This is the only occurrence of ἀϋτή in the Odyssey as compared to 24 in the Iliad (according to the Chicago Homer analysis) and this informs how I read this line.
The Murray/Dimock Loeb has “There rang in my ears a cry as of maidens…” and Wilson has “I heard the sound of female voices.” Green has “An outcry of women—young girls—just echoed round about me:” and Rieu “There’s a shrill echo in my ears, as though some girls were shrieking – Nymphs”.
These translations (which I had to hand) seemed to me to be silent on the Illadic allusion and I thought it was noteworthy. There is a spectrum here from voices/cry/outcry/ shrieking to “battle cry”. The line neatly illustrates the difficulty of translating a text which is so rich. The balance between strangeness and danger is difficult to capture, which is what made me think of the Tempest. Untranslated the poetry can remain ambiguous and allusive, in English decisions about meaning are made and some of the ambiguity is lost.
I am interested in your suggestion of a Jungian reading and will add this to my list of things to think about in the future.
Although we express ourselves differently I see you agree with me that " Perhaps Odysseus represents the compromises that have to be made to ensure survival."
What I still don’t follow is why you say “Odysseus takes pleasure in overcoming the challenges he’s presented with…”. I think he is shrewdly calculating in a way that say Achilles seems incapable. Achilles is obsessed with his honour at the cost of his allies, friends and lover and ultimately his own life. I think you have a more sentimental approach to Odysseus and whilst I don’t share this I can understand why.
Homer interrogates Heroic Values and we will all provide our own solutions or just a list of further questions.
I think of it as my Mediterranean Diet!
Concerning ἀυτή:
I didn’t want the week to go by without mentioning another aspect of the phrase this word appears in - “ἀμφήλυθε θῆλυς ἀυτή”. I’ve been reading Nagler’s Spontaneity and Tradition and in the very first chapter, he mentions this phrase which was originally used by Parry to illustrate the resemblance of phrases playing a role in the production of new phrases.
There is not only the matter of sense, but that of sound. In the matter of sense, he reminds us that we must understand that the generation of an oral formula reflects the poet’s worldview (not our own) and in this case, his perception of “the suffusion of sound and odor through their respective media”. ‘ἀμφήλυθε’ has the sense of spreading in the same way as smell.
‘θῆλυς ἀυτή’ is referred to by Hainesworth in his notes as an “acoustic echo”. While there is no other instance of ἀυτή in the Odyssey, there are similar sounding phrases, such as “ἀμφήλυθεν ἡδὺς ἀυτμή” (Od. 12.369)which could have prompted the poet to produce the phrase in 6.122.
Anyway, I’m late for Herodotus, so I’ll leave it to Michael to perhaps shed some light or give a clearer explanation on this idea. BTW, Nagler’s book is fascinating, but a bit like wading through treacle; however, that’s probably more due to my experience level than the quality of his exposition.
EDIT: It appears that ἀυτή appears 4 times in the Odyssey (6.122,11.383,14.265,and 17.434)
I do agree with this - my original question at the top of the thread was whether Odysseus is self-aware about his moral state, including the compromises he makes. Michael says above “he fears he may have landed among uncivilized folk (unlike himself, natch)”. His own self-perception is what I’m most interested in. When we get to book 9 sometime in 2035 we can talk more about what his own self-presentation says about him.
The bit just after he’s boffed Polyphemus in the eye is a good example of what I mean.
Fagles (I have a pdf so it’s easy to copy and paste)
They lumbered off, but laughter filled my heart
to think how nobody’s name—my great cunning stroke— had duped them one and all.
As this is part of his own retelling of his tale, you could read it a number of different ways: something he’s added in to show how he wasn’t afraid, a simple sign of relief, amusement at an unexpected outcome. I read it as perversely delighting in his own ingenuity during his retelling (given the context of two gobbled-up comrades).
I don’t regard it as an error and I don’t like your language.
Thank you. I fear whatever the shortcomings of the app I misread the results. There are a further three instances in the Odyssey. This seems to be the same result I got from a search of TLG. These four are mentioned in Cunliffe.
The bit just after he’s boffed Polyphemus in the eye is a good example of what I mean.
I would take this as an instance of laughing at the distress of one’s enemies, but I can see that it can be interpreted as Odysseus being very self satisfied.
Halliwell (Greek Laughter 2008) makes the point in commenting on the contrast between Odysseus’s and the suitors’ laughter that (my underlined emphasis added):
“He does, however, inwardly exult over the blindness manifested by the suitors’ congratulatory prayer (18.117), just as his ‘heart laughed’ at his success in tricking the Cyclops into believing his false name (9.413, in sharp contrast to the Cyclops’ own groans, 415), and just as we shall later be told how he ‘gave a very sardonic smile in his heart (thumos)’ when he avoided the cow’s foot thrown at him by Ctesippus (20.301–2). The cautious internalisation of pleasure, as highlighted by the paradoxical imagery of inward laughter/smiling, is an index of Odyssean cunning and forbearance. It forms a telling contrast to the raucous laughter of the suitors.”
So according to Halliwell the nature of Odysseus’s laughter serves to highlight the difference between Odysseus and the Cyclops and the suitors. I find this more complex way of reading the laughter more satisfying than either my simple laughing at the distress of one’s enemies (perhaps I was thinking too much of Medea here) or your delight in his own ingenuity. Although of course its not incompatible with either reading.
Really? ἄυσαν is narratorial, “objective,” and κουράων θῆλυς ἀυτή is what Odysseus hears. The two exactly correspond, and the focalization of the latter (if that’s how we choose to regard it) makes no difference to how the sound is described or to how Odysseus perceives it.
There’s the difference between us. You object to none because they’re all acts of reception. I object to all because they all distort the Greek. Traduttori traditori.
I think I’m agreeing with you here (unless I don’t understand you) - I was trying to say that it’s possible for shifts in focalisation in a narrative to give different contexts to the same word/cognate, but that in these lines I don’t really see how you can justify it and it seems to be the same sound in both.
Whether the first bit is ‘us watching Athena watching the girls’ or just ‘us watching the whole scene as described by the narrative voice’ isn’t really important, that was just my take (the focalisation is weak at best).
In general yes. But in this specific case I was simply saying that in my post I was not objecting to a particular translation.
You might be interested in what Wilson says about academic attitudes to translation:
"Although translation might seem a natural step for a scholar preoccupied by the connections between antiquity and later texts, Wilson was dissuaded from pursuing it. “My colleagues told me: ‘You really shouldn’t be doing that kind of thing before tenure. Before tenure you have to write, you know, the right kind of book’ ” — the right kind being one on a subject that your discipline has yet to exhaust. Wilson did write a range of books before tenure, most on canonical texts: her study of suffering and death in literature; a monograph on Socrates. But, not heeding her colleagues’ advice, she began to translate Greek and Roman tragedies. A selection of Seneca’s plays appeared in 2010; four plays by Euripides in 2016. Both projects were outgrowths of her old desire to “spend a little bit longer” with these authors.
I asked Wilson why translation isn’t valued in the academy.
“Because there is no perception that it’s serious intellectually. It’s imagined as a subset of outreach. That you’re going to be communicating with the masses, which is less important than being innovative within your field. And even though I think translation is a way of being innovative within your field, my colleagues don’t see it that way.”