Homer's The Odyssey, translated by Emily Wilson discussion
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Discussion: Book 5 of Emily Wilson's Translation of The Odyssey
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In these Olympics the gods are into aerial feats and in this action-packed event of Book 5 Homer twice repeats a pattern of incarnation into a seabird to get the job done. We have Hermes with Zeus’ cease and desist order flying as one bird and doing some acrobatics in the waves before landing at Calypso’s isle. And later we have a Theban girl turned god pop up as a bird out of the waves bearing Athena’s mission to help Odysseus survive Poseidon’s storms. Adam Nicolson in his recent book about seabirds (author of “Why Home Matters”) argues the first incarnation of the gods is likely as a shearwater and the second a kittiwake (The Seabird’s Cry: The Lives and Loves of the Planet's Great Ocean Voyagers ).
For Hermes rapid flight from Olympus to Calypso, his bird avatar as translated by Wilson goes like this:
He touched Piera, then from the sky/ he plunged into the sea and swooped between/ the waves, just like a seagull catching fish/ wetting its whirring wings in tireless brine/So Hermes scudded through the surging swell..
Nicolson explains his guess:
Homer’s word for what the god becomes is laros, now used for gulls, but Hermes is no gull since he dives beneath the waves as a gull never wood, and the best guess is that he is a shearwater, dipping his dark primaries into the outmost skim of each wave.
The clue of wingtips in the water is a signature of shearwaters as they whirl above the wave tops before plunging for fish scouted beneath the surface. He notes Pope’s translation had it “dips his pinions in the deep.”
The propensity for nesting shearwater couples to take turns making feeding trips up to a thousand miles away, aided by gales, and reliably returning home makes them a fair symbol in nature for the Odyssey of our hero and a fitting form for Hermes to take:
In the Odyssey, Hermes, the boundary-crosser, the musician, the merchant, the trickster and the traveler, the god surely of seabirds, becomes a seabird himself.
In the case of Odysseus’ encounter with gods as birds, we get a more sprightly bird here in Wilson’s take:
But stepping softly, Ino, the White Goddess,/ Cadmus’ child, once human, human-voiced,/ now honored with the gods in salty depths …Like a gull with wings outstretched/ she rose up from the sea, sat up on the raft …
After a tough pitch to get the man-hunk to ditch his raft and clothes trust in own swimming with the magic scarf (“Use the Force, Luke”), trust that her special scarf (“immortal veil”), the bird form returns for her exit:
With that, the goddess gave it,/ and plunged back down inside the surging sea, / just like a gull.
Here Nicolson points out that the Greek word is “aithuia”, the meaning of which is also subject to guesswork in translation. If not a gull, then a tern would fit diving into the waves. Nicolson’s choice is the kittiwake, which usually comes in white and behaves in a way suitable for Homer’s personification.
I love his reflection on the power of this far-traveling, otherworldly bird to inspire Homer:
That is like a kittiwake: a picture of delicacy and tailored perfection, a sign of grace and goodness, feminine and intimate with the man, with you and then not with you, not hovering like terns over the prey, but diving in from direct flight, plunging up to 3 feet beneath the waves.
… The sea is a desert of hostility, stirred up by the rage of Poseidon who loathes Odysseus, the realm of death, threatens destruction at every turn; but out of that hostility the beauty of the aithuia, a sweet-eyed, perfectly featured thing comes and speaks to the man so helplessly exposed to the ocean’s rage..
Can't wait to tap into "Why Homer Matters."
Michael wrote: "In these Olympics the gods are into aerial feats and in this action-packed event of Book 5 Homer twice repeats a pattern of incarnation into a seabird to get the job done. We have Hermes with Zeus’..."Michael, I'm not sure I understand what you're suggesting.
Are you saying Hermes actually transforms himself into a bird and Ino does the same?
I've always read the "like" and "as" as similes: "like a seagull catching fish..." "Like a gull with wings outstretched..."
