If nature abhors a vaccuum then narrative abhors a lack of much happening as does Zeus who gives the chessboard a good old godly nudge by dispatching Hermes to demand that Calypso free Odysseus and set him out to sea, while Athena journeys to Ithaca in the first of several guises to prompt Telemachus to sail off in search of his Dad. Odysseus, meanwhile, has been marooned on an island by Poseidon for poking his son's singular eye out with a stick (the biggest injury to eye in any fiction) and, with no means of escape, has been lying in thrall to the sea-nymph Calypso.
Convinced that Odysseus is dead, over a hundred of these overtly hostile and ill-mannered apes seek Penelope's hand in marriage while eating her out of house and home.
Even with my wine-addled memory (compounded perhaps by said biffing and banging) I recognised the odd phrase like "pressed in on all sides" as an exact reproduction.įollowing the events of the Ilyiad (see Eric Shanower's remarkable AGE OF BRONZE), this kicks off right in the middle of things with Odysseus now missing for seventeen years while his son Telemachus impotently seethes at the jackals circling his mother Penelope. Even though its source is an amalgam of prior translations merely consulted rather than adhered to, by maintaining the vast majority of its rhetorical devices and structure Hinds gives one a very keen sense of what it's like to actually read the original, yet without the constant threat of being biffed about the head for misconstruing a salient subclause. A summer sunshine joy, brought to watercolour light and rammed to the bucolic pens with so many of your favourite mythological beasts and best-avoided landmarks, this is by far the most faithful and engaging adaptation of Homer's epic fantasy into comic form so far.
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