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Rivalry with God. Many a devout reader may find this note jarringly impious and pessimistic. Kazantzakis is neither. Like Zorba, Odysseus exults in life, and even during his lowest moments he is seldom without gusto. There are times when he thinks he is better than God, times when he thinks that man ought to help God rather than the other way around. He never accepts defeat:
"You fool, how in your greatest need
can you abandon
most glorious man who lives and fights
to give you shape?
You fill our hearts with cries and vehement
desires,
then sink your ears in silence and refuse to listen;
but man's soul will fight on, you coward,
without your help!"
His heart leapt high, spurned Death, and
in the black air cut
a thousand roads to fly through on a
thousand wings,
then, screeching like a hawk, strove to
unwind what fate had woven.
Kazantzakis labored on and off over a period of twelve years to produce a book of singular power and beauty. Translator Kimon Friar, a poet and scholar of Greek descent, received from Kazantzakis himself the ultimate praise: that the translation was as good as the original. Whether or not that is so, as it now reads, The Odyssey is by all odds the most impressive literary achievement of many a year. It bears out the feeling Kazantzakis once expressed, in describing a form of spiritual conversion he underwent during a solitary retreat in the mountains: "Since then I have felt ashamed to commit any vulgar act, to lie, to be overcome by fears, because I know that I also have a great responsibility in the progress of the world. I work and think now with certainty, for I know that my contribution, because it follows the profound depths of the universe, will not go lost."