It didn't occur to me that Homer was suggesting they actually transformed themselves into birds.
But perhaps I misunderstood your point.
I like the way Calypso lashes out at Hermes, accusing the male gods of a double standard when it comes to relationships with mortals. She is also sly in that she does not reveal to Odysseus she has no choice but to release him because of Zeus’ commands. She makes it sound as if she is letting him go out of the goodness of her heart:I am not made of iron; no, my heart
Is kind and decent, and I pity you.
Calypso describes Demeter as having “cornrows in her hair." She must envision her as a sort of young Bo Derek look-alike.
Fair on the "like" of similes, Tamara. Still, the vividness of description of the birdlike skills displayed makes the reader imagine the metamorphoses . Like all tall tales trying to seduce you into believing the impossible. Did Proteus only seem to run through animals forms when trapped, fooling us like Athena through her guises, or did he actually incarnate in the beasts? ( Were Gulliver's experiences all in his head and the Wizard of Oz just a phoney, or did you not suspend your disbelief as a good reader)
Loved your descriptions and photos Michael. I think I actually did read these sections as actual changes of form. There is precedence I think. And I've always read Proteus as physically changing, not only appearing to change. I guess I see my mythical gods as having such abilities and likely enjoying their use.
Sue wrote: "Loved your descriptions and photos Michael. I think I actually did read these sections as actual changes of form. There is precedence I think. And I've always read Proteus as physically changing, n..."I think one place where an actual transformation takes place occurs in Book 3: 371-373 when Athena changes into an ossifrage:
Bright-eyed Athena flew away, transformed
into an ossifgrage. Astonishment
seized all the people watching, even Nestor.
(I had to look up ossifrage. It's some sort of bearded vulture.)
Well, Book 4 ends with a cliff-hanger worthy of silent films with the suitors lying in wait to ambush Telemachus. Penelope is comforted by Athena, but gets no assurance that Odysseus will return home alive. In Book 5 the poet shows us what the gods have set in motion and how Odysseus will act. Here again faith, fate and the power of the gods and mortals add narrative suspense.Zeus grants Athena one favor (Hermes as an emissary to convince Calypso to let Odysseus go), but tells her that both Telemachus, the suitors and Odysseus are her problem since she set the events in motion.
Poor Calypso—the male gods always take revenge on goddesses who fall in love with mortals, Odysseus no longer loves her as she loves him, she pleads that she is much better looking “and taller” than Penelope—but she must give him up.
Odysseus demonstrates his caginess when dealing with gods twice. He makes Calypso swear a great oath that she will not harm him on the trip from her island and she responds “you scalawag” as if she might have done. Then when Ino gives him her magic scarf he does not trust it right away, but uses his own strategy. In conclusion, there is no straight line of causality, because each actor, god or mortal, has their own quirks.
Tamara wrote: "Sue wrote: "Loved your descriptions and photos Michael. I think I actually did read these sections as actual changes of form. There is precedence I think. And I've always read Proteus as physically..."I don’t think Hermes transforms, but Michael’s beautiful book material demonstrates how detailed the similes are. I think I prefer the bird images to the Marvel hero crashing around the ocean!
Michael, thanks for that info about the possible breeds of birds mentioned. I think Hermes def. shifted into a bird. A "when in Rome" situation. If you are a god and HAVE to travel hundreds of miles oversea- might as well be as a sea bird. Also disguised as a bird would make it easier for the gods to spy on other sea travelers and go unnoticed.I loved that Io made O take off all his clothes, It made me imagine that she wanted a chance to see him naked, to see what Calpyso had made all the fuss about.
Dustincecil wrote: "...I loved that Io made O take off all his clothes, It made me imagine that she wanted a chance to see him naked, to see what Calpyso had made all the fuss about."LOL, on getting a little racy.
Why would Hermes transform into a bird when he has those handy (er, footy) dandy WINGS on his heels?
