The Cyclops, by Homer

Emily Wilson about Odyssey's translation by a woman

Film (1954. Starring Kirk Douglas. Minute 34 on)

Homer (according to the tradition, a bind man from the 8th century BC) is considered to be the author of The Iliad, The Odyssey, and some other works as the comic epic, The Frogs-Mice War.
But scholars think that the poems follow different oral traditions and that only in the 8^th century they were written down; before that, they were transmitted by generation to generation orally; this is why these narratives are in verse, so this way they were easier to remember. Another curious thing about these epics it that they were composed in an artificial language, a kind of mixture of different Greek dialects belonging to different periods.
 
The Odyssey tells us the adventures of Odysseus (Ulysses in Latin), after defeating the city of Troy, in his travels through the Mediterranean Sea to reach his home on the island of Ithaca, where his son Telemachus and his wife Penelope had been waiting for him while rejecting a crowd of suitors.
In his adventures he meets beautiful women who are almost witches, as Circe and Calypso, cannibals, lotus-eaters, giants, mermaids, dangerous straits, different gods, etc. Finally, he arrives alone home, only to have to deal with his wife's suitors.
Our episode is well-known to everybody. Ulysses arrives in Thrinnacia (Greek name for Sicily) and wants to know about the cyclopes, the singular people that live there: what kind of life they lead and how they organize their society; and he discovers that they are brutal giants without law or civilization. He and his men get trapped in Polyphemus’s cave (whose gate is closed with a huge rock) where the one-eye monster makes a feast of them. However, the cunning Ulysses (who introduces himself to the cyclops as "Noman") devises a scheme to save the rest of his men and escape. They blind the giant and tied themselves under the bellies of the cyclops's lambs when he sends them out to graze. Safe and sound, and from a certain distance of the shore, Ulysses mocks the monster and tells him his real name. Polyphemus throws them a big rock that almost sinks their ship, and he curses him telling him he is going to lose all his men and that he will get home only after a lot of suffering, for he’s the Poseidon’s son and this god is going to make him have a rough time.

QUESTIONS

-Ulysses tells Polyphemus his name is "No man", or "Noman", as a way to deceive him. Some writers decide to write under a pseudonym, and, in spy novels and films, any agent has to have an alias. What is your favourite alias? What alias/pseudonym/nickname would you choose for you?

-Hospitality is generosity to strangers who come to one's home. It was something sacred for ancient cultures. Why do you think it was so important then, and now it isn't so?

-Polyphemus is a one-eyed monster. According to you, what can symbolize this singularity?

-Cyclopes lived without laws or government, and each one was independent or free, so they live in a kind of anarchy. For a lot of people, anarchy is a kind of utopian society, a paradise. We can see that, for Ulysses, it was a badly organized society. What is your opinion about the opposition "anarchy-civilization", as it appears in the story?

VOCABULARY

tillage, over-run, sportsmen, poplars, breakers, run out, stubble, hawsers, outlaw, crag, took stock, pens, whey, strainers, rovers, vouchsafed, vitals, quiver, club, dung, cast lots, ramping, raving, auger, fleece, withies, wont, jeer, rudder, weakling, plight

Philomela, by Emma Tennant

Literary biography

BIOGRAPHY

Emma Tennant was born in London in 1937, from an aristocratic family. She spent the Blitz in a fake gothic house in a Scottish glen. Then she came back to London; after her school time in London, she went to study in Oxford for some years. When she was older, he lived for some years in Corfu, where her parents had built a house, and she wrote a book about it.

She got married four times, the last one when she was 71 to a man of 33. She also had an affair with Ted Hughes.

Although she descended from the nobility, she was a staunch supporter of the Labour Party.

She died at 80 from a form of Alzheimer.

She worked as a travel writer for a magazine and was the editor of Vogue.

She wrote her first novel when she was 26, The Colour of Rain, and submitted it to the Formentor Prix. The chairman of the jury, Alberto Moravia, said it was a horrible novel, and Emma Tennant suffered a writer’s block for ten years. A curious detail is that she wrote it under a pseudonym, composed with the Ouija. Later, she used again this device as a help to write her novels.

After these ten years, she started writing again and she published a lot. Her books are usually versions of classical stories or prequels and sequels of famous books. For example The French Daughter’s Bastard, about the daughter of Mr Rochester (the protagonist of Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë), Pemberley, a version of Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen, or Two Women of London: The Strange Case of Ms Jekyll and Mrs Hyde. Sometimes, in her versions, she changes the masculine characters for feminine ones and vice versa, and she adds magic and feminism to the original narratives.

 

SUMMARY

Philomela was originally published in 1975 in the literary magazine Bananas, whose editor she was.

It tells the classical myth of Philomel, or Philomela, that appears in The Metamorphoses, by Ovid. The narrator is Procne, Philomela’s sister. She tells how she married Tereus, from Thrace, and thus had to move out of Athens leaving her loving sister there. Procne wasn’t very happy in her marriage; after a while she had a son called Itylus, but she continued feeling sad. So her sister offered to go and live with her in Thrace, but, in the end, she didn’t go. Tereus, a man who only liked war, decided to go to Athens to fetch her sister’s wife. But he came back with the bad news that Philomela was dead. Procne was sadder and sadder; she had another child, but the children weren’t a comfort to her. Her only entertainment was to take care of her garden: she would have liked to show it to her sister…

After a time, a foreign slave went to see her and gave her a cloth. The cloth was a kind of tapestry which depicted how Tereus raped her sister, cut her tongue and locked her up in a castle.

But Procne didn’t tell anything about it to her husband and sent two loyal slaves of hers to rescue Philomela. They got her and came back to Thrace secretly.

When Tereus saw Philomela he was astonished, but he plucked up courage and said that he had committed a mistake and that he was very sorry for it, that he really believed Philomela was dead. Philomela didn’t reproach him anything.

In Tereus palace, everyone respected and feared Philomela because she was dumb, because in that time, someone who had a peculiarity was revered by the rest.

Although Procne and Philomela behave as if nothing had happened to the latter, they were planning their revenge. Itylus was an exact replica of his father, and thus he was to be the object of their retaliation.

When Tereus came from the war, and while he was celebrating his victories, the sisters killed Itylus, boiled him, made a pie with his body and gave it to Tereus in a banquet. The sisters were satisfied, but we don’t know what happened to them once Tereus knew about his heir.

 

 

QUESTIONS

-Choose a Greek myth and tell us the story. (A list)

-Do you know any other story or tale where somebody eats human flesh?

-Imagine you are in a dire strait and the only way to survive is eating human flesh; would you do it?

-Sometimes the psychoanalysis recurs to the myths and legends to explain the human behaviour. Remember the Oedipus complex. What kind of complex could be Philomela complex? I mean: if the Oedipus complex tries to explain the child’s jealousy towards his dad, what kind of problem could Philomela’s story reflect?

-In the cave, the sisters said there was a dead monster. How do you imagine this monster?

-Sometimes, when somebody has a flaw (dumbness, blindness…), people think they have magic powers. What can be the origin of this belief?

-Do you know more examples of love / loyalty between sisters, or brothers?

-What are the differences between the original myth and the story by Tennant?

Myth audiobook

VOCABULARY

bearable, moped, palling, lurked, hangings, listlessly, advanced on, groves, importantly, drifwood, boulder, shift, seeped, limpets, wince