There are a good few millennia of people beating me to the punch w/r/t novel commentary on Homer, but too much solid gold not to say a little something. Hard to pick an absolute favourite moment (my heartstrings always twinge at Odysseus being unable to embrace his mother's ghost), but this scene, circa Book 13, stood out to me the most this time around:

The majestic king
slaughtered an ox for them to Cronus' mighty son,
Zeus of the thundercloud, whose power rules the world.
They burned the thighs and fell to the lordly banquet,
reveling there, while in their midst the inspired bard
struck up a song, Demodocus, prized by all the people.
True, but time and again Odysseus turned his face
toward the radiant sun, anxious for it to set,
yearning now to be gone and home once more...

The Odyssey is always talking to The Illiad; the authorial voice is nearly uniform, and reflections abound between them. This manifests most spectacularly in the massacre of the suitors, staged for all the world like an episode of the Trojan War. Bronze-tipped spears bursting through chests and the like. But this here goes a step further. There is perhaps nothing more central to both texts than the decadent procedural of dining, libation, sacrifice and celebration. To see it yada yada'd like this is genuinely shocking. Odysseus' longing is so intense that it breaks through even the carefully sculpted illusory wall of custom and culture, the rhythm and poise of the epics themselves. Beautiful!

I read the Fagles, which I adore, though I have occasionally seen charged as a little too academic and pompous. I believe this might be true for those privy to the original Greek, but the last guy I read saying that recommended the Rieu, and that shit is a dry-as-a-bone prose translation. It (though not nearly to the same intensity) reminds me of deciphering the word-for-word literalised slog of Tolkien's Beowulf. Besides, I think a little bit of faux grandiosity is earned. They're epics! Why not have some fun?

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