Ken wrote: "Why would Hermes transform into a bird when he has those handy (er, footy) dandy WINGS on his heels?"Our first superman. Comics didn't come from nothing. (Is it a bird, is it a plane?) Eagles were sent by Zeus to attack folks at that council in Ithaca and didn't become them. But metaphors of birds abound so much that, as Wilson notes in the introduction, Zeus gets associated with the eagle as avatar, Apollo with the hawk, and Athena often as a owl (based on continuity with Minoan goddess predecessor; though the 'ossifrage' vulture incarnation has been noted).
As a poet, Ken, don't you slide easily from "x is like y" to a fine blur. You can start out with say "When the evening is spread out against the sky/Like a patient etherized upon a table" and pretty soon you can get to fog as a dog:
"The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes, The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes/ Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening"
Yes. I am a fan of slides. And metaphor. Man, for all his faults, is the only metaphorically-inclined animal. Or bird, for that matter.
Love that fog as dog Michael. Guess I'm a sucker for pushing the metaphor into out and out physical change when it comes to these Greek gods..
The Greek Gods = metaphors for poetic license. It dangles from their collars, even.
Michael wrote: "Ken wrote: "Why would Hermes transform into a bird when he has those handy (er, footy) dandy WINGS on his heels?"Our first superman. Comics didn't come from nothing. (Is it a bird, is it a plane?..."
What are the poems? T.S. Eliot?
Historygirl wrote: "What are the poems? T.S. Eliot?.."The lines that Michael cited in #14 are from T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...
Was just trying to egg our resident poet to flash upon devices already at play in this first Western epic. I always thought the "like" in that line to be an impossible stretch on purpose. So absurd to tell us evening is like a drugged patient. But then he dispenses with the "like" and just describes fog like a dog, and you somehow can see it. Gods "like" birds a similar stretch, but then Hermes dancing in the waves makes it come real just as effectively.
It’s always seemed to me that for Hermès to fly upright, as he does in every image I’ve ever seen, would be very inefficient and most unlikely to have him skimming the waves like a seabird. And he’d get his sandals and tunic wet (would he wear a tunic on this errand?) I’m definitely on the side of metamorphosis.
Tamara wrote: "Historygirl wrote: "What are the poems? T.S. Eliot?.."The lines that Michael cited in #14 are from T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet......"
Thanks. The site is also excellent with its historical archive.
I was delighted to get reacquainted with “The Love Song,,”
Lyn wrote: "It’s always seemed to me that for Hermès to fly upright, as he does in every image I’ve ever seen, would be very inefficient and most unlikely to have him skimming the waves like a seabird. And he’..."I love the inefficiency argument :-). Wish I'd thought of that one.
And why would these gods stop at turning into other creatures (or Homer stop at hinting the same). They are able to have nature do so many things whenever they wish; why not change themselves?
Janet, I think there's something elemental about kissing earth. I don't know if all popes do it, but I certainly recall Pope John Paul II doing it every time he got out of a plane to visit a new country. And I've done it after particularly rough rides on planes myself. Terra firma. Thank you, God (or in Odysseus's case, "gods").
Janet, I really like your thoughts about this book linking us with nature. I do feel that strongly, especially with this discussion. I wonder if this translation, which feels more basic and open, somehow leads us to notice basics more clearly, such as the actions of the gods, the natural world, etc.
Fagles' translation of the passage:Struggling up from the banks, he flung himself
In the deep reeds, he kissed the good green earth
and addressed his fighting spirit, desperate still:
"Man of misery, what next? Is this the end?
(Book 5: 512-515)
I like "the good green earth"
Tamara wrote: "Fagles' translation of the passage:Struggling up from the banks, he flung himself
In the deep reeds, he kissed the good green earth
and addressed his fighting spirit, desperate still:
"Man of mis..."
Well, the Fagles is very good here too.
Count me on the metamorphosis side, and I so appreciate the bird ideas, Michael.Couldn't get this old favorite--Suzanne Vega's "Calypso" out of my head while reading this book. Here it is, accompanied by some lovely art: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uC8cp...
