The Odyssey by Homer: Day 6
Book 5, lines 1-228
I love Wilson’s playful variations in the personification of Dawn as she rises again and again and again. Time’s passage marked like a devotion. Such a Dawn reverberates across modernist revisions of the epic. “At the end of daybreak” in Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. “Good morning, Daddy!” in Langston Hughes’s Montage of a Dream Deferred.
The action catches up with Odysseus, but he is still introduced as an absence.
“But Hermes did not find Odysseus, / since he was sitting by the shore as usual, / sobbing in grief and pain.”
Calypso—full throated and with examples as evidence—defends female desire. She shouts at Hermes:
“You cruel, jealous gods! You bear a grudge / whenever any goddess takes a man / to sleep with as a lover in her bed.”
Wilson’s translation subtly insists on the role gender plays in her complaint. While Fitzgerald translates “when we choose to lie with men,” highlighting instead the scandalous pairing of “mortal” and “immortal flesh,” Wilson’s lines are studded with “she’s” and “her’s.”
Join us on March 18 for a virtual discussion of The Odyssey with Stefania Heim
"The meadow softly bloomed with celery / and violets" (72-73)--I read and reread the description of Calypso's cavern out of sheer delight, and then pulled up the Brueghel painting for good measure.
"I am taller too." Am I the only one to laugh out loud at this line from Calypso? Rather wounding in the most frivolous manner (to a short reader...)