BOOKS
Odysseus Redivivus
By HUGH LLOYD-JONES
HE Cretan poet Nikos Kazantzakis died in I 1957 at the age of seventy-four. During an exceptionally active life, divided between writ- ing, politics and contemplation, he produced an -immense literary output; of this, the novels Christ Reerueified and Zorha the Greek have Already appeared in English, and attracted some Attention. A far more notable work is the gigantic poem in twenty-four books, 33,333 lines 'long, in which Kazantzakis took up the story of Odysseus from the moment when the massacre of the suitors is complete. It appeared in Greece in 1937, and was an instant success, despite its great length, its unusual metre and its many demotic expressions, puzzling to the Athenian intelligentsia. This great poem pre- sented a most formidable problem to the trans- lator'; but the problem has been triumphantly surmounted by Mr. Kimon Friar, an American poet and scholar of Greek origins.* Mr. Friar gave eight years of life to the work, and was lucky enough to have the help of the poet. But it is clear that Mr. Friar himself is a poet of unusual ifts. He has performed the amazing feat of presenting a vast epic narrative in clear, vigorous nd 'beautiful English verse which steers a sue- cessful course between the whirlpools of modern vulgarism and the dead shallows of traditionalist versifying. Kazantzakis, with sure poetic insfinct, eschewed the traditional 'politi- cal metre' with its monotonous beat in favour of a seventeen-syllable iambic measure which -Allowed him to achieve a wholly new variety of rhythm. Mr. Friar has skilfully reproduced the effect of this by using an 'iambic hexameter' which stands to the traditional English penta- meter rather as Kazantzakis's metre does to the traditional Greek lines of fifteen syllables, and the explanation of his metrical principles deserves careful study by everyone interested in modern English verse technique. Kazantzakis, in col- laboration with a well-known classical scholar, translated the Iliad and the Odyssey into modern Greek; I wish Mr. Friar would translate them into modern English.
This Odyssey is no pastiche of Homer, but a modern work of the highest originality and poetic power. We soon learn that Kazantzakis's hero and Homer's are poles apart. Homer's Odysseus is a ruthless realist, the least romantic- ally minded of all the heroes. There is no ques- tion of his wandering over the seas for the mere love of adventure; his aim is to get back as soon as possible to his wife and son- in Ithaca, and neither Poseidon's hatred nor Calypso's love is able to frustrate it. Dante first thought of Odysseus as being impelled to leave home once more by 'l'ardor . . . a divenir del mondo evert°, e delli vizi Inning e del valore'; and it is to his Odysseus and to Tennyson's rather than to Homer's that .t(azantzakis's hero looks back. Three Fates have blessed him in his cradle; Tantalus, the type of never-satisfied longing, * THE ODYSSEY; A MODERN SEQUEL. By Nikos Kazantzakis. Translated by Kimon Friar. Illus- trated by Ghika. (Seeker and Warburg, 50s.)
Prometheus, type of the mind's defiance of God and its effort to comprehend the universe, and Heracles, type of the heart's struggle towards self-purification. This Odysseus is a born adventurer, a romantic realist, remarkable not for mere cunning but for physical and moral strength and courage and for a restless urge to win salvation by exploring to the root his soul's relation to God and to the universe.
Bored almost at once with Ithaca, he sets off with a handful of picked retainers for Sparta, where he is entertained by a Menelaus grown fat and sentimental and soon to be threatened by the advancing hordes of blond barbarians. After quelling a revolt, Odysseus and his crew make off, taking with them Helen; not that Odysseus is in love with her, but he wants to save her from stagnation. They arrive in Crete, whose- king is another old comrade, Idomeneus, sinister, decrepit and only kept going by periodic revitali- sation by the great mother goddess. The Cretan civilisation is brilliant, decadent and cruel, given over to bull-jumping and sacred prostitution; it, too, is threatened by sullen slaves and oncoming barbarians. With their aid Odysseus burns the royal fleet and the great Cnossian palace and makes off, leaving Helen to mate with a barbarian and so unite the Achoean with the Dorian stock. Odysseus and his crew now sail for Egypt, where once again they side with rebellion against the established order. The rebels are crushed . by Pharaoh's countless hosts, but Odysseus is released and leads an army of the adventurous and the dis- contented in quest of the sources of the Nile. They reach their goal, and here Odysseus climbs a great mountain and communes with his spirit. He descends to found an ideal city of a Platonic type, only to see it almost immediately swept away by earthquake and volcano. After a further period of contemplation he perfects his comprehension of the universe and the purification of his spirit. Finally, he journeys through Asia, reaches the sea, and in a coffin-shaped skiff sails out to meet his death at the South Pole.
