Demon Readers Cultural Literacy Book Group

Why The Odyssey? Which Odyssey?

We're starting with Homer's Odyssey for several reasons.

First, I'd like to have our group run sort of a rough cycle in the selection of titles. We'll begin with one or two oldies but goodies from the ancient Greeks and/or Romans. Then we might touch on something from the Middle Ages or a play of Shakespeare's, before going on to one or two works from the eighteenth or nineteenth century. We'll round it off with a twentieth-century classic, and then back to the antiquities. This will allow us to cover a great deal of territory, keep things lively, and still give us the chance to steep ourselves in the works of a period (without staying there so long that we get all soggy and pruny).

That explains why we're reading something by an ancient Greek. But why The Odyssey? Why, if we're going to start with Homer, not start at the very beginning and read The Iliad?

Recently, I took my son to see a child-oriented performance of The Odyssey by a terrific theatrical group, Will & Company. In order to "prep" for the performance, we had read a storybook version of the work. I was struck by how many cultural references the book contained. It's not what you'd call a heavily quoted work, but so many of the beasties and situations have made their way into our modern vocabulary. The Odyssey is where we see the original Scylla and Charybdis that we speak of being caught between, and where Odysseus hears the Siren song that we now refer to when we want to describe something irresistible but deadly. Tennyson wrote a long poem about the land of the lotus-eaters, where Odysseus' men long to stay and eat the fruit of idle forgetfulness. Jules Verne named the hero of his Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea Nemo, which is Latin for "no one;" but Odysseus, a seafarer every bit as wily and cast apart from his fellow man as Nemo, claimed "No One" as a name (at least briefly) thousands of years before Verne was born.

The Odyssey is also a wonderful work to share with our children. When I was a child, I stumbled across a beautifully illustrated storybook version of The Iliad and The Odyssey in one volume. (Much later, when I visited the Getty villa for the first time, I saw that the illustrator of that book had based his pictures on the conventions of Greek vase art.) I skimmed The Iliad, but it couldn't hold my attention. The quarrel of Achilles and Agamemnon over who by rights "owned" Briseis, the captured slave woman; Hector's insistence that the war must go on though he disagreed with its premise and longed for peace; Athena turning coldly away from the women of Troy -- these were remote and vaguely frightening to me. I was too young to understand the tragic beauty of the story. I saw only the injustice: the women all so helpless (when they appeared in the story at all), the gods as petty as humans at their worst, the Trojans paying a horrible collective price for the misbehavior of a single man. But The Odyssey -- that was an adventure I could read and enjoy again and again. Odysseus wasn't always nice, but he was clever. Sometimes he mouthed off the wrong people, and paid for it. I could relate to that. And there were female characters of great strength and beauty -- and magical powers. I wanted that.

I've had about the same reaction in teaching my own son the stories of the Iliad and Odyssey. It's Odysseus and his adventures that stick in his mind. This book group consists primarily of homeschoolers -- people who will be passing their knowledge along to their children. Not every book we read will be something we'll share directly or right away with our offspring. We're reading for our own pleasure and cultural literacy. But it does seem appropriate to celebrate home learning by starting off with a work that we can read with our children, if we choose to.

If your child isn't ready to tackle the book-length poem itself, there are some wonderful adaptations available. I was delighted to find the very book I'd loved as a child on the library shelf. It was adapted by Jane Werner Watson and illustrated by Alice and Martin Provensen. The writing is superb -- straightforward but elegant, accessible without talking down. Another excellent picture book version of The Odyssey is called The Adventures of Odysseus, by Neil Philip. I read this to my son and he was begging for more every time I had to set it down to rest my voice. Marcia Williams is a wonderful children's book writer and illustrator. Her books -- retellings of Shakespeare's plays and the story of Robin Hood, among others -- are humorously illustrated in comic-strip fashion. She keeps to the original stories pretty closely, but the cartoony visuals keep the works from getting too intense. She tackles The Iliad and The Odyssey in one volume.

As for the grownup version of the story -- there are many translations available. I highly recommend Robert Fagles' work. His translations are always brilliant (he's also done Oedipus Rex and Antigone, other works I hope we'll be reading), and he has copious explanatory footnotes in the back if you like that sort of thing (which I do). The introductory material to The Odyssey is also very good. Richmond Lattimore's translation of The Odyssey is excellent as well. These are the only two I'm familiar with. If you know others that you'd like to recommend or strenuously warn us away from, please let me know.

If you aren't yet familiar with Greek mythology, you really need to be before you tackle Homer -- or any other ancient Greek writer, for that matter. The good news is that the Greek myths are a lot of fun. Don't run out and get one of those over-serious grownup collections. Go to the children's section of the library and get some of the terrific picture books they have on the subject. (I've learned that the best way to research almost any subject is to start in the children's section. Children's books assume you know nothing about the subject at hand and try hard to keep you interested as they educate you.) Probably the best collection, and one that every library is bound to have, is D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths. The D'Aulaires were (and still are, for all I know) a husband and wife writer-artist team. They did a fantastic book about trolls, a biography of Lincoln, and a lot of other acclaimed children's books. Their Greek myth collection is superb, and you can read it to your kids and be getting some important book group reading done at the same time. I keep wishing they'd come out with an edition that would cook dinner, too, but we can only ask so much of even the greatest literature.