“So he had tricked them all.
After examining the mighty bow
carefully, inch by inch—as easily
as an experienced musician stretches
a sheep-gut string around a lyre’s peg
and makes it fast—Odysseus, with ease,
strung the great bow. He held it in his right hand
and plucked the string, which sang like swallow-song,
a clear sweet note. The suitors, horrified,
grew pale, and Zeus made ominous thunder rumble.”
The Odyssey, Book 21: An Archery Contest (translated by Emily Wilson)
In the comprehensive introduction to her new translation, Emily Wilson breaks down the many worlds found within The Odyssey:
“We may expect the hero of an “epic” narrative to confront evil forces, perform a superhuman task, and rescue vast numbers of people from an extraordinary kind of threat. […] In The Odyssey, we find instead the story of a man whose grand adventure is simply to go back to his own home, where he tries to turn everything back to the way it was before he went away.
Only a portion of the twenty-four books of The Odyssey describes the magical wandering of Odysseus on his journey back to Ithaca. […] Sometimes the setting feels entirely realistic, even mundane—where a mother packs a wholesome lunch of bread and cheese for her daughter, where there is a particular joy in taking a hot bath, where men listen to music and play checkers, and lively, pretty girls have fun playing ball games together. At other moments, we are in the realm of pure fantasy, inhabited by cannibals, witches, and goddesses with six barking heads, where it is possible to cross the stream of Ocean (the mythical river that encircles the known world) and come to the land of asphodel, where the spirits of the world live forever.”
Following up on last year’s successful class on Emily Wilson’s translation of The Iliad, we are happy to offer a course focused on Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey. Each week, students will also have the opportunity to select their favorite passages and lead a discussion on it! We will cover 4 books of the epic per class over the course of 6 weeks and supplement our discussion with the following incisive secondary sources:
“Perils of Song in Homer’s Odyssey” by Zachary Biles
“Conversation in the Odyssey” by Scott Richardson
“Athena and Penelope as Foils for Odysseus in the Odyssey” by Lillian E. Doherty
“KLEOS AND ITS IRONIES IN THE ODYSSEY” by Charles Segal
