The Roman poet Ovid summed it up in a couplet two millennia ago.
Or what’s the Odyssey except a woman
Wooed by the suitors while her man’s away?
In fact, there are over a hundred suitors who are trying to marry Odysseus’s wife. The main theme of Homer’s Odyssey is homecoming. Ovid lived a life of exile in Tomis on the Black Sea coast and despondently pines for home. The poet was banished from Rome by the Emperor Augustus for what he describes as ‘a poem and a mistake’ but the latter must remain ‘unmentioned’. He feels tormented by what he calls ‘a barbarous tongue that’s ignorant of Latin’. Ovid dearly misses his wife and compares her to a bearing beam that props his ruins. He praises her profusely: ‘Had Fortune given you Homer for your poet’, he writes, ‘Your fame would have outranked Penelope. And he ends one of his poems by telling her that she’ll live for ever in his poetry.
It has taken the director many decades to fulfil his dream of turning The Odyssey into a film
Ovid was scolded by his father for his choice of profession, informing his son that even Homer died a poor man. The poet thinks of Rome in Tomis, of home and haunts he longs for like water trickling down from springtime snow. He prays for death when he arrives at the Black Sea coast, for he couldn’t endure its climate or get used to the water and the soil. Ovid felt that he perished when he lost his country. He spent his final years in Tomis pleading for a pardon but died in banishment. He wished for his bones to be transported in an urn so that in this death he didn’t remain an exile. He’d call Ulysses lucky.
James Joyce based his epic novel on The Odyssey and calls it Ulysses, which is the Latin name of Odysseus. It took the Greek hero 10 years to reach home to Ithaca after the Trojan War and it took James Joyce a good part of a decade to write Ulysses. The novel covers a single day in the lives of three Dubliners. Leopold Bloom’s character in the book is similar to that of Ulysses. His wife, Molly, is the modern-day counterpart of Penelope. Joyce started writing Ulysses on the 16th of June which is now celebrated as Bloomsday all over the world. The Irish novelist lived most of his life outside Ireland. He lived in Trieste, Zurich and Paris where one day he met Monsieur Proust for dinner at the Majestic Hotel.
The Greek word for the homecoming is Nostos, which is also the root word of nostalgia. The other themes in The Odyssey besides homecoming are loyalty and hospitality. Penelope remains faithful to Odysseus for 20 years after he left home and hospitality is a moral obligation for the ancient Greeks. There is utmost respect for hospitality in the Greco-Roman era. Homer was a blind poet and Joyce nearly lost his eyesight while writing his novels.
Derek Walcott teleports Odysseus from the Mediterranean and Aegean Seas to the Caribbean in Omeros (Greek name of Homer), thereby retelling the stories of The Iliad and The Odyssey. Walcott was born in St Lucia, also known as the Helen of the West Indies because it is fiercely beautiful and the island changed hands 14 times between the British and the French. A blind elder called Seven Seas represents Homer in Walcott’s epic poem. He alludes to the wound of slavery and recounts the suffering of the individual in exile. Walcott’s protagonists aren’t the Greek heroes but their namesakes who are fishermen and two of them are enamoured with a housemaid called Helen.
The theme of homecoming runs deep in Walcott’s Omeros and his other works. In one of the poems, he writes about the homecomings without a home. Walcott’s fishermen, Hector and Achille, fight over Helen who is the maid of a British expat. She is proud and beautiful, dismissed by her employer and then works as a waitress. The Trojan War lasts 10 years and it takes Odysseus another 10 years to reach home. Walcott believes that there are two journeys in every odyssey and for both, the ‘I’ is a mast; a desk is a raft.
I must confess that Christopher Nolan’s previous blockbuster film, Oppenheimer, made me enter a cinema hall again after an interval of more than 20 years. The film was shot in both monochrome and colour. His new film, The Odyssey, is entirely shot with IMAX film cameras which is a feat in itself. It was filmed in six countries from Iceland to Morocco over a period of six months.
Nolan was fascinated by the Trojan horse ever since he was a child, watching older children at his school enact the scene of Homer’s classic epic. It has taken the director many decades to fulfil his dream of turning The Odyssey into a film. He visited Mumbai recently to promote his new film in India. As a youngster, I loved to watch a three-hour-long widescreen Bollywood film in a cinema in my neighbourhood in Kashmir.
The Odyssey is also about a father’s longing to meet his son after a long absence. I plan to take my 13-year-old to see The Odyssey at an independent cinema in my new neighbourhood in London. His English teacher recommended him to read The Iliad. I watched Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy on the small screen but it didn’t prove to be a memorable experience except for seeing Diane Kruger for the first time playing Helen whose face launched a thousand ships.
No one can say with certainty whether Homer was literate or if he existed at all. However, his legend has endured for more than three millennia and will continue to shape the world of art and literature for centuries to come.
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