Welcome to a new sub series I'll be working on here: Casually Completing Classics, where I actually finish some of these classical books I've talked about. There won't be a ton of super serious research, commentary, etc. going on. Rather, I'll read them the way you'd read a novel. At whatever pace is comfortable, taking only light notes on things that are interesting/confusing, and jotting a quick summary for each chapter. I have a few used books where people wrote summaries, and I enjoyed having them. I figure I should try doing it myself.
This is partially inspired by my stepdaughter listening to
EPIC: The Musical. I told her I'd read one of the books from it with her, and she picked
The Odyssey. I figured we'd do a chapter a week or something, but she's plowing ahead to try to whole thing on summer break. There's no way I can do a in-depth, close read with research at that speed, and keep up with all my other projects. So, I'm trying it this way.
I've also been thinking about how I'd like to actually finish some of the pieces I've done excerpts from anyway, and this is a nice way to get started. I have a couple others available. If this goes well, I'll continue with others. If not, I'll keep going with the regular daily updates and do longer reads later. I'm going to try to get one up every Wednesday (to go with the weekly recaps on Monday and Star Wars Classics on Friday). No set timeline for when I'll finish The Odyssey (I'm a little over halfway through this reread), but probably late summer or early fall.
One last note: I'm primarily using the Fitzgerald translation for this, but I have the Butcher/Lang (the one from T5FSOB), Fagles, and Wilson (the one my stepdaughter is reading) translations at hand (and I suppose anything that's easily on the internet). This isn't a hardcore translation analysis, but it might come up a little, and I wanted people to know which I was using if they looked at my quotes.
The Odyssey: Books 1-
Intro:
Alright, dusk jacket summary if you've somehow made it to this blog, but don't know what The Odyssey is. It's the second of two epics by Homer (who we know very little about, including whether there even is one actual "Homer" person) dealing with the Trojan war. The Odyssey deals with how Odysseus (the dude who came up with the Trojan horse) gets home from Troy. It introduces a bunch of famous Greek mythological stories and monsters like The Cyclops and the Scylla. At least that's what everybody says.
I'd argue the voyage home from Troy is actually (an important) subplot, not the main thrust of the book. Odysseus doesn't even show up for the first ten percent of the book, and then by around the halfway point he's already home. At best, the voyage is maybe a third of the story (and that's with some generous accounting of asides, retellings, etc.) Instead, it's a story about how Odysseus's family deals with the suitors who have come to try to seduce Penelope (his wife) in his absence, with each character having their own arc within that plot. Odysseus: Sail home, fight monsters. Telemachus: Look for his father, grow into a man himself. Penelope: Trick horny men, deal with her son growing up. Penelope gets the short end of the stick.
Book 1:
I love the way these old epic poems start.
Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story
of that man skilled in all ways of contending
I'm a sucker for a good frame story/epistolary format. It's interesting that frame stories are still pretty popular, but you don't see this style very often anymore. Why can't your urban fantasy story start with: Hey buddy, tell me about that time Sam Skulldudger outfoxed the lycans, vamps, and necros all in one night!
(Beowulf gets the best one, since you get an all purpose interjection as the first word and can make it YO! or HEY! or BRO!)
Zeus gives a summary of a good chunk of the book. I mostly like this as a preview, but I do think that giving up that the whole thing is Poseidon's fault is a mistake. Talk about Odysseus being lost, fighting monsters, etc. cool. Makes me want to read the book. But I like the idea of the initial inciting incident being a bit more mysterious. Maybe everyone just knows that if you're lost at sea it's Poseidon's fault though.
Athena goes to Ithaca to talk to Telemachus and send him to look for Odysseus. The suitors are sitting in "easy chairs" which is an interesting phrase to read in an ancient Greek context. Usually I think of an easy chair as a fancy La-Z-Boy or something. It's probably like a chaise. She meets Telemachus and he askes her a million questions, then we get the first appearance of "winedark sea." Most people would call that more of a dark red, but not Homer.
There's a whole line of study about how cultures invent words for colors, etc. The consensus seems to be that yes, the ancient Greeks could see blue, but they didn't have a word for it since it's so "default" in nature (sea and sky). Curiously, the word blue does show up a couple times in most translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey, but it's more inferred from other words (descriptions of eyes) than a direct translation. Translation is weird and cool and crazy.
Stopping there for today. I'd like to do more than one book a day in general, but I've got about a hundred books to put on a shelf.
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