Ino and the Sea This quite short but dramatic Book allows Odysseus to enter the story in person, and shows him battling for his life, not against monsters or people for now, but against winds and waves.
We also meet yet another deity associated with the sea, in addition to Poseidon, Amphitrite, Triton, Proteus, Phorcys, Oceanus, various sea nymphs such as Thetis, all mentioned in the Odyssey, and the Four Winds, who can whip up waves and blow help or harm to sailing ships.
The new sea goddess is Ino, introduced at line 333, who helps Odysseus to survive the storm that Poseidon sends, as does Athena, who persuades 3 of the 4 winds to rest, so that instead of being blown hither and thither, Boreas, the North Wind, alone, can blow Odysseus on a consistent course towards an inhabited island.
I think this shows why the Greeks liked to have several different sea gods and godesses to pray to when in peril on the water: if Poseidon does not want to help, some other god may.
Homer tells us that Ino used to be a human and (as he also says of Circe), she has a voice like a human's rather than a god's. He does not tell us the rest of Ino's complicated back story, which, according to internet search, includes bringing up the god Dionysus, who is her nephew. She is closely related to Cadmus, Semele and Acteon, who feature in various other myths.
As often with the Greek pagan gods, Ino's story involves some ruthless and, at least to us, morally questionable, incidents, including murdering children and step children of hers. At one point, when her husband, during a long exile, had in his absence from Ino married a second wife and had children by her, Ino learned that the rival wife had sent men with a description of how Ino's children are dressed, with orders to kill them. Ino responds by making her own children swap clothes with the other wife's children, so that the latter are murdered instead.
Eventually Ino went mad and leapt into the Sea, and Zeus, rather than let her drown, turned her into an immortal marine godess.
Whatever we can say for or against either Ino's or Odysseus's conduct at other times, here in Book 5 neither of them does anything we can reasonably criticize.
As this Book 5 comes chronologically after, but narratively before, Odysseus' blinds Poseidon's one-eyed giant son Polyphemus the Cyclops, to be recounted in flashback in Book 9, we don't yet know why Poseidon, most powerful of the sea deities, is so implacably hostile to Odysseus. Ino is presumably not powerful enough stop to the great storm that Poseidon has sent, but she can give Odysseus advice and help to survive it, although he loses his raft, provisions and clothes.
Tithonus; Calypso's ComplaintThe first line of this book has the dawn goddess Eos awake beside her partner Tithonus. According to Emily Wilson's Glossary, and the principle that everyone in Greek Mythology is related to everyone else, Tithonus is the brother of King Priam of Troy. Although he is a mortal, the goddess of Dawn chose him as her lover, something that Calypso complains later in this Book (see below) the gods begrudge and punish, including with Dawn and her previous lover Orion (Lines 122 - 125).
Whether it is a direct punishment or not, although not mentioned in the Odyssey, as Emily W explains in her Glossary at the end of her translation, the tradition was that when Dawn, as an immortal goddess, asked Zeus to make her human lover Tithonus immortal, so he could always be with her, she did not think to ask for him to have eternal youth along with eternal life.
Consequently, although Tithonus cannot die, he continues to age and his body to decay, until, after centuries, he will so completely fade away that nothing will remain of him but his whisper, which sounds like a Cicada.
Immortality is, therefore, not always as attractive a prospect as one may think. I don't know if that has any relevance to Odysseus decision, which Calypso regrets at lines 209 - 210, to refuse the chance to stay with her always and become immortal himself - if the Olympians had allowed that, of course, as Calypso knows, but Odysseus does not, that Zeus, prompted by Athena, wants Odysseus to at last get home to Ithaca and his family.
