THE ODYSSEY: A MODERN SEQUEL (824 pp.)—Nikos Kazantzakis, translated by Kimon Friar—Simon & Schuster ($10).
Masterpieces of literature are hard to come by and even harder to recognize. This is particularly true when they are written in verse, and when they presumably lose their pristine shine in the process of translation. It has taken 20 years for The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel to reach English in hexameter from its original modern Greek. The poem has not been translated into any other language and so is virtually unknown outside its native Greece. But in it, chances are, U.S. readers have a masterpiece at hand, in a fine translation.
When Author Nikos Kazantzakis died last year at 74, he was known to U.S. readers mostly for his novel Zorba the Greek, a flashing testament to the proposition that every minute of life should be lived to the sensuous, sensual hilt. At least twice, reportedly, he failed to win the Nobel Prize by the narrowest of margins. By taking for his own the name of Homer's poem, by adopting Odysseus as his own hero, Kazantzakis has underlined the audacity of his undertaking. His 33,333 lines measure its vastness. But the poem's real boldness lies not so much in affinities or in size as in what it sets out to do: to relate man to the earth and his own appetites, to describe his need for God and the tortuous spiritual route of the search, and finally to show how man attempts to exorcise his private and worldly devils in a never-ending quest, not for peace of mind but for freedom of soul.
The Birth of Doubt. Author Kazantzakis begins just about where Homer left off. Odysseus has come home, slain Penelope's suitors and re-established his authority. Now Penelope, whom he has not seen for 19 years, bores him. His gentle son Telemachus seems soft and dull and disapproves of his cunning, brutal father who lives as if life were a permanent state of war. With five devoted and adventurous companions, Odysseus builds a new boat and leaves his island home to begin a second odyssey, which is to end in a spiritual trial by fire and death.
He has no plan, no itinerary. He visits Helen of Troy and her husband Menelaus in Sparta. Helen is still beautiful, but the King has become a fat and greedy landlord whose subjects are on the edge of revolt. Helen and Odysseus are, up to a point, two of a kind. When he suggests that they run off, she agrees, and they slip away to Crete. There the King is old and sterile; there, too, the people talk revolution and the blond barbarians from the north are muscling in. The old King marries Helen, and Odysseus, after adventures of fierce brutality, leaves Crete without her and sails to Egypt.