Well, the vacation is over, and though distracted by hiking and daughters and dunking myself in the lake from a canoe, I made it as far as Athena’s parting in γ. I’ll try to continue as I find time though.
No, I don’t have time for much of the secondary Homeric literature. I appreciate the use of Homer in anthropological and linguistic sciences. And lexicons are fine tools. But that’s only the surface of the wine dark sea of what gets published. I have too much else to read to be willing to waste myself on the massive Wookieepedia of literary Homeric scholarship. Nietzsche has more to say on this, but most of his quotes on this subject are too mean to use here.
My youngest got moved into her older sister’s room last night, and it looks like I get to have a few wakeful nights reading the Odyssey during the transition. Lucky me.
I’m confused here at δ 193-198. Nestor’s son is addressing Menelaus about his fallen brother. If I had to write down how I understood this, it would be something like:
“And now, if it’s at all possible, be persuaded of me: for I at least do not <enjoy - τέρπομι> being <sad - ὀδυρόμενος μεταδόρπιος>, but rather it will be <spring-birthing - ἠριγένεια> morning, and I would that I were assigned nothing to cry over, whoever died among mortals and <caused grief - πότμον ἐπίσπηι>. This is now the only gift for <troubled - ὀϊζυροῖσι> mortals, to shave the hair and drip tears from our cheeks.”
Joel, you need to look up words in the dictionary: μεταδόρπιος, ἠριγένεια, νεμεσσῶμαί, πότμον, ἐπίσπηι (hint: εφεπω), γέρας, ὀϊζυροῖσι.
I don’t think you can expect to pick up Homer and read with comprehension without doing some heavy lifting at first to solidify your command of the grammatical forms and especially the vocabulary (and in my case, after about 58 years of reading Homer, I still need to go the dictionary from time to time). Otherwise, you will miss half or more. It’s a slow slog in the initial stage, but it doesn’t take long before it gets much easier.
ἠριγένεια is a standard epithet of ἠώς and doesn’t mean “spring-born.” ὀϊζυροῖσι is formulaic with βροτοῖσιν. πότμον ἐπίσπηι is a common formula.
γὰρ does not automatically correspond exactly and in all circumstances to “for” and γε doesn’t correspond to “at least”, though sometimes they can be translated that way.
I think that it’s fair to say that I’m missing a great deal. We could even quantify that exactly with reading comprehension tests if anybody cared.
But the second read-through would give me a higher score on such a hypothetical test. And for the third read-through, I’ll only look up the very few words that I still don’t understand. Even now, I am re-reading sections and lines far less than I did in book a.
The reason why I’m willing to suffer through not knowing a word – and it really is a very hard sort of suffering when I know that the LSJ is digitally on my phone in my pocket and in print on my mapstand across the room – is that there are some learning advantages. First, I am sensitized to words whenever I almost understand them, and to their contexts, and to their roots. Continuing, I run across something similar and get the “aha!” moment, which fixes the meaning better than a lexicon can (see the “fixed” and “broken” discussion from earlier for the peril of memorizing lexicon meanings). Stopping and looking up the (Victorian) English equivalents for everything has its advantages, but it does take away a lot of this useful mental priming for recognition and memorization. Even now, I could probably write out good chunks of the passage that I asked about from memory, and I could never have done that if I had stopped to look up every word that I half-understood in a lexicon.
And as for the specific comments, the formulas are certainly the hardest part to learn this way because the context never really changes. I know that ἠώς is ἠριγένεια always, but as for what that means, I won’t be able to tell until I see the roots used elsewhere and it clicks.
δ was fun, and I’ve come to terms with the gods fixing everything for the good guys. But if Athena is a god, why is she so bad at disguises? Mentor isn’t fooling anybody, apparently.
the formulas are certainly the hardest part to learn this way
Hey Joel. Are you familiar with The Chicago Homer? I totally get the way you’re currently trying to read the Odyssey, and probably the app doesn’t fit that approach. Anyway, though, I find it a tremendously useful app. You can turn the English on and off, and I especially like being able to effortlessly find and link to all occurrences of formulae in Homer (and Hesiod).
I read the last 300 lines of ε too quickly (and in too much of a sleep deficit) and they made little sense, beyond the gross elements that there was a storm, Ino said something nice, Poseidon blustered, Odysseus’ raft foundered, and he got to shore.
I read through the lines again this morning, and was able to follow everything in detail, easily even, and had a great deal of fun with the passage.
