Kate Hamill’s Odyssey and the Odyssean Tradition

In many ways, the Odyssey is better thought of as a tradition than as a text. The ancient Greek poem attributed to Homer is the product of a lengthy oral tradition stretching back deep into the Bronze Age; the story of Odysseus’s wanderings and return must have been retold and recomposed countless times before being fixed in writing. The story of the long-absent husband and his reunion with his long-suffering wife belongs to the deepest layers of Eurasian folklore. In Uzbekistan, for example, far from the shores of the Mediterranean, a version of the tale remarkably similar to the Homeric Odyssey is told about the hero Alpamysh.

As a literary text, the Odyssey has achieved a degree of prestige and canonicity matched by few other poems. And yet, despite or possibly because of its canonical status, the poem has served for millennia as the starting point for ambitious projects of translation, adaptation, and reconfiguration. Roman literature begins with Livius Andronicus’s translation of the poem into Latin. He renders Odysseus’s famous epithet πολύτροπος—“wily, clever, of many turns”—with versutus, a word that puns on the Latin term for “translate” (vertere). From early on, then, Odysseus has been an eminently translatable and translated figure, translation becoming one among the many forms of displacement that define the Odyssean hero.

As a sense of displacement and a longing for the recovery of a secure home have become increasingly pervasive conditions of modern life, the Odyssey has repeatedly provided the foundation for profound reflections on these distinctly modern aspects of human experience. To name just two examples: Romare Bearden’s “Odysseus suite,” a series of twenty collages made in 1977, translates the Homeric poem into a unique visual idiom that combines African, African-American, Caribbean, and European elements. Bearden, who had been commissioned three years earlier to design the cover for Black Odyssey: A Search for Home (a special issue of The Harvard Advocate), uses the Odyssey as a vehicle for exploring the violent displacement underlying the African-American and Afro-Caribbean experiences. In a different context and a different medium, James Joyce’s Ulysses famously exploits the Odyssey as a framework for reflection on marital, social, and political dislocation.

Kate Hamill’s astonishing new stage adaptation arrives as the latest contribution to this centuries-long tradition of remaking the Odyssey. Hamill’s Odyssey is anything but a straight translation of the Homeric poem for the stage. Hamill works at the edges and in the gaps of the Homeric text to highlight latent themes and undertones—about the relationships between trauma, memory, and violence, for example—and also to reframe the story in significant ways. Most importantly, she directs our attention to the agonizing choices faced by Penelope, and more generally to the often devastating consequences for women of “heroic” codes of masculinity. Her play participates in a rich dialogue with works such as Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad and Madeleine Miller’s Circe.

Hamill’s play is an exhilaratingly original retelling of the Odyssey. And yet, for all its startling originality, it remains in many ways truer to the Greek epic than many straight translations. The Homeric poem abounds in ethical ambiguity, encouraging us, sometimes subtly and sometimes less so, to question many of the actions taken by its hero. It also adopts an unambiguously critical perspective on the code of heroic values that appears so rigid and unshakeable in its companion epic, the Iliad. In this sense, Hamill’s Odyssey, casting as it does a critical eye on the cracks that appear, with little pressure, in the polished surface of heroic narratives, remains deeply and undeniably Odyssean in spirit.

David F. Elmer is the Eliot Professor of Greek Literature at Harvard University.

Photos:

Kate Hamill and Nike Imoru at the first rehearsal of The Odyssey: Maggie Hall.