7 reasons to read the Odyssey

Barcelona"Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns driven straight out of that holy mountain / top by the lightning.". This is how the new Catalan version of Homer's Odyssey begins, one of the foundational epic poems in the history of literature, translated by Pau Sabaté and just published by Bernat Metge Universal, a label from Abacus. The classic tells the journey of the heroic and cunning Odysseus (or Ulysses, depending on the version), after the Trojan War – an episode dealt with in the Iliad, Homer's other literary monument–, with the aim of reaching the island of Ithaca, reuniting with his wife and son, Penelope and Telemachus, and reclaiming his throne. It is one of the books "most known and influential, subject to countless readings, rewrites and interpretations," comments the editor in the preface of the volume, Roger Aluja. Why does it continue to amaze readers and motivate new adaptations, such as the one that filmmaker Christopher Nolan is about to premiere, almost three thousand years after its conception?

"Homer is the great child poet. The world is born and Homer sings it. He is the bird of that dawn". These words by Victor Weber in the first chapter of his essay William Shakespeare (1864) serve to illustrate the foundational element of the Odyssey. Composed and recited orally since the 9th century BC and fixed in writing during the 8th century BC, it is one of the first epic poems in the Western literary canon. Divided into 24 cantos and comprising more than 12,000 hexameters, it has been praised by writers as diverse as Dante Alighieri, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce –who offered a very personal reinterpretation in Ulysses–, Mercè Rodoreda, Jorge Luis Borges, and Margaret Atwood. "Whether the Odyssey is Homer's work or not adds a mist of mystery that seems secondary to me. What is important is that we have two great poems attributed to this name", comments Roger Aluja.

In the essay The Scar of Ulysses, included in Mimesis (1946) and recently recovered by Acantilado in Spanish, Erich Auerbach (1892-1957) praised "the joy of sensory existence that becomes present" when reading the Odyssey: "We don't care to know if it's a legend, if it's all lies – he adds–. Homer doesn't need to insist on the historical truth of his narrative, his reality is solid enough. Homer seduces us, traps us in the reality he describes, and that's enough for him. In that real world, which exists in itself, and to which we as readers have been brought as if by magic, there is nothing else. The Homeric poems hide nothing, they contain no teaching or secret second meaning".

Classics can be fascinating on a personal level – and end up in the "unforgettable" books drawer – or blend into the collective unconscious, as Italo Calvino recalled in Why Read the Classics (1981; in Catalan at Edicions 62). Youthful readings are so important, for Calvino, that he recommends rereading them at least once in a lifetime. “As we grow older, we change and our encounter with texts is totally different,” he writes: every rereading of a classic is, in reality, a reading as initiatory and surprising as the first.The love for Pau Sabaté and Roger Aluja's Odyssey

began in adolescence and has been transforming. "The first time I read it, I was 15 years old – Sabaté recalls. We had the second translation by Carles Riba at home [published between 1947 and 1948]. It amazed me. When you overcome the barrier of the splendid language it uses, it becomes very seductive and interesting." Homer influenced Sabaté in his decision to study Greek and, later, classical philology at the University of Barcelona (UB). In 2019, he inaugurated the lavish Bernat Metge Universal collection with his translation of the Iliad, and six years later he repeats with the Odyssey. His editor, Roger Aluja, was also captivated by the same book as Sabaté when he was in high school. "My research project consisted of comparing various versions of the sixth canto – he explains. Riba's, which was the first I read, but also the one in prose by Joan Alberich [La Magrana, 1998], and a couple or three in Spanish." When he was studying classical philology at the UB, Aluja coincided in the classroom with the Hellenist Jaume Pòrtulas: "He is one of the foremost specialists in the world in Homeric poetry. Professor Pòrtulas ended up directing my doctoral thesis, which is an aesthetic commentary on the eleventh canto of the Odyssey".

"TheOdyssey" is a book of travels, without travels –assures Dolors Miquel in the epilogue of the new edition of the Bernat Metge Universal–. A tale that a shepherd or a peasant would tell by a fire or on a summer evening. Or someone from distant lands. It would seem that the author is telling us that the only great and possible journey is that of the logos, that the most penetrating Odyssey of all is that of the imagination."

It is Odysseus himself who, transformed within the work into an aede –a term that designated Greek rhapsode poets–, is in charge of narrating his adventures, among which are the deception of the cyclops Polyphemus, the song of the Sirens –who have the head of a woman and the body of a bird–, the sacrifice of the Sun's cows, and his relationships with Nausicaa, Circe, and Calypso. "Although Calypso offers him immortality if he stays with her on the island where she lives, Odysseus prefers to return to Ithaca to reunite with Penelope and his son Telemachus –says Sabaté–. At first glance, the most striking and attractive part of the Odyssey is the adventures, but the cantos that take place in Ithaca are fundamental. For the adult reader, perhaps they are even more interesting." In relation to highlighting the adventures in the epic poem, Carles Riba considered it, in the prologue to his second translation, an attempt to bring the classic "to the marketplace," and added: "To snatch the Odyssey" from the monopoly of more or less learned Hellenists, all right; but as much as delivering it to the insensitivity and banality of mere novel devourers [...] it is difficult to resign oneself to it".

