Polytropos - The Man of Twists and Turns
Anyone who uses the word “odyssey” nowadays generally means nothing more than wandering around. Such wandering can lead to a safe and sound homecoming - thus the comfortable and circ*mspect way of thinking, which does not wish to hear about roaming around unless the story ends with the reminder that there is no place like home. But wandering around can lead to distant horizons, and this corresponds to the modern sensibility that generally mistrusts arrivals and praises those who keep going - because all places seem in principle to be equally good or bad. Thus I can tell whether you are a conservative or a modern if you tell me whether you prefer for an odyssey to end at home or whether the name “Ithaca” only refers to a stage on a journey that continues further, to a familiar destination or to parts unknown.
If we open the Odyssey, attributed to a poet by the name of Homer, who is supposed to be the same person responsible for the Iliad, a book about the rage of Achilles and the fall of Troy, then simply reading it will convince us that its famous stories of wandering have merely an episodic function - they constitute just four of the twenty-four books that form the corpus of Odysseus’ tale (although this way of arranging the text was a late addition by an Alexandrine editor). The other twenty books have a single theme: how it could happen that Odysseus, the man who for a long time could not find his way back from Asia Minor to Ithaca, still finally arrived back home after a twenty-year absence, by the will of the gods and in keeping with his own heartfelt desire? Thus any actual reader of the Odyssey - or better, any listener who allows him- or herself to be enchanted by the rhapsodic recital as though at a concert - will be quite certain that it is a story of coming back home after a war, even more: an apotheosis of the return to domesticity. What the Odyssey celebrates in twenty of its twenty-four books is the ability to put a monstrous ten-year war on foreign soil behind one, and to then suffer ten years of nautical and erotic catastrophe on various islands and at sea, and yet to be able to once more become a Greek among one’s own kind at the end, a friend among friends, a man of the house with his wife, in a word: a man who returns home to peace. Only in this way is the story structured in a decidedly Ithaca-centric manner. And this was the only way to convince all post-Homeric generations of Greeks, initially listeners but later readers of the songs, too, that a Greek is someone who succeeds in returning from a foreign war to once more devote himself to the binding powers and dynamic vital energies that are to be found in a place of his own -and even to the tragedies that not seldom follow the homecoming.
In short: Even today, when we open the Odyssey, we read the greatest story of re-civilization in Western literature. It provides an answer to the existential question of Greek culture: “Is there life after the Trojan War?” It can affirm that there is, by showing how the process of the heroes’ return home tends to end up subtly disarming the heroes - along with a tragic local politics and endless dramas having to do with relationships.-
So let us turn to the much-read beginning of the Odyssey once again and listen to how the singer provides a framework and perspective for his subject-matter:
Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story Of that man skilled in all ways of contending, The wanderer, harried for years on end, After he plundered the stronghold On the proud height of Troy.
He saw the townlands
And learned the minds of many distant men, And weathered many bitter nights and days In his deep heart at sea, while he fought only To save his life, to bring his shipmates home ... And when long years and seasons Wheeling brought him around that point of time Ordained for him to make his passage homeward, Trials and dangers, even so, attended him Even in Ithaka, near those he loved ..
We have said enough for now about the epic plot. In fact, the Odyssey, from the thirteenth up to the twenty-fourth and final book, only recounts the details of Odysseus’ difficulties after he returns to Ithaca - he has come home and yet is far from reclaiming his property. In his formerly wealthy home, a host of parasites have established themselves and gotten used to enjoying the delights of a freeloading life, in some ways comparable here to a modern society of those who live off the interest from their trust funds while devoting themselves to amusem*nts. The homecoming hero must avoid their murderous intentions, and the former ruler of Ithaca must match his own sense of wounded honor, which must be made right, against their exploitative impudence, even if the price to be paid is a massacre.
