When you study and teach Classics — the literature, history and culture of Ancient Greece and Rome — you really need to have two heads. One head is aware that you’re dealing with the deepest roots of European civilization, and appreciates the way that much of how we think about everything from architecture to athletics, politics to poetry, ethics to Eros, derives from those two ancient civilizations. The other head recognizes that some of the foundations upon which those foundational cultures were built represent ideas and institutions that are profoundly alien, not to say repellent, to modern sensibilities. (Slavery and patriarchy, for starters.) Sometimes the two heads engage in fruitful dialogue; sometimes they argue bitterly about the value and relevance of their subject. In my writing over the past three decades, I’ve tried to harness those two unruly heads, illuminating the beauties and enduring relevance of Greek and Latin literature and culture while reminding readers that even some of the most familiar-seeming elements of the ancient civilizations were stranger than we might think. But nowhere was that challenge greater than in my new translation of the Odyssey, published last month. Some translations have dusted off the epic, slimming it down and giving it a fresh, modern feel. But I was eager to try to recreate Homer’s way of doing things, reproducing his long, sinuous line and his sometimes craggy diction, honoring his habit of repeating certain phrases and passages verbatim — a trace of the poem’s origins as an oral work. I wanted, in other words, to underscore the beautiful strangeness of the original’s textures and manner, while (with that other head) creating a rendering fluid and clear enough to bring across its timeless themes. One of those themes, as I write in a guest essay for Opinion, feels more timeless than ever: the nature of identity. More than any other work from Greek antiquity, the Odyssey wrestles continually with the question of how we know who we are. Its wandering hero, who keeps concealing and altering his identity during his 10-year journey home, changing both the way he looks and the stories he tells about himself, must nonetheless prove that he is still himself once he returns. As I argue in my essay, that paradox — one with which all of us wrestle as we age and change — is a true classic.
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