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THE ODYSSEY: TRANSLATED BY ROBERT FITZGERALD (VINTAGE CLASSI ...

BOOK
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The Odyssey

A GODDESS INTERVENES

TRA N SLATED BY

Robert Fitzgerald

VINTAGE BOOKS
London

THE ODYSSEY: TRANSLATED BY ROBERT FITZGERALD (VINTAGE CLASSI ...

HOMER

Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story


I
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 tov.rnlands
and learned the minds of many distant men,
and weathered many biner nights and days
in his deep heart at sea, while he fought only
to save his life, to bring his shipmates home.
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But not by will nor valor could he save them,
for their own recklessness destroyed them allchildren and fools, they killed and feasted on
the cattle of Lord Helios, the Sun,
and he who moves all day through heaven
took from their eyes the dawn of their return.
Of these adventures, Muse, daughter of Zeus,
tell us in our time, lift the great song again.
Begin when all the rest who left behind them
headlong death in battle or at sea
had long ago returned, while he alone still hungered
for home and vvife. Her ladyship Kalypso
clung to him in her sea-hollowed cavesa nymph, immortal and most beautiful,

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who craved him for her own.


And when long years and seasons
wheeling brought around that point of time
ordained for him to make his passage homevvard,
trials and dangers, even so, attended him
even in Ithaka, near those he loved.
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Yet all the gods had pitied Lord Odysseus,
all but Poseidon, raging cold and rough
against the brave king till he came ashore
at last on his own land.
But now that god
had gone far off among the sunburnt races,
most remote of men, at earth's two verges,
in sunset lands and lands of the rising sun,
to be regaled by smoke of thighbones burning,
haunches of rams and bulls, a hundred fold.
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He lingered delighted at the banquet side.
In the bright hall of Zeus upon Olympos
the other gods were all at home, and Zeus,
the father of gods and men, made conversation.
For he had meditated on Aiglsthos, dead
by the hand of Agamemnon's son, Orestes,
and spoke his thought aloud before them all:
"My vord, how mortals take the gods to task!

HOMER

THE ODYSSEY: TRANSLATED BY ROBERT FITZGERALD (VINTAGE CLASSI ..

All their afflictions come from us, we hear.


And what of their own failings? Greed and folly
double the suffering in the lot of man.
See how Aigisthos, for his double portion,
stole Agamemnon's \vife and killed the soldier
on his homecoming day. And yet Aig!sthos

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knew that his own doom lay in this. We gods


had warned him, sent down Hermes Argeiphontes,
our most observant courier, to say:
'Don't kill the man, don't touch his wife,
or face a reckoning with Orestes
the day he comes of age and wants his patrimony.'
Friendly advice-but would Aigisthos take it?
Now he has paid the reckoning in full."
The grey-eyed goddess Athena replied to Zeus:
"O Majesty, O Father of us all,
that man is in the dust indeed, and justly.
So perish all who do what he had done.
But my own heart is broken for Odysseus,
t he master mind of war, so long a castaway
upon an island in the running sea;
a wooded island, in the sea's middle,
and there's a goddess in the place, the daughter
of one whose baleful mind knows all the deeps
of the blue sea- Atlas, \11ho holds the columns

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that bear from land the great thrust of the sky.


His daughter will not let Odysseus go,
poor mournful man; she keeps on coaxing him
with her beguiling talk, to turn his mind
from Ithaka. But such desire is in him
merely to see the hearthsmoke leaping upward
from his own island, that he longs to die.
Are you not moved by this, Lord of Olympos?
Had you no pleasure from Odysseus' offerings
beside the Argive ships, on Troy's wide seaboard?
o Zeus, what do you hold against him now?"

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To this the summoner of cloud replied:


"My child, what strange remarks you let escape you.
Could I forget that kingly man, Odysseus?
There is no mortal half so wise; no mortal
gave so much to t he lords of open sky.
Only the god who laps the land in water,
Poseidon, bears the fighter an old grudge
since he poked out the eye of Polyphemos,
brawniest of the Kyklopes. Who bore
that giant lout? Thoosa, daughter of Phorkys,
an offshore sea lord: for this nymph had lain
with Lord Poseidon in her hollow caves.
Naturally, the god, after the blinding-

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THE ODYSSEY: TRANSLATED BY ROBERT FITZGERALD (VINTAGE CLASSI ...

HOMER

mind you, he does not kill the man;


he only buffets him away from home.
But come now, we are all at leisure here,
let us take up this matter of his return,
that he may sail. Poseidon must relent
for being quarrelsome will get him nowhere,
one god, flouting the will of all the gods."

and win his own reno\vn about the world."


JOO

The grey-eyed goddess Athena answered him:


"O Majesty, o Father of us all,
if it now please the blissful gods
that wise Odysseus reach his home again,
let the Wayfinder, Hermes, cross the sea
to the island of Ogygia; let him tell
our fixed intent to the nymph with pretty braids,
and let the steadfast man depart for home.
For my part, I shall visit Ithaka
to put more courage in the son, and rouse him
to call an assembly of the islanders,
Akhaian gentlemen with flowing hair.
He must \Varn off that wolf pack of the suitors
who prey upon his flocks and dusky cattle.
I'll send him to the mainland then, to Sparta
by the sand beach of Pylos; let him find
news of his dear father where he may

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She bent to tie her beautiful sandals on,


ambrosial, golden, that carry her over water
or over endless land on the wings of the wind,
and took the great haft of her spear in handthat bronzeshod spear this child of Power can use
to break in wrath long battle lines of fighters.
Flashing down from Olympos' height she went
to stand in Ithaka, before the Manor,
just at the doors ill of the court. She seemed
a family friend, the Taphian captain, Mentes,
waiting, \Vith a light hand on her spear.
Before her eyes she found the lusty suitors
casting dice inside the gate, at ease
on hides of oxen-oxen they had killed.
Their o\11n retainers made a busy sight
with houseboys mixing bowls of water and wine,
or sopping water up in sponges, wiping
tables to be placed about in hall,
or butchering vvhole carcasses for roasting.
Long before anyone else, the prince Telemakhos
now caught sight of Athena- for he, too,
was sitting chere unhappy among the suitors,
a boy, daydreaming. What if his great father

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