Some people, both in the prior discussions in this group and in some other commentaries, take Calypso's complaint to Hermes at lines 117 - 130, about being ordered to let Odysseus go, as a protest about the apparently hypocritical double standard by which male gods like Zeus and Poseidon are allowed to have affairs with mortal women but are hard on female goddesses like herself who take mortal men as lovers:
[118] 'You cruel, jealous gods! You bear a grudge whenever any goddess takes a man to sleep with as a lover in her bed. Just so the gods who live at ease were angry when rosy-fingered Dawn took up Orion, and from her golden throne chaste Artemis attacked and killed him with her gentle arrows....
So now, you male gods are upset with me for living with a man. A man I saved!'
However, it is always tempting, where something in ancient literature superficially looks like a modern, even modern politically correct, attitude, to assume that that is what it is.
However, I don't think that on the evidence of this Book alone we can necessarily say that Calypso is protesting, like a modern liberal, at the double standard that certainly applied to male and female sexual behaviour in those days.
'It's not fair!' is a more characteristic complaint of modern than Homer's time, when there was no theory that all human beings should in some sense be equal and have equal rights.
Even in our own day, the inequalities of biology, by which it is women who have to bear the greater physical consequences of casual sex in becoming pregnant, this necessarily means that women do have reason to be more cautious about such matters than men.
In ancient times, with no modern contraception (not that that is 100% reliable even today) and no DNA tests to determine paternal responsibility, the consequences of sex for women were far greater than for men. Hence, it was almost inevitable that a different standard of behaviour would apply.
While Calypso complains that the gods begrudge godesses like herself indulging their desires for mortal men, unless you take it as implied, she nowhere uses the 'double standard' argument that male gods do not live by the rule they impose on godesses like her. Her complaint is just that they won't let her do what she wants.
Indeed, it is not just male gods who enforce this standard. Calypso notes that the (virgin) goddess Artemis killed Orion for breaking it with the goddess Dawn.
(We shall later meet Orion's spirit in Hades in Book 11, when he is still chasing the spirits of the animals he had hunted on Earth.)
'As if on Horseback'; Sleep under Olive Bush Lines 370 - 372, when Odysseus' raft breaks up in the storm:
'...so were the raft's long timbers flung apart. He climbed astride a plank and rode along as if on horseback.'
A rare reference for Homer to riding on horseback. Like his occasional references to iron, despite the poem being set in the Bronze Age, this may be an anachronism based on the customs of Homer's time, rather than circa 12th Century BC when the Trojan War and the events of the Iliad and Odyssey are supposed to have taken place.
Horses seem to have been domesticated in stages. First, they were harnessed to pull carts and chariots. Only centuries later did people learn to ride horses directly by sitting on their backs.
Bronze Age Mycenaean Greece was still in the chariot, not the horse-riding, phase. Hence Homer's battles, based on legends and probably poetic traditions from those times, include foot soldiers and chariots, but no cavalry.
Horses were, however, being ridden by Homer's own time, even if less efficiently than later, as the stirrups were not introduced until many centuries later still.
Hence the simile of Odysseus sitting astride his plank bobbing along the waves as though riding a horse.
******
Towards the end of this Book, washed up on an unknown island, exhausted, Odysseus improvises a bed of piled up leaves for himself:
'beneath two bushes grown together, of olive and thorn. No strong wet wind could blow through them...no rain could penetrate them; they were growing so thickly intertwined.'
Other translations available to read on the internet or listen to on YouTube seem to fall into two camps about the species of the two intertwined bushes. Perhaps a slight majority, as here, say they are an olive and a thorn. Others say they are a cultivated olive and a wild olive.
It is some time since I have been in an olive grove, but my memory is that their branches do grow close enough together to block off most of the light, so that little else grows in their shade. Hence, I can believe that they would provide effective shelter from wind and rain.
Here, Odysseus settles down to sleep in his simple open air bed of leaves beneath an olive bush and Book 5 ends.
Perhaps in deliberate contrast, near the beginning of the next Book, Book 6, elsewhere on the same island a young Princess, Nausicaa, awakes in a real bed in a decorated bedroom with shining doors, in a palace.
