In 1899 Jack London, beginning his career as a writer, sold a story to Atlantic Monthly for $120. Drawing on his experiences during the Klondike gold rush and on the Yukon River, it was a tale of an Aleutian native wandering the Arctic for years on end in search of his wife, who had been stolen by a powerful Nordic sea captain. London titled his saga, “An Odyssey of the North.”
It is a fascinating venture, full of crisply realized landscapes, exotic characters, and told aslant by bystanders such as the Malemute Kid, who are bunking at a Canadian waystation for men and dogs traveling by sled over the icy trails, when Naass, the Aleutian, first shows up. London put way too much plot in this novice venture. It lacks the narrative drive of The Call of the Wild or the suspense of White Fang, but the editors of the Atlantic Monthly realized they’d found a born writer.
And where did Jack London find his inspiration? A few pages into the story, the Malamute kid nicknames the Aleutian “Mr. Ulysses,” and cites the legend of the mysterious stranger traveling the Bering Sea and the Alaskan hinterland in search of no one knew what. Clearly London, despite his meager education, knew his Homer. “The Odyssey of the North” was his homage to the great epic. Naass, incidentally, does find Unga, his Penelope, but things don’t work out as well as they did for the original Odysseus. This is Jack London’s world, after all.
The Odyssey haunts Western literature and the arts, probably more than the blood-soaked Iliad. Christopher Nolan’s cinematic extravaganza may or may not live up to the epic. I have not yet seen it because all the IMAX theaters in New York are booked solid for weeks to come. But that won’t stop me from surfing its wake.
I don’t read Greek but I have half a bookshelf of English translations, four of which I’ve read completely, and I may, in time, get to the others. Here is how some of them translate that tricky opening:
Tell me the tale of a man, Muse, who had so many roundabout ways
Daniel Mendelsohn, 2025
Tell me about a complicated man.
Emily Wilson, 2017
Muse, tell me of a man: a man of much resource, who was made to wander far and long.
Martin Hammond, 2000
Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns.
Robert Fagles, 1996
Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways, who was driven far journeys.
Richard Lattimore, 1965
Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story
of that man skilled in all ways of contending,
Robert Fitzgerald, 1961
Tell me, oh Muse, of that ingenious hero who traveled far and wide
Samuel Butler, 1900
Muse make the man thy theme, for shrewdness famed
And genius versatile, who far and wide
William Cowper, 1791
The man for wisdom’s various arts renown’d,
Long exercised in woes, O Muse! resound;
Alexander Pope, 1725
The man, O Muse, inform, that many a way
Wound with his wisdom to his wished stay;
George Chapman, 1611
That roundabout complicated, resourceful, twisty-turny, wayward, contending, ingenious, shrewd, versatile, artful, resourceful, winding man, of course, is Odysseus. Matt Damon certainly took on a lot when he took on the role for Christopher Nolan. Dozens of English poets have tried to pin Odysseus’ roundabout ways to English. Homer’s word is “polytropos,” which is literally “of many turns,” but conveys a sense for which there is no definite English word. As Emily Wilson says, it’s complicated.
Among the modern translations, Fagles’s is my favorite. Wilson’s feminist-inflected, stripped-down simplicity is easiest to read. Mendelsohn writes in sinuously long lines that bring the weariness of the journey to the forefront, though I doubt that was his intention. I’m fond of Chapman’s translation, not least because it inspired Keats to write, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” – “Much have I travell’d in the realms gold.” Or, in Jack London’s case, the realms of cold.
Emily Wilson has recently made news by biting the hand that made her translation famous. Nolan drew on her translation (among other) in his virtuoso movie, but Wilson writing in the London Review of Books, roundly condemned it. “The writing is abysmal. None of the characters has a convincing motivation for their actions or words. There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible.” And these are among her milder comments. She reminds me of Melantho, a minor character in the Odyssey, who is a servant in Odysseus’ palace. When he returns in disguise, she scolds him. In Wilson’s translation:
“Hey! Stranger! Will you
keep causing trouble, roaming around our house
at night and spying on us women here?
Get out, you tramp!”
Melantho, let’s say, misread the situation.
The Odyssey is a near-inexhaustible inspiration for other authors. Surely James Joyce’s Ulysses tops that list, though I have no love for it. Lest I give in to the temptation to make Emily Wilson my muse, I’ll leave it at that. Zachary Mason’s The Lost Books of the Odyssey is a dreamlike collection of short stories that take Odysseus to islands beyond those that Homer describes. Omeros is an epic poem by the Caribbean poet Derek Walcott that I have attempted several times but have always ended up on the shore. Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier sets the story as the journey home of a dispossessed Civil War veteran in the ruins of the South. I’m told that Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying takes its title from a scene in the Odyssey in which the spirit of Agamemnon rails against the injustice of his death. I admire Faulkner’s book, but I can’t quite see it as some do as a reversal of the Odyssey, though it does involve an arduous journey home. Margaret Atwood – she who has bequeathed us the miserable Handmaid’s Tale – composed The Penelopiad, which plays the modern game of inverting a character and giving “her side” of the story.
Books about epic journeys are abundant. Can they all be derived from Homer’s masterwork? No, but Homer stands in the background of even those that take their inspiration from other sources. Is Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey indebted to Homer for anything other than the word “odyssey?” I don’t see it. O Brother, Where Art Thou? however is a lighthearted homage by Joel and Ethan Coen to one of the masterworks of Western literature.
Nolan’s movie will surely kindle new interest in the whole ocean of Odyssey-inspired fiction and film. I epically hope it will inspire a new generation of readers to dive into this ocean. Doing so has set more writers than Jack London on a path of success. Every Naass in search of his Unga should voyage hither.
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