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- [00:16]
A
Tell me about a complicated man, Muse. Tell me how he wandered and was lost when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy and where he went and who he met, the pain he suffered on the sea and how he worked to save his life and bring his men back home.
- [00:35]
B
Oh, I love it so much. That is the opening lines. Thank you for reading it, Mary. The opening lines of Homer's epic poem the Odyssey in translation by Emily Wilson there. And I'm so excited about this. The poem is one of the oldest surviving works of literature and thousands of years on, it's still one of the most exciting and generative and rewarding and extraordinary works of literature to read and reread. And it is so many things. It's so many things in one poem. It's a Rhodes movie, it's a family drama, it's a western, it's a fantasy, it's a moral tale, it's a kind of homecoming, it's a discovery of who you are. It would probably be the book I would want to be washed up with on a desert island if I had to have just one book. And as part of this extraordinary world that Homer builds, it's got amazing characters. So it's got the extraordinary one eyed cyclopses, the cannibalistic giants, it's got beautiful alluring sirens who lure men to their death with their beautiful songs. It's got witches, it's got nymphs, it's got goddesses and gods and magical animals. And all of this is woven into a great tapestry which is about the hero Odysseus trying to get home. A journey that takes him 10 years after he's been part of the winning forces in the Trojan War. And kind of excitingly, I mean, I'm super excited. Christopher Nolan, the great British film director, is directing an adaptation of the Odyssey, which is coming up in 2026. And so that's another reason to be rereading the Odyssey.
- [02:23]
A
And Charlotte's already trying to book her ticket for the opening of Christopher Nolan's new movie. You can tell that she's possibly even more enthusiastic about the Odyssey than I am. But partly for that reason, our guess, we thought that there could be no better book to kick off our instant classics book club than this classic to end all classics, the Odyssey. So what we're going to be doing is over the next several months and we don't know quite how long it's going to take. It's a bit open ended. We're going to be talking about the Odyssey and reading it together. So you can pick up any, any copy you can find anywhere and you can join us and read along with us.
- [03:12]
B
As you can tell, I'm kind of excited about reading this book again for the. I can't tell you how many times I've read it, but I really want to read it with Mary and I really want to read it with you. But I guess now why do we love this poem so much? Well, I have a super long relationship with this poem because I'm a nerdy classicist. But actually for me it was, it was reading the sort of children's stories extracted from the Odyssey before I read the Odyssey. So my brother, my elder brother had this beautiful book of stories from the Iliad and the Odyssey with amazing illustrations. So that was my first plunging into the stories. But then of course I had to read it when I was a student. When I was an undergraduate, I, you know, had to read most of Homer in Greek. And actually, I'm afraid to say, even though I was taught by one of the foremost Homerists of my day, I didn't really love Homer when I was a student. I think it was to do with that classic thing of reading a poem for its sort of weird academic questions rather than I was sort of unable to read it as a kind of person just coming to it for the joy of the world that Homer builds. I've reread it a lot but I was well into my 20s before I really started to have a relationship with it. And it's post studenthood, you see.
- [04:37]
A
Part of my story matches yours because I can't remember a particular book but I remember either being, I think being read stories from the Odyssey, I think by my mum. She must have had some selection like what you saw. And I remember also being captivated by, by the Cyclops with their cannibalistic one eyed giants and you know, the travails. What I got into was the idea of this was a poem about the journey home that Odysseus the hero tried to make to get back home from his part in the victory against Troy and all the terrible things that happened to him. I then read bits of it in Greek when I was at high school, but they tended to be those same bits. Actually I remember I still got the Cyclops bit which I read in Greek. Then I got to university and like you, I was made to read the Odyssey as a whole. It was such a surprise when I read it as a whole because I thought that it was solely about Odysseus's journey home. Now it's partly about that and all those wonderful stories are part of it, but I hadn't realised that actually it was woven into all kinds of other stories. Particularly what I'd never really been made to think about until I got to university was that there's a parallel narrative going on in the Odyssey, which is not Odysseus journey home, but it's what's happening in his home in Ithaca while he's away and what's happening with his wife and son and how there's a load of kind of euphemistically called suitors have kind of ended up in the family palace and they're trying to get Penelope, Odysseus's wife, to marry one of them. And that will mean that they kind of inherit Odysseus's kingdom and they assume that Odysseus is never going to get back. And then Odysseus does get back. And the end of the poem is all about what happens when he arrives. There's a lot of that. There's more of that really than the one eyed giants. I think what suddenly struck me, and I think this has never gone away for me, was that I kind of thought, right, this is a very, very early piece of literature. And it is. I thought that when literature kind of was just newly hatched, like the Odyssey is newly hatched literature, I assumed it would be simple, you know, it would start simple, it would tell a simple story. And what for me was mind blowing about the Odyssey was that here's the very origin, or almost the very origin of Western literature and it's already stories within stories, parallel narratives.
- [07:42]
B
This is amazingly sophisticated, 100% that sense that it kind of feels postmodern because it's not a story that's linear, it's not linear. It has flashbacks, it has stories within stories. It feels so modern. And also I think what you've just made me remember and think about is one of the reasons I've reread this poem so much is that it reads differently every time you read it. Like, this is a poem, like all great classic literature, it reacts to the moment that it's read in. And I have read this poem, I guess the first time I read it probably was more of the Odysseus adventure story, but also from the other side, you know, as you say, like it's also what's happening on his home island of Ithaca. And it's so much about Telemachus, his son as well. It's about what makes a father, what makes a son, how do you know that you are the son of your father, like, in metaphorical and in real ways? So it's got all of that. That's so beautiful. And then I've also thought of it as. In terms of, you know, the hero, the warrior returning from a war and what that means about a person reintegrating into a society, into a peacetime society, that's. That sort of feels really resonant, and also this kind of sense of an individual person in the world on their own, kind of navigating all the terrible things that the universe chucks at you. So it's got all of that, and I'm really looking forward to seeing how it's going to resonate when we read it together, because I know it's going to be different from the last time, which was actually very recently because I read a new translation.
