The Odyssey's Slow Movement

Abstract

The Odyssey's Slow Movement M. J. Fitzgerald (bio) Until confined by the pandemic, I had not read my father's Postscript to his translation of the Odyssey, written almost sixty years ago: it is dated Perugia, June 1962. We had moved to the house below the hamlet of San Fortunato della Collina near Perugia just before Christmas 1961, and soon after the Epiphany, the four of us who were attending local schools enjoyed the measles that quarantined us well into the beginning of spring. The two older siblings, already at boarding schools, escaped. While my father was composing the postscript up in the attic studio, at the pinewood architect's desk facing the window, the Tiber valley lay before him, all the way to the Subasio hill with Assisi nestled at its foot. It lay before us all as the weather got milder, when we stepped out of the house onto the terrace, letting the screen door slam. The air of that last childhood spring is always clear and cool, the sky blue with tones of pink, the distant ancient mountains, eroded by time, still miraculously blue green. In memory, rain belongs to an earlier period, where it slides forever down latticed panes in windows that look out to the stormy sea from the house overlooking the Mediterranean where we lived for a number of years before moving to Umbria. In the Postscript, my father theorized a division of the epic into six blocks, based on his own particular way of deducing the length of performances in ancient times, informed by Milman Parry, the Harvard scholar who transformed the study of Homer, and who was a mentor and long-lasting influence: If you will make the effort to imagine this Greek as still virgin of any visual signs at all, associated with no letters, no Greek characters, no script, no print—as purely and simply expressive sound, you will be [End Page 7] able to perceive it in the air, its true medium, and to hear how it shapes and tempers the air by the virtue of stops and tones. (493) My father calculated how many lines could be performed in an hour and based the division on the assumption that each part would have lasted around five hours. The division blocks together Books I to IV, V to VIII, IX to XII, XIII to XVI, XVII to XX, XXI to XXIV. When I read it, I was struck at how my father seemed almost ambivalent, and a little defensive in naming one of the blocks, Books XIII to XVI, The Slow Movement: it was the only block he named, almost as if he could not stop himself from thinking of those four books somehow as fillers, dragging on the poem in a mechanistic effort to reach the final stage, to move the protagonists and get them to the same place at the same time. This is understandable if the assumption is that ancient audiences, just like today's audience, are uninterested in nuance. Did he see the need for the slowness of the movement, and yet wished it were not so, and was eager for the action to pick up? During the lockdown, I also finally read my father's translation of the epic. Trained by a professional career teaching Creative Writing that had fostered a technical interest in the writing of fiction, I noticed how almost all the action in the poem is in the remembered past, and how little action there is in the narrative present, until the righteous slaughter of the suitors; and I noticed that all the books of the slow movement are in the narrative present, with no epic flashbacks. Book xiii during the preparations for the overnight clear sailing between Skheria and Ithaka, the tenderness of the encounter between Odysseus and Nausikaa is replicated in this first book of the slow movement on a different note from Odysseus' first encounter with her in Book VI: now the crew of the ship … God, the man is tired: it is specifically recorded that after Odysseus left Kalypso on the fragile raft, seventeen nights and days in the open water he sailed, before...