From the start we see in play the dialectic between the hero's mind, which wishes to build it- self an iron tower of refuge from the world, and his heart, which longs to enter into sympathy with all things, living and inanimate; these two Odysseus must all the time play off against each other as he 'slowly mounts the burning desert paths of virtue.' God is not distinct from man nor from nature, but lives only in the effort of all things to purify the spirit from material dross; God is symbolised for Odysseus by a hungry flame or by an arrow always mounting upwards. First the hero passes beyond the restrictions of his own ego and his own race; then he enters into sympathy with all mankind and with all existing things. The vital impulse towards purification in all things is the same as God, as Love, as Death. So far Odysseus has attained by the end of his self-communion on the mountain near the sources of the Nile; he descends to translate his vision into concrete reality by the founding of his ideal city. After he has undergone the supreme ordeal
of seeing it destroyed, he can go further; he hears the voice of Heracles within him say :
'When you have purified your mind of gods and demons,
of virtues great and small, of sorrows and of joys, and only Death's great lighthouse stays, the glowing mind, then rise, my heir, and sternly cleave your mind in two: below will lie your last foe, rotten-thighed Hope, above, the savage Flame, no light, no air, no tire, scornful and superhuman in man's hopeless skull.'
Odysseus has accepted the universe for what it is, and has recognised God's identity with the evolutionary struggle itself; and he must now go on and conquer the last enemy, Hope, by willingly accepting the fact of annihilation. So he emerges in triumph as the saviour of a universe in which there is no salvation, as one who has saved himself from the very need of being saved. We are shown how this doctrine differs from others which at first sight may appear similar. Odysseus encounters Prince Motherth, the type of the Buddha, who meets the threat of death , and decay with a negative attitude of renuncia- tion. Odysseus tells him that it is Death that gives Life its tasty salt; he himself 'holds Death like a black banner and marches on.' He meets Margaro, the famous courtesan, who says to each other lovers, 'Beloved, I feel at length that we two are but one'; to her he says, 'Even this One, O Margaro, even this One is empty air.' He meets a hermit who has spent his life in wondering what is the purpose of man's existence; he shows this hermit that man's existence has no purpose unless he accepts the Earth and all that it contains. He rejects as divorced from reality the quixotism of the idealist; he recoils from the cold hedonism that samples all experience while refusing to become involved in any; and he is on several occasions tempted by a Negro boy who speaks of an all-loving father, whq turns the cheek when struck and whom he ends by hanging on the mid- mast of his ship of death to be used as a scarecrow.
The origins and affiliations of the mystical beliefs here outlined are easily perceived. The reader is not surprised to learn that Kazantzakis studied under Bergson and was influenced by Nietzsche, or to remark affinities with such con- temporaries as Yeats, Mann and D. H. Law- rence. Yet the reader's attitude to these beliefs need in no way affect his attitude to the mag- nificent poetry in which they are expressed. The work is above all things a religious poem, the record of a search for the understanding of God and the universe; but it is as far removed as possible from the bloodless aridity of most symbolical writing. Just as the writer's mysticism insists on the acceptance of the universe, so does his poetry describe life in the world in all its concreteness with tremendous realism and power. In spite of all the immense differences that separate the language, style and thought of Kazantzakis from those of his ancient predeces- sors, one signal similarity can be observed be- tween them; and this similarity lies in the very feature which, more than any other, marks off
his doctrine from those of most other mystics, The Odysseus of Kazantzakis goes beyond most other contemplatives in pressing forward to the last victory over Hope, the willing acceptance of annihilation. We are reminded of how the ancient
poets of his race face, without an instant of false self-consolation, the ultimate• facts of human impotence and mortality; and we see the link that
connects the greatest Greek poem of modern times with the sublime acceptance of man's fate that concludes Pindar's last and greatest ode of victory.
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