On First Looking into Homer’s Odyssey

INTRODUCTION

In the introduction to On First Looking into Homer’s Iliad I explained why I chose the Fagels translation for the investigation of the bard’s dramatic artistry.  That explanation holds for this volume. The comprehensive and illuminatng introductions to both volumes by the distinguished scholar Bernard Knox provided a further incentive toward their adoption. 

On First Looking into Homer’s Odyssey is a complement to the On First Looking into Homer’s Iliad though differing profoundly in tone and theme from the latter. Unlike the Iliad with its tale of heroes in the Trojan war, the Odyssey, Bernard Knox declares in his introduction to the Fagles translation, “presents us with ‘adventurous journeys’ and ‘changes of fortune…an epic tale of a hero’s return, to find at home a situation more dangerous than anything he faced on the plains of Troy or in his wanderings over uncharted seas.’” 

My enthusiasm for the Homeric epics dates to 1933, when in Frank Durkee’s sophomore English class in Somerville (New Jersey) High School, I was introduced to the Odyssey in the Butcher & Lang prose translation.  (Seventy-five years ago the epic was standard high school fare!) We students had already been exposed to Classical mythology in the elementary grades, and I had read on my own Bulfinch’s Age of Fable, a treasured birthday present.  Mr. Durkee presented the Odyssey merely as a collection of fabulous adventures, and I read with excitement about the Cyclops, the witch Circe, the Sirens and Scylla and Charybdis.  In my late teens and early twenties I read and re-read the Iliad in various translations, eager to learn about the events which preceded the Odyssey.  In my mid-thirties, I undertook to master Classical Greek, impelled in great part by a desire to read Homer in the original.  When I declared to Vera Lachmann, a Brooklyn College Classics professor who invited me to read Greek with her on Saturday mornings, that I was coming to believe that there was Homer and other literature, she exclaimed, “It’s about time you came to that conclusion!”   Returning to university in 1961 to pursue courses toward a doctorate, I explored in my dissertation,  among other topics, Byron’s critique of the Homeric epics in his comic epic, Don Juan.

Appointed in 1966 to found a Classics department at Brock University, a newly established Ontario institution, I developed in addition to classes in Latin and Greek an intensive survey course of Classical literature in translation (from which I hoped to recruit students for courses in Latin and Greek).  The first day of class of the survey course, I would announce: “People think that if they can read a newspaper they know how to read, and, indeed, you may be able to read a bestseller with minimal effort, but the works we will be studying this year require a special effort, a special kind of reading. Masterworks like the Homeric epics are to be approached as congealed life.  Almost every line exposes a view of the world that Cicero denominated humanitas.  And so this year you are going to learn how to read the Greek and Roman classics and to investigate an alternate view of the world to the Judaeo-Christian.”

            The approach I have followed in the two volumes exploring Homer’s dramatic artistry is similar to that I pursued in my classes more than forty years ago.