One more ode to one more man

Struggling with the second ode of Sophocles' Antigone this week, I came across this, and nearly wept with delight:

Many terribly quiet customers exist but none more

terribly quiet than Man:

his footsteps pass so perilously soft across the sea

in marble winter,

up the stiff blue waves and every Tuesday

down he grinds the unastonishable earth

with horse and shatter.

Shatters too the cheeks of birds and traps them in his forest headlights,

salty silvers roll into his net, he weaves it just for that,

this terribly quiet customer.

He dooms

animals and mountains technically,

by yoke he makes the bull bend, the horse to its knees.

And utterance and thought as clear as complicated air and

moods that make a city moral, these he taught himself.

The snowy cold he knows to flee

and every human exigency crackles as he plugs it in:

every outlet works but

one.

Death stays dark.

Death he cannot doom.

Fabrications notwithstanding.

Evil,

good,

laws,

gods,

honest oath taking notwithstanding.

Hilarious in his high city

you see him cantering just as he please,

the lava up to here.

Anne Carson

The New Yorker reads Mason, Malouf and Banville

Mussy notes this New Yorker piece, in which Daniel Mendelsohn reviews three recent fictions working with classical Greek materials: John Banville’s “The Infinities,” David Malouf’s “Ransom,” Zachary Mason’s “The Lost Books of the Odyssey."

Among Mendelsohn's fine observations noted:

The first adjective in the first line of the twelve thousand one hundred and nine that make up the Odyssey is polytropos, which means, in the context, “clever”—literally, “of many turns.” Both are apt modifiers for the poem’s hero, who is subject to many detours and is also Greek myth’s preëminent talker, fibber, and plotter. If the Iliad, set during a war, keeps showing us men’s bodies, either in frenzied action or stilled by death, the Odyssey, set in war’s aftermath, can be described as a poem about the mind—a celebration of the intellectual and verbal qualities that we might need to survive in a world uneasily settling back into the forgotten habits of peacetime. And a quality of mind that the Odyssey admires extravagantly is the ability to tell a good story. It’s easy to forget that nearly all the famous adventures we associate with Odysseus—the encounters with the Cyclops, the witch Calypso, Scylla and Charybdis, the Lotus Eaters—are narrated not by the poem’s invisible narrator, the “I” who invokes the Muse in the first line, but by Odysseus, about himself. At a certain point in his voyage, he finds himself on an island inhabited by refined, pleasure-loving natives called the Phaeacians, and, one night over dinner, he tells them the story of his homecoming thus far. This takes up four entire books of Homer’s poem—which is to say that much of the Odyssey is a kind of epic performance within the epic, a long flashback in which the “poet” and the hero are one and the same person.

Which adds resonance to some of the parallels we've noted between Milton's Satan and Odysseus.