AN ODYSSEY

"Athena as Mentor," pencil, watercolor ink, and India ink on 8½" x 11" cardstock.

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"Like through the jointed grass / The long-stemmed deer / Almost vanishes / But a hound has already found her flattened tracks / And he's running through the fields toward her"

—from Memorial: A Version of Homer's Iliad by Alice Oswald

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Where there is hound, there is likely hunter. I imagine Artemis not too far off, the string of her bow drawn taut, the head of the arrow waiting to strike at the heart, tried and true.

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I was readying myself for another "Cutting In" project. I thought I was going to explore the artwork and poetry of William Blake. But the Cosmic Octopus had other plans for me and pushed me in the direction of The Odyssey by Homer, as translated by Emily Wilson.

I had been a longtime fan of the translation by Robert Fagles, but I think Emily Wilson renders the poetry of the lines better. I'm no reader of Greek, so I have to have some faith that the translator knows what he or she is doing and accept that their interpretation works for me. Until the Wilson translation, for me, that was Fagles.

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As Wilson writes in her "Tranlator's Note:"

"The original is in six-footed lines (dactylic hexameter), the conventional meter for archaic Greek narrative verse. I used iambic pentameter, because it is the conventional meter for regular English narrative verse—the rhythm of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Keats, and plenty of more recent anglophone poets. I have spent many hours reading aloud, both the Greek original and my own work in progress. Homer's music is quite different than mine, but my translation sings to its own regular and distinctive beat."

It is that "regular and distinctive beat" of Wilson's translation to which I am attracted.

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It is not just The Odyssey to which the Cosmic Octopus leads me, but to the first translation of the poem into English by a woman.

I already have a copy of Memorial: A Version of Homer's Iliad by Alice Oswald, which is a very intensely focused mixture of paraphrase and translation of only the death scenes and similes of Homer's original.

I have Caroline Alexander's translation of The Iliad on order.

I am probably going to have to order Sarah Ruden's translation of the Homeric Hymns.

It seems that I will be journeying through Homer's work and words (and those classically attributed to him but not necessarily by him) alongside female guides, much like Telemachus or Odysseus under the protection and guidance of the goddess Athena.

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"Of Pallas Athene, guardian of the city, I begin to sing. Dread is she, and with Ares she loves deeds of war, the sack of cities and the shouting and the battle. It is she who saves the people as they go out to war and come back. Hail, goddess, and give us good fortune with happiness!"

—from "To Athena," XI, Homeric Hymns, translated by Hugh G. Evelyn-White

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As I start this new version of "Cutting In," may Athena and the Cosmic Octopus grant me good fortune with happiness!