles gives it all up to have a sulk by the ships.
On top of all these challenges is the fact that this is an ancient Greek poem. There will always be a suspicion that translations may not do it justice. Reading group contributor daveportivo expressed this fear when he asked: “Is the Iliad supposed to be pleasing in terms of rhythm, tone, rhyme, pacing, flow, etc … any of the stuff that you associate with various types of poetry?”
The short answer to that question is: yes. But the longer one is complicated and gets to the heart of what we may be losing in translation. The issue is obvious from the very first line of the poem, as I’ll try to show here with a few different renderings from across the centuries:
George Chapman, writing in 1616, went for: “Achilles’ baneful wrath resound, O Goddess.”
Alexander Pope, (who also brings in a bit of line two) in 1720 gave us: “Achilles’ wrath, to Greece the direful spring / Of woes unnumber’d, heavenly goddess, sing!”
Samuel Butler in 1898 had: “Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus …”
EV Rieu in 1949: “The wrath of Achilles is my theme, that fatal wrath …”
Caroline Alexander in 2016, has gone for: “Wrath – sing, goddess, of the ruinous wrath of Peleus’ son Achilles.”
All these versions are significantly different – and they all give different weight to the crucial words “wrath”, “sing” and “Achilles”. Here’s the Greek: “μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος οὐλομένην.” (“Menin aeide thea Peleiadeo Achilleos oulomenin.”) A word-for-word translation goes something like: “Wrath sing goddess of the son of Peleus of Achilles deadly.”
You’re hopefully already getting an idea of why that’s so hard to translate – and why there are so many possibilities. In English, we nearly always expect an imperative (“sing”) to come at the start of a sentence. Otherwise, it feels very alien. (We never say, for instance: “Doing that, stop.”) But if we put “sing” at the start we lose a lot of the brute power of Homer’s opening. He comes in big with “wrath” for a reason. It’s the central tragic theme of the poem. Not to mention a meaty word in and of itself.
There are further tricks here that are hard to translate. Note how in the Greek – a highly inflected language – we don’t find out who the wrath belongs to, until the end of the line, with emphasis building up to the word “Achilles” by the positioning of that patronymic (Pelieiadeo) before it. Add to that the lovely assonance in all those vowels, and the difficulty of recreating the feel of a syllabic hexameter, and you can understand why translators have such a struggle. Then you have to take into account the theory that the Iliad may have been intended to be sung - and almost certainly relied for its sound and feel on a pitch accent. If academic attempts to recreate that latter are anything to go by, we’re in very strange territory indeed.
But all of this is the counsel of despair. Really, it makes up an argument for coming to a better understanding of Homeric language and culture, rather than for giving up on translations. Homer does have a special music – but so too do plenty of the translations. The trick is not to focus on what we’re losing – but what’s still there.
Meanwhile, even the other frustrations I’ve listed above may unsettle first-time readers, but they are also a great part of the poem’s enduring fascination. They’re a mark of the Iliad’s great distance from us, but also of how lucky we are to be able to peer into this ancient and alien culture, to have these messages from the long vanished past, to have such enticing mysteries.
Even that catalogue of ships becomes interesting if you think of the poem as something that would often be recited orally, from memory. It must have been some feat, to get all those names and their connections in order. I can imagine rapt audiences listening just waiting for the singer to slip.
All those genealogies also take on deeper resonance if you think of memory in a broader sense. The whole poem is about the struggle against mortality, what it means to be remembered, about fame and reputation, and the struggle to maintain “kleos”. Listing ancestors takes on a special meaning in this context. To repeat the names of other men is to keep alive the hope that you’ll be remembered, too. As the Iliad was being put together, Greek societies were only just rediscovering the art of writing. Such memories must have felt like the only line into the past, the only link into the future.
Back on the subject of “kleos”, there’s delicious irony in the fact that men so wrapped up in their own reputations can be so silly. Agamemnon is as greedy and heedless as the worst Tory stereotype; Achilles is so mardy. As the poem goes on, their petulance becomes more and more intriguing – especially as fate gives them more and more cause to regret it.
As for fate, and the gods, the more you read of the poem, the more you come to realise that this power isn’t straightforward. Homer provokes deep questions about the role of fate and human agency. It isn’t much of a stretch to see much of the western philosophical tradition’s obsession with free will starting here.
So much for the challenges in Iliad. I haven’t even started on the good stuff. I remember that on my first reading of Homer, I sometimes felt like I was wandering in deep fog. But that confusion made the moments when the sun broke through feel all the more golden. When a hand reached down to mine, across 3,0000 years, and I felt its reassuringly human touch. It can bring tears to your eyes. Read a passage from Caroline Alexander’s translation from the end of Book VI, of Hector’s encounter with his wife and son before he has to leave them for battle. There’s no misunderstanding that.
And if that whets your appetite, I’m happy to say we’ve got 10 copies of the new translation to give away to the first 10 readers from the UK to post “I want a copy please”, along with a nice, constructive comment in the comments section below. If you’re lucky enough to be one of the first to comment, email Laura Kemp with your address (laura.kemp@theguardian.com) – we can’t track you down ourselves. Be nice to her, too.
