“I have learnt to be valiant always, to fight amid the foremost Trojans, striving to win my father’s great glory and mine own.”

Homer (end of the 8th century b.c.)
Bard, called “the Poet” by the ancients

“The second of the great Homeric poems is a marvelous novel of maritime adventures and bragging, a bit like A Thousand and One Nights as told on the Vieux-Port (of Marseilles). […] You can better understand the coexistence of the smell of the ocean air which rises from his verses on one hand, and on the other the rollicking atmosphere of an adventure-novel written by a very clever man, exploiting people’s love of the exotic, and working off the nautical instructions of the Phoenicians and the accounts of explorers – for him the exploration of Sicily was as charged with literary magic as the exploration of the ocean was for Cook… Indeed, we find in Homer a Jules Verne of Antiquity. But that being said, there are also the most beautiful images of adventure and of death. Though The Odyssey is less rich in brilliant poetry than The Iliad, its narrative is smoother and more exciting. I’ve translated almost the entire episode of Nausicaa, which is so charmingly fresh, because it is a good example of epic narrative. In other places I chose passages from the Journey to the Underworld – whose exquisite human poetry has probably never been surpassed – as well as little sea-snippets here and there, still freshly smelling of salty ocean air. I even chose some famous good-natured puns, which accentuate the Marseillais aspect of the masterpiece, and the superb yet barbaric episodes of Ulysses’ vengeance. To give a good idea of how much familiarity and nobleness there is in the work it would take at least fifty more pages – not to mention the boguey monsters, the ogres, the beautiful gods, the naive tricks, and the never ceasing sound and smell of the sea that envelopes all these inventions.”

20th century Author
Writer