Does reading the text of Homer’s epic really help us Ody-See more clearly?
Sing to me muse, of a buy-one-get-one-free hardcover book deal.
Bookstore sales of The Odyssey have skyrocketed recently; overall annual print sales of Homer’s epic have increased by 76% in the United States. Sales for copies of The Odyssey, along with its brutality-laden brother, The Iliad, have contributed ￡980 000 (over $1.8 million CAD) in poetry sales so far this year in the United Kingdom. Now, this spike in popularity for a book that is the basis of what is, undoubtedly, summer’s biggest blockbuster, might not seem notable. But for a nearly three thousand-year-old epic that’s just over 1200 lines long to sell that many copies at a time when fewer adults are reading any book recreationally? Those are some pretty impressive statistics. With so many new readers welcoming copies of The Odyssey to their shelves, it begs the question: Is the original story really any good, especially when compared to Chistopher Nolan’s behemoth of a movie? If Nolan’s film is the island from which readers are sailing into the waters of The Odyssey, just how smooth will their literary trip home be?
While many of the challenges Odysseus and his men face are depicted in Nolan’s movie, any literary translation of The Odyssey features even more elements of the story. These elements are so prime for the imagination and fantastical that they can’t necessarily translate directly to the silver screen. This gives the reader the ability to conceptualize aspects of the story in their own way, without external obligations to actualize them. This is also true for the more reflective and emotional moments of the poem, of which there are many. Processing and reflecting through the act of reading enables agency and time to exercise the imagination and critical engagement muscles, and with all the tale’s complexities, it’s a pretty good literary workout.
Firstly, just because you’re not experiencing The Odyssey right next to a whole audience of popcorn eating, IMAX enthusiasts when you read it, does not mean you are reading it alone. The Odyssey has been entertaining audiences for millennia because humans across the history of literature have taken the time and the care to preserve it and care about both its form and its content. Each reader of The Odyssey travels back across the waves of time and connects to the people of antiquity and every reader that has come after, who, despite being temporally removed, are not that dissimilar to us at all. In fact, it is that notion of connection across supposed divides that makes reading The Odyssey beyond the trend of the day, but as a start to reading other great epics of the world, that can be the most rewarding. By expanding the scope of study and reading ancient epics of the eastern world, like ancient Mesopotamia’s The Epic of Gilgamesh (which predates The Odyssey by approximately 1000-1500 years) for example, we come to understand how the structures of and innate approaches to stories and poems differ around the world. In doing so, we all become increasingly able to contextualize literature on its own and within greater global and cultural contexts, which are essential skills to understanding our increasingly global world.
There are so many stories that we will never hear. But, seemingly against all practical odds, The Odyssey not only lives, but thrives. Across mediums and eras it continues to excite, to move, and to provoke. By not letting The Odyssey be the end of our exploration of ancient epics, we keep finding reminders of our shared humanity by returning to a return and by caring for words, stories, and the gaps between them.