The epithet that first provides a closer description of the story’s hero is key to the issue under consideration. We find the first instance of Odysseus’ name in the forty-eighth verse, yet the first verse already introduces his winged epithet: polytropos, a word whose adequate translation has racked the brains of Hellenists and Homeric experts since the Roman era. Livius Andronicus, whose rather loose translation Odusia inaugurated Roman literature around 200 BCE, decided on the Latin expression virum versutum [Tr. - “well-versed man”]. In 1781, ss, for a long time the most successful of the German translators of Homer, rendered it in a philologically faithful manner as “der Vielgewanderte” [Tr. - “he who has wandered much”]. The translation used above, by Robert Fitzgerald from 1963, uses “that man skilled in all ways of contending.”- Earlier English Hellenists used expressions such as “much-traveled” or “crafty” for this passage, while more recent ones, provide a free poetic rendering, such as Robert fa*gles’ “the man of twists and turns.” The French poet Lecomte de Lisle adapts
polytropos in his translation of the Odyssey from 1867 with: I’homme subtil qui erra si longtemps - which is unquestionably quite a stretch from the spirit of the original. Ippolito Piedemonte, the author of the classic Italian translation, renders the critical passage with the phrase I 'eroe multiforme che tanto vagd. If we realize that Homeric epithets are the soul of rhapsodic movement, we know that translating them is anything but a minor issue. Just as Hegel will later speak of “the labor of the concept,” so we must speak of “the labor of the epithet” in the world of Homeric formulation. On this critical question, I believe that we should award first prize to the translation of old Vjss, with second prize going to Robert fa*gles, who caused a furor in 1990 with his new translation of the Odyssey - in which he risked breaking up Homer’s epithet too much with his “in twists and turns”4 - harming the authentic rhapsodic tone quite a bit, which requires the eternal return of concise stock phrases.
Anyone wishing to know who Odysseus is must start with the fact that from the very first line he is polytropos: the man of many paths, who has been put to the test by his detours, a sufferer of setbacks, someone who has been storm-tossed, a man who is played with in many ways and yet who always manages to ensure that the moves made by circ*mstance ultimately lead to a single result on which everything hinges, the completion of his return home. Because his difficulties in returning home can be traced back to a divine grudge, his wanderings are to be understood as a punishment. They are not an endless sentence, but rather an assignment that he can complete in a certain amount of time with the assistance of Athena and a good deal of his own ingenuity. Thus ten years of divinely sent obstacles are added to ten years of absence caused by war. A large part of the second decade is spent by the hero on two different islands under the spell of women who are skilled in magic, first with Calypso, who demands seven years of love-bondage in her grotto, and then with Circe, who claims an additional year for herself and her marvelous bed. A shorter part of the journey’s time is spent in actual seafaring, facing storms, shipwreck, and the famous adventures with the oblivious lotus eaters, the one-eyed man-eater Polyphemus, the eccentric Laestrygonian giants, and finally the fairy-tale-like friendly Phaeacians, to whom he relates his adventures one long evening as thanks for their hospitality - the odyssey within the Odyssey.
The polytropos is thus the hero of delayed movement toward a goal. This predestines him for all manner of metaphorical reinterpretation and spiritual appropriation, since Odysseus is directly or indirectly a factor any time the structure of the complicated return voyage is taken up again in later European culture. For early Christians, paradise is an Ithaca of the soul, for Augustine the human heart is always restless and is storm-tossed by exercises until it finds rest in God, while in Novalis the correct Romantic answer to the question “Where are we going?” is “always back home,” and even for Hegel the Odyssey is a symbol of spirit’s journey around the world, which after its long exile in externality finally returns as the reflective arrival of the idea at home with itself.
