BONUS: Homer and the Pterodactyl (11:07)

BONUS-01-HOMER-AND-THE -PTERODACTYL

This bonus episode of The Odyssey Odyssey comes with a very strict warning label. It's labeled N  - for “nerd.” 

Do me a favor and look at your finger. Either one of your fingers will do nicely. And I want you to bend it unless you're driving, in which case you can do this later. Bend it so that you can see the articulation of the bones. And unless you have a very interesting story to tell, you'll see 3 bones, one long and two short. Long, short, short. And in Greek, your finger is your dactylos  (δάκτυλος).  And if you lived 237,000,000 years ago, and you had a finger with one long and two short bones, you would be a pterodactyl. You would have a winged finger. Terra is a wing and dactylos is a finger. And if you were a poet and you combined words and phrases with one long and two short syllables. You're using dactyls. Maybe you write “ENDlessly MURmuring POetry.” Or maybe you write “TYPical ELephant POetry.”

Long, short, short. 

And if you take 6 dactyls and you put them in a row you have created a line of dactylic hexameter. 

Now, if this is the kind of thing that glazed your eyes over in high school when you were learning poetic meter, take heart. Everyone learns iambic pentameter. It's sort of drummed into people's heads, often in a way that really takes all the joy out of it. Iambic pentameter is a series of five iambs, and an iamb is short long, so “Oh Romeo, ROmeo. WHEREfor ART thou ROmeo?” That's five iambs. And, of course, no actress would ever say it that way. But Shakespeare was certainly conscious of the fact that he was combining these five groups of two syllables, a short and a long, “To BE or NOT to BE. That IS the QUESTion.” Which adds up to 10 syllables, and of course, every time you tell this to a high school class, somebody instantly finds a line in Shakespeare that has 11 syllables or even 12 syllables. And there's this sort of “aha, gotcha!” moment, but it's really not about counting the syllables. It's about feeling the beats. Iambic pentameter has those five beats, and dactylic hexameter has six beats long, short short. A dactyl in Morse code would be the letter D. And if you had, say, a Cipriani Panetone tin, it would sound a little something like this.(---  * * / ---- * * /  --- * * ) And you may have noticed that the last of those six. feet, as they're called, was not long short, short, but long, long. And that's the classic dactylic hexameter line. That's the way every single one of the 12,109 lines of the Odyssey, as well as every line of the Iliad and every line of every epic poem ever written in ancient Greece is written - in this classic epic meter. 

So it was knowing this fact that all of these poems were written in this meter, this epic meter. It's what set me off on the path of trying to get just a little closer to the original of Homer's Odyssey and Iliad. I'm always obsessed, whatever story I'm telling, I want to hear it in its original language, whether I speak it or not. There's so many nuances, there's so many elements to the story, I think that are linked. If it's in Irish, if it's in Norwegian, even if it's in ancient Sumerian. I want to hear at least a breath of the original language, so that's what started me learning the very little bit of ancient Greek that I know. Because it's one thing to read the first line of the Odyssey and to read, 

Tell me Muse of the man. With many devices. 

And it's a very different thing to hear “ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ,” which is the first line in ancient Greek. And once I had unlocked that syllabic combination in the very little bit of Greek that I was able to muster, the poem just electrified itself for me, and I wanted to include this mini- episode just to acknowledge this, and to remind you that as a retelling of the poem, one of the things that you're losing is this rhythmic beat that would constantly be underlying the poem if you were hearing it thousands of years ago, or even if you were reading a good translation today. And of course, every line in Homer is in dactylic hexameter, but they're not rigidly the same. One of the beauties of reading Greek, or even just smelling it as I say, is seeing how Homer can vary those syllabic arrangements. And I share all this, particularly in case anybody's moved to reread the Odyssey. Having picked up this podcast, one of the things I really encourage is to read a verse translation and different authors do that in different ways. No one has ever published a translation of the Odyssey using dactylic hexameter. It really doesn't carry in English. There's a famous poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow called Evangeline. It's famous because it's one of the only poems that uses dactylic hectometer throughout. It's a really long poem. 
 
 

“This is the forest primeval, the murmuring Pines and the hemlocks, 

bearded with mosses and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight.” 

If you want to read the whole thing, I'm going to link to it on my website and I'm going to wish you lots of luck. A lot of scholars say that iambic pentameter - that we know some well from Shakespeare - that this is the sort of natural rhythm of English. And it's funny if you are in any way obsessed with this, how often you'll utter a sentence and then realize that you've just spoken a perfect line of iambic pentameter. (“I think I'll go and buy a loaf of bread.” The oldest English translation of the Odyssey is by George Chapman from 1615, and he used that iambic pentameter, 

“The man, o Muse, inform that many a way wounded his wisdom to his wished stay.” 

Alexander Pope spent years of his life translating the Iliad into not just iambic pentameter, but rhyming iambic pentameter. None of the Greek rhymes at the end of the lines. Then in 1725 he was asked sort of by popular demand to translate the Odyssey, and it had taken him so long to translate the Iliad. He was overwhelmed by the notion of tackling the Odyssey, so he actually subcontracted big chunks of it out to other poets. It was a man named Elijah Fenton, who translated book one of what's known as Pope's Odyssey, 

“The man for Wisdom's various arts renowned, long exercised in woes. O muse, resound.”

 A lot of people think that the Pope and associated poets that this translation is really one of the greatest translations and comes closest to getting that sense of Homer's rhythm and contemporary translators who translate into verse. It tends to be a lot less strict. There's a rhythm. Sort of suggestion of iambic pentameter, but it's much looser. It's sort of hidden in the verse. Robert Fitzgerald says 

“Sing in me muse and through me Tell the story of the man skilled in all ways of contending.”

 And that's certainly not as rhythmic as Pope. But Fitzgerald is very conscious of the rhythm. 

The same with Emily Wilson's recent celebrated translation. 

“Tell me about a complicated man. Tell me how he wandered and was lost.”

 You wouldn't even maybe really notice that that was in verse if you weren't looking for it, but it's very thoughtfully and very sensitively done. “Tell me how he wandered and was lost.” The beauty of that is, of course, that the rhythm is just going to sort of sink into your mind as you're reading. You're not working through it. But if you pick up a prose translation just a block of prose like W.H.D. Rouse that we read in middle school, 

“This is the story of a man, one who was never at a loss. He travelled far in the world after the Sack of Troy.”

Those are the words. That's the information. But the rhythm is gone from that completely. So that's our first bonus episode and gentle listener. If you do read some Homer, I hope that it lifts you on pterodactyl wings. As always, keep those cards and letters coming. There's links to some of these examples on my website, www.tomleestoryteller.net, and we'll see you on Thursday.