Homer on the news-stand. One can buy a video cassette of the condensed TV version of the Odyssey, produced in eight episodes in 1968 with Franco Rossi as director.
The leading actors were Bekim Fehmiu (Ulysses), Irene Papas (Penelope), Renaud Verley (Telemachus), Scilla Gabel (Helen), Juliette Mayniel (Circe), Barbara Gregoriani (Nausicaa). The critics were not very kind about this “colossal” but the public liked it, with an average of 16.6 million viewers per episode.
This reference to current news is a starting point to talk about Homer and to say that the Iliad and Odyssey are not just two great poems; they have been touched by a still higher destiny, that of entering the history of the human imagination, since ever and for ever. Age prevents me from verifying certain experiences, but if I think of the generation to which I belong, to the generation that studied in secondary school in the ‘thirties and ‘forties, I can say in all sincerity that from Homer we often received a happy wish to reverse reality. On Sundays we were divided between fans of Juventus and fans of Bologna, between fans of Milan and fans of Ambrosiana, as Inter was called in those days, but on other days we were fans of Hector and Achilles, Aeneas and Ajax. The timid were for Hector and Aeneas, the brawlers for Achilles and Ajax. It was too soon for us to love Ulysses, too complicated a personality, poised between cunning and nostalgia.
Adolescence does not care for subtle games of ambiguity, for a psychology that does not consent to instinctive choices. I do not know if that was a hidden way of playing war. Our days were full of pointed lances, swords and shields, all imaginary. Behind the severe felt hats of our teachers, imagination saw plumed helmets. Certainly they were signals, symbols, of war. But let us ask ourselves, of what war? A war where, every so often, miracles happened, where deities popped up out of grey veils of mist, where beautiful slave girls spread ointments on the bodies of warriors, fortune tellers examined the viscera of animals and dawn had always ‘rose-coloured fingers’.
The burning of Troy was little more than a bonfire to young readers like ourselves. Precisely because the magic filter of poetry still further increased the distance of millenniums, the events of which Homer sung lost their sense of blood and horror, of violence and tears. Achilles refreshed himself in the river where we bathed in summer. Nausicaa’s ball bounced between our feet as we dribbled it along in our games of football. Andromache pronounced her sad amorous presages with the tones of some actress seen at the cinema, a Greta Garbo, a Norma Shearer. The Iliad and the Odyssey thus entered our lives and when, after fateful 1939, it was our turn to see close up what real war was like, we understood that Homer had not prepared us for the ‘night of reason’ nor the infinite bloody desolation of our world. On the contrary, Homer had made possible the dear fantasies of the Greek encampments lined up in the courtyard of our home. Homer had ensured that every high wall, every gloomy residue of ancient fortifications from other epochs, became the walls of Troy, that immense bastion encountered in the verses of his poems.
It is now fashionable to argue that personalities like Hector and Achilles, Aeneas and Ajax, correspond to our Superman, our Mazinga, our E.T. (the unforgettable and moving Extra-Terrestrial of Steven Spielberg’s film, abandoned by his people on the earth and hidden through the complicity of a child). Always in the name of rejection of the present (or inability to understand the present), the generation to which I belong sought in the remote past (that is in Homer) what today is sought for in the remote future. The comparison is undoubtedly a fertile one and would lend itself to infinite variations: yesterday the mask of the conquering or conquered hero; today the mask of the robot or the extraterrestrial. Yesterday and today, pretence, acting, camouflage, something that creates a distance from reality. I confess it: I do not feel able to accept this comparison. A difference must be maintained between cartoon strip and poetry. I may have cancelled the plain of Troy or the island loved by Ulysses from my atlas; I may have forgotten the swords and shields forged in Haephestus’ smithy, Cassandra’s sad prophecies, the land of the Lotus Eaters and the fruit that led to forgetfulness, Nestor’s wisdom; Priam’s death at the hand of the cruel Neoptolemos… but the first verses of the Iliad (Sing, oh goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus, that brought countless / ills upon the Achaeans) and then the first verses of the Odyssey (Tell me, O muse, of the ingenious hero who travelled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy; many cities did he visit, and many were the nations with whose manners and customs he was acquainted, moreover he suffered much by sea while trying to save his own life…) suffice to recompose the whole. The poetry makes the shades eternal. Homer can count on this our secret indestructible fidelity. Edgar Lee Masters (1869-1950) published the Spoon River Anthology in 1915. Inspired by the literature of the sepulchral epigrams of the Greek “Palatine Anthology”, Masters’s work is composed of scarcely rhymed verses from the tombstones of a small town in the Midwest called Spoon River. The book enjoyed immediate and resounding success. The dead “all, all are sleeping on the hill” but on the poet’s invitation they awake and recount their stories, their hells, their purgatories and their paradises.
One of the voices of Spoon River is indicated as simply that of blind Jack, whose destiny is linked to the stories of two other unfortunates, Butch Weldy and Jack McGuire, spoken of in other epigraphs. We are with Blind Jack, who had played music all day at the town fair. On the way home, Weldy and McGuire, totally drunk, insisted that Jack must play another song and in the meantime whipped up the horses. Their carriage fell into a ditch and Jack was crushed between the wheels.
We are at the end of the epigraph. Jack is speaking: “There’s a blind man here with a brow / as big and white as a cloud. / And all we fiddlers from the highest to the lowest, / writers of music and tellers of stories, / sit at his feet, / and hear him sing of the fall of Troy.
When, as often happens, I quote these verses that exalt the immortality of Homer, I feel a shiver of emotion.

(trad. Interpres sas Giussano)