I was surprised by ὃ δ᾽ αὐτίκα παῦσεν ἑὸν ῥόον after Odysseus prayed to to the river. Despite the gods and talking seagulls (or whatever an αἰθίη is), I thought that the situation felt physically realistic and vivid up until the river stopped flowing. But maybe I took it too literally.
Earlier in ε, yesterday, I thought that Hermes came across as city-dwelling jerk to Kalypso, who was sympathetic, but not as sympathetic as Odysseus. I really appreciated the sentiment of 214 - 224.
I remember the first time I read ε. I had little very little Greek then, and my progress was very slow. Odysseus was drowning and I was swamped; finally, after a long and mighty struggle, we both got there, to Phaeacia. But difficult as it was, it was also very powerful, and I still have the taste of salt water in my mouth.
I got dumped into lakes twice this summer; a canoe last weekend, and capsizing my sailboat earlier in the summer when the boom caught my hat. Reading ε was terrifying. It’s far more realistic action than anything the Telemachus chapters prepared me for, and I’ve been trying to think of what action scenes in the Iliad compare exactly.
And perhaps on a different level, I liked the short, again realistic, description of the wilderness before Odysseus goes to sleep.
EDIT:
And here is something topical for the hurricane out east right now, that can’t seem to make up its mind on direction.
In θ, 182-184 made me think of Paul’s psychology theory, and here whether Odysseus was really talking about being sore and out of training, instead of depressed. And really, whether any of his constantly referred to sorrows are meant to be understood physically throughout? The ἀνδρῶν τε πτολέμους don’t seem like a good explanation for his current physical condition though. And it’s certainly mental anguish on the isle of Ogygie (what a wonderful fairy-tale sounding name when you say it out loud).
Hey, it could be Odysseus playing the hustler (would you put it past him?):
“I’m in pretty rough shape right now, both physically and mentally, I’ve been wounded in war, I’ve been beaten up by the sea, but hey, all the same (even though I’ve suffered many bad things), I’ll take a shot at the prize.”
I’m not sure I really have a theory, it was more like random observations on how the focus in interactions between characters is on the external and not the internal…
The Cyclops was a jerk, but Odysseus seemed to be breaking in to steal. I was surprised at his threat of the mantis at the end, despite the earlier claim to have no use for gods. Maybe that’s a character arc.
Book ι has been the only episode where I remembered the overall plot before going in (which helped me; the vocabulary got harder in ι, before getting easier again in κ). I think that my teenage “read” of the Odyssey a quarter century ago might have been more of a skim. Other than the iconic episodes (the chat with the dead, Scylla and Charybdis, Circe and the pigs, the mass slaughter at the end), I’m unsure what the next half of the Odyssey contains. In the first half, I had no memory at all of the details of the Telemachus journey, or all the time spent with the Phaiekes. A skim read during my teenage years makes sense, as I would have just been finishing the Iliad, which I enjoyed immensely, and been put off by the Odyssey’s start and lack of gore-filled action.
Its charm has grown on me during this read, I admit.
Rest assured that some of the best parts are still to come - like the swineherd Eumaios, and others, which I’m not going to spoil for you! There’s also the horrible hanging of the slave girls. The very end might be something of a deception, but other than that, the second half is just as good as the first one.
Paul making a mistake in English!..Even Homer nods.
The crew opening the forbidden bladder(?) of winds, and the voyage back to Aiolos and the abrupt “enemy of the gods” change of heart was wonderful. The realistic story-telling style seems to have gone by the wayside though, and we’re firmly in “fairy”.
For the past book, I’ve been confused about what αὐτοκασιγνήτη could possibly mean, having seen it several times. Hunter? But it finally came clear in κ.135-139
It must mean something like “sibling” (or twin?). The γν would be a 0-grade of γιγνομαι, I guess. I have no idea about the -κασι-, though I’ll keep my eye out.
I took a break at Circe’s island, and read Eurpides’ Cyclops this morning, before the kids woke up. I thought it was a wonderful amplification of the Odyssey story. Everything was a little more fleshed out and sharper. The atheism of the Cyclops was a wonderful passage. The death of the companions was more horrific. (The Chorus’ song! χναύειν, βρύκειν, κρεοκοπεῖν μέλη ξένων). I enjoyed the Cyclops’ drunkenness (and conversion to awe of the Gods?). The replacement of the sheep escape with the Οὖτις wordplay was fun, although I missed the sheep (or was the episode there and I didn’t see it? I don’t pretend to have read with 100% or even 90% understanding). The Satyrs joining Odysseus’ crew at the end seemed to promise more to come? I would have liked to have read more like this.