Achilles is brutal, vain, pitiless – and a true hero
Homer’s idolised demigod in the Iliad has plenty of loathsome aspects – but remains a magnetic figure it’s hard not to admire
Sam Jordison
Tue 16 Feb 2016
After a week spent discussing the challenges the Iliad presents modern readers, I’m going to try for something more positive. I say “try” because if there’s one thing that reading ancient Greek literature has taught me, it is to beware of hubris. If I were to try to list all the things that I think matter about this book it might well result in a list as long as the catalogue of the ships. Instead, I’d like to focus on just one aspect of the poem: the man who gets its first line and whose wrath sets it all in motion, Achilles.
Achilles does not fit modern sensibilities. He is a killer, arguably a rapist, certainly a pillager. He is sulky, high-strung and oh boy, is he temperamental. He can be pitiless – actively enjoying the iron in his heart – and he can be murderously cruel. Yet there is still something fundamental about him to which we can all relate, even if it is also something particularly hard to rationalise and explain. He is faster, sharper, bigger, brighter and more important than other men. He is more beautiful. He rides on deeper emotional currents (when Achilles is upset, he is seriously upset). He is semi-divine and wholly precious. Other men cannot even aspire to be like him. At his most resplendent, men cannot even bear to look at him. He is just above and beyond.
Achilles in short, is a hero and taps into a need that most of us have to worship and admire. I was recently listening to a very good Stanford lecture about the Iliad by Marsh McCall, where the genial professor suggests that baseball and American football players play a similar role in modern society. There is also a fantastic video of kids meeting their football idols, viewed more than 69m times on social media, which gives an idea of how primal and overpowering such reverence can be.
To speak personally, I don’t feel much beyond the usual admiration for sports players. I also like to think of myself as rational and keen to judge on actual merit and not mythology. But I’m far from immune to the appeal of the hero, and I imagine few people are. One of the many laments I could relate to, for instance, following the recent loss of David Bowie was the simple expression of incredulity that death could catch even him, that someone who had seemed so much bigger than life should actually have to go.
This human need to venerate was something Homer understood and exploited to glorious effect in the Iliad. Most obviously, and brilliantly, he does this by keeping Achilles off the scene. In the first line of the Iliad, Homer may ask the muses to sing about the wrath of Achilles – but the man himself appears in the poem surprisingly rarely. Homer is careful to give him mainly the big moments – the beginning, the climax, and a few crucial turning points. There are books and books in which he is barely mentioned. But, of course, all the time he is off the scene, his presence only grows. Every other feat of arms, every brutal kill, every spear cast invokes a comparison to the absent hero – and is inevitably found wanting. We know that, even at his most terrible and shining, Hector would not have a hope against Achilles. We know that, big as he may be, Ajax’s achievements are dwarfed by the demigod. We know, saddest of all, that Patroclus is but a shadow of his great friend, the armour he has borrowed from him is an all but empty shell, and that where Achilles would sweep all before him, he is doomed to fall. All the killing, all the struggle, all the pain – all is made futile because we know that if Achilles were on the scene it would turn out differently.
This trick works especially well because when Achilles does return to the field of battle, he does so with (literally) god-given style. First in a blaze of glory and accompanied by the terrifying screech of the goddess Thetis. Next, wrapped up in the astonishing armour Hephaestus gave him, burning with fury and effortlessly smiting anyone who stands before him.
Yet it isn’t just Achilles’ supernatural power that makes him such a compelling hero. It’s also his fallibility. Three thousand years ago, just as today, hero worship had to have its negative aspect – the hands reaching up to drag the star from the podium, the mistakes that make the successes seem all the more remarkable. In among all the adoring articles about Bowie, there were a good number of attempts at muckraking. Likewise for many a sporting idol.
Achilles, too, has to spend his time in the muck. One of the most famous passages in the Iliad comes at the start of Book 18, when Achilles learns that his beloved companion Patroclus has been killed by Hector, stripped of his armour (the very armour Achilles lent him before he sent him off to battle) and that Trojans and Achaeans are now fighting over his naked corpse. A dark cloud of grief shrouds the hero and, we are told, he defiles his handsome face with ashes from the fire and collapses, as Caroline Alexander translates, “outstretched in the dust, a great man in his greatness, and with his own hands he defiled his hair, tearing at it”. He’s at his most moving when he’s at his most human, prostrate, weeping, knowing he’s done the wrong thing, knowing that fate is going to pummel him as a result. Even at the height of his fury, Homer also takes the time to render Achilles helpless, sweeping him up in the river Skamander, reminding us that even he has limitations.
But Homer doesn’t just beg our sympathy. We also see Achilles being bad. Above and beyond the aforementioned sulking, and those actions that don’t square with 21st-century morality, are outrages intolerable even in his battle-hardened society. No one, god or Greek, can approve of Achilles’ attempts to defile Hector’s corpse. But again, such actions are a mark of someone who just has to go that bit further, that bit madder with grief, that bit deeper into the maelstrom. What’s more, the troughs Achilles plumbs just make the heights seem all the more exalted. His calm enjoyment of the funeral games and level-headed generosity to the competitors, the sympathetic hearing he eventually grants poor old Priam – both seem all the more impressive after his previous derangement. The Iliad is a masterful investigation of a character whom we just can’t help but look up to: a lesson in charisma for any age.
One final extra thought, while I’ve shied away from listing Homer’s other fine moments in this article, it might well be fun to compile some ideas in the comments. For starters, I’ll chuck in the fact that the poet clearly loves lions, throwing in references to their power and the way they move throughout the epic. And also how Nestor can be both an “in my day” bore and a brave, resolute man, making the moment Achilles offers him an award in his games feel both poignant and satisfyingly right. Oh, and poor old Hecuba … But that’s enough for now. Over to you.
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