On the second Saturday of August each summer I can’t help but feel a real sense of emptiness as the Greek withdrawal symptoms kick in.
Each year I have the enormous pleasure to teach and learn at the JACT Greek Summer School, a fortnight’s full immersion in all things Greek. The course is pretty much non-stop: 32 hours of teaching to prep and deliver, written work to mark, seminars and lectures to attend (or give), grammar clinics to run, plays to enjoy, quirks of irregular verbs to check with eminent colleagues… you get the picture. So when it does in fact stop, there’s quite the vacuum.
In 2018 I hatched a plan to plug this void and bide the 50 weeks between summer schools by reading the whole Odyssey bit-by-bit in the original Greek. I then (rashly?) had the further idea to tweet a synopsis of each day’s lines on a new Twitter handle, @50weekOdyssey.
In truth, a major motivation for this was to hold myself up to the mark and ensure I actually did the thing – so much the better if it also, along the way, produced a helpful resource or source of enjoyment for those who chose to follow – i.e. a potted Odyssey via the medium of Twitter.
Quick calculations established that to cover the 12,110 lines of the whole poem on time I’d have to read between 30-35 lines a day, which didn’t sound absurd as I set out.
Here’s a taste of the first two tweets, to give you a flavour:
1.1-43
Sing, Muse… Od = πολυτροπος (@EmilyRCWilson chose ‘complicated’). Comrades lost. Od stuck. Other leaders home; Od alone without νοστος (homecoming). Poseidon raging, but has gone away: a chance! Memory of Aegisthus’ crime alarms: similar danger awaits Od in Ithaca?
1.44-79
Athena to Zeus: “Daddy dearest… Aeg. deserved to suffer; not so Od. He is Calypso’s captive; yearns to see smoke of home fires; now wants to die. Didn’t he sacrifice to you? Why are you at odds (ωδυσαο) with Od?” (pun!) Z: “Pos angry b/c Od blinded Cyclops, but… OK…”
So, how did I get on, and what were my reflections along the way?
Well, the first admission is that I didn’t get anywhere near my aim.
August and September saw me speeding through Books 1-3, but soon life, and the realities of a typically busy Autumn Term, began to bite and I started to come adrift (no allusion intended) from my schedule. I soldiered on in the self-delusion that a slow start could be atoned for if I came back strong in the spring and summer. 1st January saw me starting Book 8. By Easter I was into Book 12, about 6,000 lines in – not bad, but by then I had conceded that getting Odysseus home, triumphant and fully recognised in time for late July would be unrealistic.
So I left him parked on Ithaca over the summer (Book 13), resolving to finish the job by the 2021 Summer School. This academic year I’ve picked it up fitfully, but I’m now steeling myself to revive the project properly and finish the nostos by late July.
It will be a year late, but, making a virtue of necessity, I console myself with these lines of Cavafy’s Ithaca:
As you set out bound for Ithaca,
hope that the journey is a long one…
…
To arrive there is your destination.
But in no way rush the voyage.
Better for it to last many years;
and for you to berth on the isle an old man,
rich with all you gained on the journey. (tr. David Connolly)
A few thoughts on what I have gained / am gaining on the journey:
1. Habit-forming is incredibly hard…
…even for something as enjoyable as reading 30 lines of Homer’s Greek! At this stage of the year I often hear myself telling pupils (especially in exam classes) to make time for 10 minutes’ worth of vocab revision every few days – but I know that good intentions and end results are two different things (and that every subject teacher is suggesting similar things…). If pupils aim high and get even half way there, they’re doing a good job.
2. Synopses are impossible to get quite right, but a great skill to work on.
Trying to condense 30 lines of Homer into 250-odd characters is tricky, to say the least (I’ll admit I’ve regularly cheated and turned a section into two or even three tweets). Can you really bring yourself to paraphrase or even omit that famous line, rather than quoting it in full? What points in this section are absolutely key? What can we ruthlessly excise? How much detail is too much detail?
Answers to all these questions aren’t fixed, nor should be; I’ve often adopted different approaches depending on the content of a day’s section, and indeed my desperation to produce a pithy tweet and get it out into the ether before doing the washing up. The whole process, though, of encapsulating the content and indeed the feel of a passage in just a sentence or two is great for focusing the mind. I encourage my Year 11-13 students to make their own synopses of the set texts we read, and I’m convinced it makes them more alert (not more simplistic) as literary critics.
The end product of a synopsis may look like a blunt instrument, but the journey getting there is great practice in making choices and reading a text sensitively.
3. The Odyssey has lots of neglected episodes.
How often do we really give due attention to some of the less famous bits? Like the grim section in Book 4 (lines 431ff.) when Menelaus and co are waiting inside stinking seal skins for the Old Man of the Sea to appear… Or the lines in Book 14 (275ff.) when Odysseus is fabricating his tale to Eumaeus and describes how he chose to surrender and grovel in tears to the Egyptian king after all his men had been routed?
I’ve always wondered about those invocations to the Muse in the proems of both the Iliad and the Odyssey which essentially say, ‘tell us about the bit when…’; the fact that there are so many good episodes in the Odyssey (many which have little to do with the main narrative highway) conjures up, for me, images of Greek aristocrats shouting to their bards over supper and calling for a personal favourite section, like some ancient radio request show.
4. Slow is good.
The Odyssey’s hit-parade of all the old highlights (Cyclops, Sirens, Underworld) only, of course, occupies a very small section of the whole; most of the poem is concerned with a tantalisingly-structured description of just a few days at the end of the affair (and I’m aware that, as I’m in Book 14, I’m only just getting into that section). It’s not just that Homer is focussing the most supernatural stuff into the tale of his fallible narrator-hero in Books 9-12; it’s that his audience loves the slow burn and almost unbearable tension of the whole second half. As Cavafy says: in no way rush the voyage.
5. Thank heavens for the formulae.
Just as the bards could flick the auto-pilot switch for anywhere between a half-line and a stock section of several lines (e.g. sacrifice and feast), so these familiar phrases come as blessed relief for the synopsis-maker, who can focus on the rest, guilt-free!
6. If only we had more of the Cretan epic cycle!
So many of Odysseus’ embedded tales involve Cretan escapades and characters that it seems likely there must have been an extensive independent Cretan epic tradition; my hunch is that the Cretan element in the Odyssey wasn’t just a convenient vehicle for Odysseus’ own self-definition through fabricated ‘autobiography’, but a nod to an older narrative thread. If only we had an Odysseus-free tale centring on (say) Idomeneus!
As I say, I hope to get through the rest of the epic by the time that JACT Greek cycles round again (late July). Do follow @50weekOdyssey to see if I can get there; and if you’re keen to continue your own Greek odyssey, do join us at the JACT Greek Summer School itself: we now have courses for schoolteachers as well as students!