As polytropos, Odysseus is a man who is stretched on the rack of delay. Hence his maneuverability is only the flip side of his constant suffering. In truth, he is a passion-hero, a man of sorrows who encounters obstacles on his return home, even when circ*mstances seem to ensure that his delays are enjoyable. He is not just a passion-hero when he is tossed about in the flood sent by Poseidon, which lasts for days, with death seemingly right around the corner, or when barbarians eat his traveling companions while they are still alive, he is also one when he takes a year off to rest in the arms of the nymph Calypso. As the goddess’s nightly lover, he sits on the shore of the island of Ogygia by day and weeps bitter tears, feeling homesick. He heroically perseveres in sleeping with the goddess, of course, but his heart is not really in it, since his home and his wife are always on his mind. He only analogically shares a bed with another woman, insofar as she is a respectable surrogate for his wife. He agrees to pay tribute to femininity at another point, since from his distinctly faithful perspective every attractive woman is more or less created in the image of Penelope. Thus he can never be entirely unfaithful when he is attracted to other women - traveling around the world has its price. But since Odysseus’ love, in the final analysis, is bound to his native soil - patrida gaia - and to his marital furrow, he must be disappointed by every woman that makes him weak in the knees but cannot provide him with that great feeling of finally arriving home and seeing his herds in the fields, when the wandering traveler comes back for his own. Even the incredibly voluptuous Circe finds this out and has every reason to say to the reluctant hero: “Hale must your heart be and your tempered will. / Odysseus then you are, O great contender we again hear the key word, polytropos, which characterizes the hero’s being tossed back and forth. Odysseus climbs into the bed of the witch of Aeaea after she makes a solemn vow to not harm him. Otherwise, he would have to fear that: “now it is I myself you hold, enticing / into your chamber, to your dangerous bed, / to take my manhood when you have me stripped.”^ After Circe’s pledge he is nevertheless ready to give it a try, even if the homecoming temporarily fades from view here.
The much-wandering hero’s frequent movement even includes an encounter with his own epic shadow. Odysseus undergoes a primal staging of the encounter with the self, indeed of selfreflection, near the half-way point of his journey, when he attends a banquet at the court of the Phaiacian King Alcinous, where the blind rhapsode Demodocus (whose name literally means “honored by the people”) performs in the midst of the festivities. Incredibly, Demodocus sings of the very events in the war from which our hero has escaped not long before. At the Phaiacian king’s table, Odysseus hears the song of the fall of Troy and of the unspeakable suffering of the heroes who died there, indeed he even hears the story of the Trojan Horse and the sack of the city: this is more than he can bear, and he loses his composure. To conceal his distress, he draws a veil over his face and freely weeps tears that his host cannot see: “And Odysseus / let the bright molten tears run down his cheeks, / weeping the way a wife mourns for her lord / on the lost field where he has gone down fighting.
In this moment of emotional reflection, he first fully becomes polytropos, a man who got around so much that he had to stumble across the reflections of his own past. Here reflexivity emerges from maneuverability, an encounter with the self emerges from being tossed about. In this staging of subjective memory, the oldest in European literature, the epic reunion with his own fate still initially seems to be a superficial coincidence, and yet here memory is already linked to emotional pain - centuries before tragedy and millennia before psychoanalysis. Catharsis immediately follows anamnesis. If even tears must somehow be learned, then we could say that Europe has learned a beneficial kind of crying from Odysseus and first realized how stories and tears belong together by observing him, a storm-tossed man. Of course,
Odysseus weeps to himself over everything that has happened, everything in which he was actively involved and everything that he suffered, and sheds ecumenical tears for friend and foe alike.
Many centuries later, Virgil still adheres to this principle that depiction and storytelling renew pain, when he has the Roman Odysseus, Aeneas, a refugee who is on his way from the old Troy in the East to Rome, the new Troy in the West, encounter ornate images that immortalize the Trojan catastrophe, shordy after landing on the coast of Carthage - images before which he stands stunned, “sighing often the while, and his face wet with a full river of tears.”- Though in convulsions, Aeneas manages to say Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt: “Even things themselves have their tears, and mortal fates touch the soul.”- Virgil provides a formula for how the realist art of narration functions in Aeneas’ subsequent telling of the story to Dido, when it occurs to the hero to say to his listener: Infandum, regina, iubes renovare dolorem, or “Dreadful, O Queen, is the woe thou bidst me recall.”— Theodor Haecker was probably right when he remarked that Virgil here managed to write one of the most sonorous lines of all time with five of the most ordinary words in Latin.—
