Friday, February 24, 2012

Comparison Studies Lesson 5 Part C: The Odysseus of The Odyssey


Lesson Five C: The Odysseus of The Odyssey

Materials needed: With Rough Gods and access to linked documents

Read and paraphrase Odysseus's encounter with Circe from The Odysseybook 10 320-348 (lines 422-457 in the linked translation).

Read and paraphrase the following translation from The Odyssey, Book 19, lines 560-569 (trans Palmer) wherein Penelope is talking with a disguised Odysseus about a dream she had regarding Odysseus's return:

Visitor, fantasies have been known to be worthless.
Chaotically gossiping, they are born to our minds
But not any one of all the whole has fulfilled us,
For doubts and double doors are the stuff of feeble dreams:
One door is worked out of the horns of base animals,
But the other is of the horn of the elephant:
Those dreams that come through the sawn horn of the elephant
Elude there and then, bearing unfulfilled, fruitless words.

But those dreams that come out of the polished door of horn
Sound true and fulfill what any mortal in them hears.
It was not, I believe, from there that my dread dream came,
But what a welcome it would be to my family
If only such a sound vision would swiftly arrive!

Re-read and paraphrase "Odysseus & Circe" and "Odysseus & Penelope" from With Rough Gods

Answer the following questions:

3: The speaker of "Odysseus & Penelope" is intentionally ambiguous. How does that ambiguity enhance the experience of the poem? How does it match with Palmer's description of both Odysseus and Penelope against Homer's depiction of the two characters?

4: What differences and similarities can you see in the Odysseus presented by Homer in The Iliad and the one in The Odyssey? How can you explain them? How would Homer have explained them? How are these differences and similarities continued by Palmer in With Rough Gods?

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