The Penelopiad
Homer's Odyssey is not the only version of the story. Mythic material was originally oral, and also local -- a myth would be told one way in one place and quite differently in another. I have drawn on material other than the Odyssey, especially for the details of Penelope's parentage, her early life and marriage, and the scandalous rumors circulating about her. I've chosen to give the telling of the story to Penelope and to the twelve hanged maids. The maids form a chanting and singing Chorus, which focuses on two questions that must pose themselves after any close reading of the Odyssey: What led to the hanging of the maids, and what was Penelope really up to? The story as told in the Odyssey doesn't hold water: there are too many inconsistencies. I've always been haunted by the hanged maids and, in The Penelopiad, so is Penelope herself. The author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Blind Assassin presents a cycle of stories about Penelope, wife of Odysseus, through the eyes of the twelve maids hanged for disloyalty to Odysseus in his absence.
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- >It is not impossible that Butler's unruffled version is the most faithful.
I admit this quote is out-of-context, you can read here J. L. Borges - The Homeric Versions: https://gwern.net/doc/borges/1932-borges-thehomericversions....
if you speak Spanish or Italian, there are new editions that are translations from Butler, plus Atwood's "Penelopiad" and more, very nice books:
- I had three false starts with Fagles but just tore through Wilson’s translation. Her introduction is really good, too.
A fun postscript is Atwood’s “The Penelopiad.” It’s short and really entertaining.
“Let me add that meat was highly valued among us – the aristocracy ate lots of it, meat, meat, meat, and all they ever did was roast it: ours was not an age of haute cuisine. Oh, I forgot: there was also bread, flatbread that is, bread, bread, bread, and wine, wine, wine. We did have the odd fruit or vegetable, but you’ve probably never heard of these because no one put them into the songs much.”
- If you thought this was interesting, you might also like Margret Atwood's "The Penelopiad"
- Agreed.
Three fiction recommendations:
* The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood
* The Last Question by Isaac Asimov
* Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon
Three non-fiction recommendations:
* Art is Work by Milton Glaser
* Pragmatic Thinking And Learning by Andy Hunt
* The First And Last Freedom by Jiddu Krishnamurti
- > The most memorable creative responses to The Odyssey – such as Euripides’ Helen, Virgil’s Aeneid, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Joyce’s Ulysses, Walcott’s Omeros, Atwood’s Penelopiad, Madeline Miller’s Circe or Lisa Peterson’s play set in a modern migrant camp –
Hey, she forgot to include O Brother, Where Art Thou!
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- I gave a book of her poetry (Penelopiad) to a friend of mine, a talented poet herself. She said it made her angry: this was what she'd been aiming for her whole life, and Atwood made it look easy.
I'm glad that Handmaid's Tale has brought her to a wider audience. It would be easy for her to be shunted into "genre fiction" for that book, or into "chick lit" for most of her other novels. But she's one of the most gifted prose stylists I've ever read. Her nonfiction book Payback, about debt, is actually quite insightful as well -- it came out at the heart of the financial crisis, but was developed before it began and is a very astute criticism of the entire financial system.
