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Two Thousand Years of “The Odyssey” at the Library

Posted by: Maria Peña

Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” introduces the epic poem attributed to Homer to a new generation of moviegoers, turning a nearly 3,000-year-old story into a fresh cultural touchstone.

The Library’s vast collections, covering centuries of time, document how artists, cartographers and translators around the world have translated and reimagined Odysseus’ journey anew. From medieval engravings to graphic novels, the Library’s holdings document how each generation seems to find fresh meaning in the mythical, decade-long struggle of the Greek hero to return home to his wife, Penelope, and son, Telemachus, following the Trojan War.

The 12,000-line prose poem originated in an oral tradition more than 2,800 years ago in ancient Greece and was performed at festivals for hundreds of years. It uses monsters, murder, war, gods and disasters to pose timeless questions about loyalty and perseverance, resilience, temptation, loss and, above all, the universal search for belonging.

The Library’s holdings on work attributed to Homer go back about 2,000 years, with a papyrus fragment from “The Iliad,” the precursor to “The Odyssey,” and then continue as the centuries go by.

Homer’s influence always seemed to be hovering, as shown in a 1597 map by Flemish cartographer Abraham Ortelius. It fuses myth and geography to trace Odysseus’ journey across the ancient world, roughly the present-day Mediterranean, in his Theatrum Orbis Terrarum.

Around this time in London, the poet and playwright George Chapman, a contemporary of William Shakespeare, had begun the first translation of “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey” into English. He began publishing installments as early as 1598.

In 1616, he published them both in “The Whole Works of Homer, Prince of Poetts, in His Iliads and Odysses.” His vivid, poetic rendering opened the story to readers beyond the Greek-speaking world and became an enduring influence on English literature. The poet John Keats, 200 years later, was so taken with Chapman’s translation that he penned “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” which itself became famous.

Then there’s the 1640 etching by Theodoor van Thulden, which captures the moment Odysseus outwits Polyphemus, the man-eating Cyclops. One of 58 illustrations in the book “Errores Vlyssis,” van Thulden shows Ulysses and his crew trapped inside a dimly lit cave as they get the giant drunk and drive a burning stake into its single eye before escaping.

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