Odysseus represents "a type of heroism different from that of Achilles, the great protagonist of the Iliad", says Aluja. He shares with Achilles skill on the battlefield, but unlike him, "he does not give up other war tactics, such as ambushes, camouflage, or the use of the bow, which for warriors of strength is the weapon of cowards".

"Odysseus is a master of dissimulation and deception", comments Sabaté. The fact that he is a man "of great cunning" –according to Riba–, "of a thousand faces" –in the translation by Joan F. Mira in 2011 for Proa– or "very versatile" –in Sabaté's version– allows him to overcome all obstacles, human and divine, during the ten years that separate him from the end of the Trojan War and his arrival in Ithaca. "When he wakes up on the beach of Ithaca, Athena [or Athena], his protector, transforms him into a miserable beggar, so that he remains unnoticed by everyone, friends and enemies alike –writes Jaume Pòrtulas in the prologue to the latest reissue of the Odyssey translated by Carles Riba in the Bernat Metge Essencial in 2019–. Finally, already at home and among his own, the man who had been [...] No one will manage to recover, thanks to a series of measured and successive recognitions, the different facets of his personal and social self. He thus returns to the fullness of himself. We could say that he rebuilds himself: he rebuilds himself as the father of Telemachus, as the husband of Penelope, as the son of Laertes, and also as the king of Ithaca".

There are three versions of the Odyssey by Carles Riba: between the first, published by Editorial Catalana in 1919, and the last, by Alpha – from the Col·lecció Bernat Metge – in 1953, more than three decades passed. "The mark it has left on contemporary Catalan literature has been important, although perhaps more in the realm of poets, translators, and other writers than for the average reader," admits Jaume Pòrtulas. When Joan F. Mira published his Odyssey in 2011 with Proa, he aimed "not to embellish the text, nor to try to improve it, nor to pretend to make it more poetic and more elevated". Like Riba and Sabaté, but unlike Joan Alberich's version, he translated it in verse. "Translating Homer in prose is entirely respectable, but it can never be read, perceived, or felt like a translation in verse – Mira argued at the time –. Never, in any way. And translating Homer in verse means, if it is materially possible (in some languages it certainly is not), reproducing the hexameters of the original".

Pau Sabaté has wanted to follow "Riba's path": "I have tried to capture the passion for genuineness. Riba is sometimes even colloquial. He also has the aspiration to be very literal, to convey the strangeness of the original Greek text, which sometimes seems like an incantation. I have tried not to emphasize this point". The translator has avoided "modernizing the language of the Odyssey to the extreme". The reader interested in a sound prose version – made from the English adaptation by Samuel Butler, author of Erewhon, in 1900 – can turn to the recent edition by Blackie Books, which features the translation by Xavier Pàmies.

As Dolors Miquel points out in her epilogue, the Dolors Miquel points out in her epilogue, the Odyssey opens and closes with the goddess Athena. Throughout the poem, women have "a more relevant role than in the Iliad", says Aluja. "Although Calypso wants to keep Odysseus on the island, she eventually lets him go, and it is Circe who explains all the obstacles he must overcome to reach Ithaca — she adds—. Penelope awaits him there, who has managed to postpone the decision to choose a suitor with the cunning of undoing at night what she weaves during the day. Until the work is finished, she will not remarry." Miquel explains that beneath this female presence beats "the beginning of a phallocentric truth obsessed with hiding what is mysterious, what is feminine, uterine and unique". She recalls that Greek thought, appealing to the philosopher and psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray, transmits a "world that man has constructed to supplant adhesion to the maternal world, to assert himself against the mother, against participation in her world". In the Odyssey

In addition to proposing a journey through various Greek islands and allowing the reader to learn about their fauna, the Odyssey is a poem rich in mentions of trees and plants. "The names of animals and plants are always a thorny issue when translating ancient literature –comments Pau Sabaté–. The flora and fauna of the eastern Mediterranean, even if not radically different from ours, do not entirely correspond to that of the western shores either. A second problem is that the temporal distance and the limited nature of the sources have made certain denominations confusing." Wracking his brains, Sabaté has reached the conclusion that the "double thicket" under which Ulysses shelters on the island of the Phaeacians is formed by a part of olive tree and another that, instead of being broom or wild olive, must be oleaster. "A wild olive and an olive tree growing together do not quite make a "}double thicket" –he adds–. The usual cultivation technique for olive trees was to graft them onto oleasters to make them fruit faster.

One of the riskiest adventures posed by the epic poem is the journey to Hades, the name by which hell was known in ancient Greece. "Odysseus goes there twice. The first time is explained in the eleventh canto, and among the most memorable passages is the reunion with Achilles, the hero of the Iliad", recalls the translator. Achilles laments having had to pay the price of death to achieve glory among the living: "Do not try to console me about death, Odysseus, do not comfort me! / I would much rather earn a day's wage on earth / by hiring myself out to a man without inheritance or much to live on / than be the king of all the dead, of those who have finished." Odysseus learns his lesson and ends up returning home.