- [09:20]
A
I feel like you. And I think you do see different things each time. And so I'm really looking forward to exploring it just anew. You don't really need to know very much before you actually just dive into this, but it's probably useful to get a few kind of vital statistics cleared up, and they're very simple. First is, the Odyssey is a very long poem. It's 12,000 lines of Greek, and it's now divided up into 24 sections, which we call books. But sections would probably be better. That's one thing we know. After that, almost everything is disputed and debated, like who wrote it, when they wrote it, where they wrote it. Now, as we've been assuming, the ancient Greeks largely thought it was written by a blind poet called Homer. Most people now assume that it wasn't composed in writing by any single person, that it is the product of a tradition of oral poetry, of bards singing versions of it and bits of it, you know, around the imaginary campfire sort of thing, over a period of maybe, maybe a couple of hundred years, maybe more. So it's essentially an oral poem that seems to have taken the form we now read it in. In, let's say, the late 8th century BCE, the 720s, perhaps BCE, but was only later actually written down. And I think it's worth saying also because we'll be coming to this in various ways, it's not actually the oldest work of Western literature. It was beaten to that claim by the Iliad, which is about the Trojan War, but also ascribed by the ancient Greeks to this blind poet, Homer. Now, the thing is, we're going to be coming back to all that because as you can tell from the sort of hesitancy in my voice. These are very, very contested claims, but we're going to be looking at them from time to time in more detail.
- [11:51]
B
I think the crucial thing to say, Mary, isn't it? Is that the time that it's set to paper, the time that it took shape, is several hundred years before what we think of as the high point of the classical ancient world of Athens. So it's. It's several hundred years kind of before the Parthenon and before Plato and before that Greek tragedy. But the poem itself is also looking back. It's not. It's a poem that's about some misty past. So it sort of sits between these two sort of time frames, one of them concrete and one of them a little bit hazy. But, you know, that's all we need to know. It's looking back at this world of the Trojan War, and basically it was probably written down more or less as soon as the Greeks acquired the technology to do the writing down. So that's.
- [12:42]
A
It sort of comes more of all that later.
- [12:45]
B
Of all that later. Exactly. But, so what translation are we going to be using? That's a really big question. I think. Grab any translation that you have or off the Internet or whatever, and I don't think it super matters. I mean, we will definitely talk about translation as an art and what it means to have a different translation. You know, we will talk about that, but I kind of feel like we'll be using Emily Wilson. Right. I mean, I really like the Emily Wilson translation. It's very fast. It's very exciting. She was my tutorial partner when we were students together, so that's also a plus. And it's. Yeah. I think what it's really got going for it is that you won't be bored. It's really Pacey. It's really fresh. And she foregrounds comprehensibility, I suppose you'd say. Like, it's really clear and it's really exciting.
- [13:38]
A
Yeah. And I think that's the one that we're mostly going to be actually quoting out of. But it really doesn't matter if that's not the translation that people are using. I mean, Homer. Homer's Odyssey has been Translated since the 17th century into English. And, you know, this famous Keats poem, you know, talking about first looking into Chapman's Homer, which was the first English translation of the Odyssey. And, you know, I. People always ask, well, which translation should I use? And I think, you know, my answer is usually, well, anyone that you've got and anyone that you can get along with. I mean, there's translations in prose, there are translations into verse, there are translations done by all kinds of, I think, quite unexpected people, you know. Yeah.
- [14:28]
B
Like T.E.
- [14:29]
A
lawrence, you know, Lawrence of Arabia translated the Odyssey.
- [14:34]
B
And there's another really nice new one by Daniel Mendelssohn, which is the Penguin. New Penguin Classics one, which is definitely. It's a lovely translation, but, you know, there are tons.
- [14:42]
A
There's tons. I mean, the post war Penguin classic was by Evie Ruhr, however you say it, and it was a. It was the first book in the Penguin classic series, that famous black covered series.
- [14:53]
B
Yeah. And it was amazing.
- [14:55]
A
It was in prose, bestseller. It was an absolute bestseller. And in some ways that was partly because of what you were saying. This was just post Second World War and it was about homecoming and about
- [15:07]
B
what happens when you come home from
- [15:09]
A
the war, you know, so really, don't worry too much. And you'll find plenty of versions online, too, so you don't even have to shell out. Now, what we're saying here basically is, look, you don't need to know any Greek for sure, not to have immense fun here. And what we'll be doing as we go along is sometimes we'll be taking a whole section, a whole book to look at and think what's going on there. Sometimes we'll be taking just a few lines, sometimes we'll be diverting to talk about some of these as still not wholly solved mysteries about when it was actually first written down. But next time, what we're going to do is we're going to take a really deep dive into the first ten lines or so of the Odyssey. And we're going to be concentrating actually not wholly, but mainly on just one word in Greek. And it's a word that opens up the whole poem. So buckle up, guys, because we are very, very, very, very much hope that after our next episode, the word polutropos will be on your lips, on everyone's lips. And it will be, I think, fun to actually talk about translating and what difference translations can make by looking at just this single word. Polytropos can't wait. You'll find out what it means or might mean, or the many things it might mean next time. So keep reading with us. Let us know your thoughts on email instantclassicspodmail.com or on our socials. Instant Classics Book Club will be back soon, and in the meantime, head to the main feed for more from Instant Classics.