Translations

Odysseys

Alexander Pope began his 1725 translation of The Odyssey thus:

The man for wisdom's various arts renown'd,

Long exercised in woes, O Muse! resound;

Who, when his arms had wrought the destined fall

Of sacred Troy, and razed her heaven-built wall,

Wandering from clime to clime, observant stray'd,

Their manners noted, and their states survey'd,

On stormy seas unnumber'd toils he bore,

Safe with his friends to gain his natal shore:

Vain toils! their impious folly dared to prey

On herds devoted to the god of day;

The god vindictive doom'd them never more

(Ah, men unbless'd!) to touch that natal shore.

Oh, snatch some portion of these acts from fate,

Celestial Muse! and to our world relate.

Doesn’t get more early eighteenth-century English Georgian Augustan than that.

The Italians have a compact aphorism for the problem of translation: traduttore, traditore. Translator, Traitor in English. To translate is to betray. This gets at the fundamental problem of accessing texts in other languages (although T. S. Eliot supposedly said he could tell Dante was a great poet reading him in Italian, before Eliot could speak Italian himself). But translations can take other forms, like texts into the visual arts. Or into films.

"The Siren Painter," Odysseus tied to the mast, wikimedia, original in the British Museum

The earliest illustrations of the Odyssey we have date from centuries after Homer supposedly wrote it, so close to a millennium after the events of the story itself. To transcribe a story into imagery is to make some choices, about narrative moment, about recognizability of the characters, about implications of later or earlier events in the narrative. When Greek vase painters showed Odysseus, they weren’t being archival or archeological, much less philological. They showed their hero in their own time, or as they showed any other figure from mythology or history (those two disciplines were not clearly distinguished). Heaven knows where 19^th century German scholars got the idea that Greeks were blonde (heaven knows, indeed), but in Red-figure pottery they always have dark hair (and dark beards). And, tied to the mast and elsewhere, Odysseus was nude.

Zesu-Ammon, Museo Baracco, Rome

Then, there is the complex situation of the Mediterranean, and all the lands that border it. If anyone has ever, like me, been confused about Thebes, the answer is simple: There are two. The older one is in Egypt, the “newer” one (today one of the oldest continually inhabited places on Earth) in Greece (Boetia, so north-central Greece). In the Iliad, Greek Thebes was distinguished as Seven-Gated Thebes from the Egyptian Hundred-Gated city. More is more. Greek Thebes sided with the Persians against the Athenians in their early fifth-century invasion. Yet Homer lists Boeotian ships first and foremost among those sailing for Troy with the Achaeans. One of the primary deities they worshipped in Greek Thebes was Zeus-Ammon (Amun), a borrowing from Egyptian religion of the sun-god Amun, or Amun-Ra.

When, within a couple of decades of Pope, Giambattista Tiepolo painted his magnificent illusionistic fresco of The Sacrifice of Iphigenia on a wall in the entry hall of the Villa Valmarana outside Vicenza, the priest is one of the painter’s stock “exotic Orientals,” and Iphigenia a figure straight out of contemporary opera (apart from her décolletage).

Tiepolo, Sacrifice of Iphignia, Villa Valmarana, Vicenza

A pedantic neoclassicist like Anton Raphael Mengs criticized artists like Tiepolo precisely for these anachronisms, but the reality is that archeological fidelity in Old Master paintings was the exception, not the rule. Artists from Raphael to Rubens to Poussin, who loved antiquity and studied it passionately, did not have an historical sense of the difference between Roman and Greek military costume, for example. All’antica was a catch-all, meaning evocative of antiquity without being archeologically-correct. And no one really expected them to be.

Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, called Il Grechetto: (La Maga) Circe

The situation was more extreme in Baroque opera, where costume was meant to dazzle, and even the things that painters could do—like nudity or antique garb—were either not possible or not desirable on stage. It was enough to distinguish a Cleopatra from a Roman matron with some fanciful exotic accessories. No one expected, nor probably wanted, an archeological staging of an ancient story like Handel’s Giulio Cesare in Egitto. (in Handel’s original staging, by the way, a castrato sang the role of Julius Caesar).

So, should someone want to create an “accurate” film of the Odyssey, assuming it’s sung in ancient Ionian Greek (I mean, if you’re going to do The Passion of the Christ in Aramaic—which is not a typo for American), be ready for the nude hero (like his crew) tied to the ship’s mast, Italic (Sorrento) siren bird-women, North African Lotus-Eaters. Eating the cattle of Helios (on Sicily) incurs the wrath of the sun god, who implores Zeus for revenge. And, of course, Helen being the daughter of Zeus (-Ammon, the Egyptian sun god?), she may have Egyptian roots. Her mother may have been Leda (with Zeus as a swan, even a black one), or else Nemesis (the daughter of Nyx, Night; Nut was the Egyptian goddess of the nighttime sky).

So, it’s complicated. Any translation is a betrayal. Make it a good one. Christopher Nolan did not. But’s that’s another story, so to speak…

Roughly contemporary Greek Kouros figure and 25th Dynasty Egyptian "Black Pharaoh", both about a century after Homer