The Long Way Home
Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center will livestream a six-day reading of Homer’s The Odyssey.
FOR MORE THAN 2,500 YEARS, artists, musicians, and writers have turned to Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey for inspiration. In more recent history, James Joyce, Romare Bearden, the Coen Brothers, and Teresita Fernández (to name a few) have adapted or referenced the poem in their art. The first English translation of Homer’s story dates to 1615, recounting Odysseus’ winding ten-year journey to return to his home on Ithaca after the Trojan War’s conclusion. At least sixty English translations have populated the shelves of bookstores and libraries since that time. Four hundred years later, in 2017, Emily Wilson is among the first women to publish an English translation of the work. Wilson’s translation won near-universal praise and led to a MacArthur Fellowship for the scholar in 2019. Using iambic pentameter, the poetic meter most famously used by William Shakespeare, Wilson creates an immediate, accessible, and boldly contemporary version of the ancient text. While scholars don’t know much about Homer, there is wide consensus that the poem was composed orally, not through the writing process, and intended to be performed before a live audience rather than read silently. With its verse structure and clear language, Wilson’s translation is ideally positioned for performance.
At a time when we’ve canceled travel and confined ourselves to our apartments and houses to slow the spread of a global pandemic, it would seem we might feel more at home than ever. But the world, and our sense of place within it, has changed. In the wake of this crisis, with its extreme disruptions to our health, careers, and lives, individuals and communities can feel unmoored, lost at sea. Many of us yearn for a time before, when home was home. Writing in a different time, but with a resonant sentiment, James Baldwin observed in Giovanni’s Room, “You don’t have a home until you leave it, and then, once you have left it, you can never go back.” This concept is embedded in the word nostalgia from the ancient Greek nostos, meaning “homecoming” and algos, meaning “pain.”
What will be the path of our homecoming after this, and how might we find it? Perhaps it’s time to revisit, collectively, Homer’s tale of adventure, loss, pain, and eventually, return.
In August, Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center will livestream a six-day reading of Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey. Working with a diverse group of local and national educators, actors, musicians and public officials as readers—including Emily Wilson herself—Oklahoma Contemporary’s broadcast will cover all twenty-four books of the poem. Our goal for this series is to digitally recreate the experience of listening quietly together to a tale told thousands of times throughout histories and across continents to see if we can find ourselves in Odysseus’ ever-turning voyage to find home. Flashing and flickering, our screens will be the flames around which we gather to hear the story of this complicated character.
In the introduction to her translation, Wilson frames the many facets of the wandering man from Ithaca. “Odysseus is a migrant, but he is also a political and military leader, a strategist, a poet, a loving husband, and father, an adulterer, a homeless person, an athlete, a disabled cripple, a soldier with a traumatic past, a pirate, a thief and liar, a fugitive, a colonial invader, a home owner, a sailor, a construction worker, a mass murderer, and a war hero. Immersing ourselves in his story and considering how these categories can exist in the same imaginative space, may help us reconsider both the origins of Western literature, and our infinitely complex contemporary world.” As we listen to this contemporary version of The Odyssey unfurl, we just might find the beginning of our own homecoming.