What a monster, but it’s done now. I just finished Nikos Kazantzakis’s massive 1938 epic The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel in its staggering 1958 translation by Kimon Friar, in collaboration with Kazantzakis.
In the Greek, it is “33,333 lines of an extremely unfamiliar
seventeen-syllable unrhymed iambic measure of eight beats” (ix), using “simplified
spelling” and “a special lexicon of almost 2,000 words… in familiar and daily
use by shepherds and fishermen” (x), all of which has disintegrated in the
English, which makes do with regular old alexandrines.
What are you gonna do?
Maybe someone who reads Greek will come by and tell me what I am
missing. I doubt that will happen.
Kazantzakis is writing in the tradition of Dante, Tennyson,
and Cavafy, sending a restless Odysseus off on new voyages, but aside from writing
a massive epic rather than a lyric poem he also cuts the last two cantos off of
Homer, beginning his story just after the death of the suitors and thus
creating a branching, alternate epic. His
Odysseus has been changed, perhaps traumatized, by his adventures, and is now a
danger to his home and family:
The stooped house-wrecker in his brine-black heart drank in
the uncivil poisoned welcome of his shameless people
and in his wrathful heart a lightning longing seized him
to fall on his isle ruthlessly and put to the sword
men, women, and gods, and on the flaming shores of dawn
scatter to the wide winds the ashes of his own homeland. (Bk. 1, 6)
So what a relief when he recruits a crew of misfits and
heads south, for good, his patron god no longer the civilized Athena but
Death. The Odyssey of Kazantzakis
is, really, a philosophical poem, beginning with Nietzsche and ending with
Epicureanism, with Odysseus becoming reconciled with the world and
disintegrating into the oversoul, let’s say.
The book often made me think of Hermann Hesse. Somewhere in the middle I wondered if
Odysseus would meet Buddha, or become Buddha.
Yes and perhaps yes. He meets Don
Quixote, too, a camel-riding, slave-freeing East African Don Quixote. I would read that novel, if anyone would
write it.
I thought the last four cantos, the increasingly abstract
death of Odysseus, were the best part of the book. I assume Kazantzakis had a good sense of
where he was going but was more inconsistent filling in the episodes in
between.
The ethos of the book is masculinist. Lots of phalli and breasts; lots of seed and
milk. All of this is fair game for the
imagery of an anthropologically sophisticated maximalist syncretic mid-century
work of literature, but I found Kazantzakis’s language sometimes turning into
kitsch. The book contains its own critique
– the eventual Epicurean position demands a balance – but at times it was rough
going. The second major episode of the
book is set in a grotesquely masculine Cretan bull-god society, where some of
the kitsch is likely intentional. The
bull-god is overthrown by Odysseus and his friends, with a happily pregnant
Helen (yes, that Helen) installed as the ruler of the newly feminized
culture. The masculine principle, pushed
too far, is decadent, corrupt, and destructive.
Clearly a critique. “The fate of
woman suddenly seemed to him most cruel” (Bk 6, 187, before the revolution).
Still, The
Odyssey is not exactly due for revival.
This is not its moment. Perhaps
it will never have another moment.
The bit in the title is from Book 6, p. 186:
Odysseus watched, and mankind's murderous soul seemed deep,
bottomless, sunless, pummeled like earth's bloody crust.
But Odysseus, and the patient reader, has a long ways to go from here.
