Nikos Kazantzakis' Odysseys

Some light bedtime reading?

The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel was translated by Kimon Friar. What an undertaking, for both the poet and for the translator! At 33,333 lines, too challenging for me, I have to admit. Here's a synopsis (I don't like that unfortunate description of the poem as 'the greatest epic of the white race'- what an absurd comment; I suggest the Kazantzakis Museum Foundation removes that pronto).

I prefer to go back to Zorba the Greek, Report to Greco or The Fratricides.

The last novel, The Fratricides or I aderfofades, is set in Epirus (translation Athena Gianakas Dallas, Oxford, 1964):

Τα  κορµιά  τους κι  οι  ψυχές  τους είχαν  πάρει  τα  χρώµατα  και  τη  σκληράδα  της πέτρας  

"Stark and ashen, the houses were barren, stone piled on stone, their doors so low one had to stoop to enter – and within was darkness. The courtyards smelled of horse manure, goat droppings, and the heavy stench of man. Not a single house had a tree in its courtyard, or a songbird in a cage, or a flowerpot in the window, with perhaps a root of basil or a red carnation; everywhere, only stone upon stone. And the souls who lived within these stones were hard and inhospitable. Mountains, houses, people – they were all granite...They, like cliffweeds, had hooked on to these inhuman grey rocks and would not be torn away. As long as the world endured, these hard-headed people of Epirus would not let go.
   Their bodies and their souls were the colour and the hardness of stone; they had become one with it, soaked by rain, tanned by the sun, covered by snow; all together, as though they were all people, as though they were all stones."

Get the picture? Perhaps that's why I feel so much at home in a stony, austere Epirot mountain village! In fact the warm-hearted, hospitable people of Epirus are not like that at all. Maybe it was the author's Cretan imagination, and he was writing about the Greek Civil War. He began writing the novel in 1949. Many people will tell you that that period still has a powerful influence upon the present (i.e. the election campaign).

I prefer to re-read at least the first few pages of "Zorba the Greek" (try pages 15-16) or "The Fratricides" in the original Greek rather than tackle the daunting "The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel", even in English. I don't suggest you try reading it online. One day I'll try the printed text again.

N. Kazantzakis and I.T.Kakridis also translated Homer's Odyssey into Modern Greek