When, in theOdyssey, Telemachus goes to looking for news of his father who has been lost for ten years, old Nestor tells a curious episode relating to Agamemnon, who on his return from Troy was killed by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Egisto: leaving for the war, Agamemnon would have entrusted his wife to an aedo, a poet, to provide for her. “But when fate conquered her, to the point of being tamed, / then, led the singer to a desert island, / (Egisto) abandoned him in prey and booty to birds, / and, eager, willingly took her to his home “(III, 269-272).
It is the passage from which Alice Oswald starts in her latest collection of poetry, Nobody (ie Nobody, Ulysses), affirming that it “lives in the dark turbidity between the two stories”, that of Ulysses and that of Agamemnon. “His voice is blown by the wind and damaged by the water, as if someone proposed to sing the Odyssey but was then led, by oars, to a stony island and never discovered the end of the poem.”
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A little poem in the depths
In reality, Nobody it is a poem in which Clytemnestra and Philoctetes also vibrate, as well as the shadows that Ulysses encounters in Hades. It is, truly, the sea, which “has no beginning” and which “never ends”: it echoes near the port of Ithaca, taking on the aspect of Old, spreading over the whole earth. Those who live near it, the sea “dries them, shrinks them, hardens them, simplifies them, half-buries them.” The sea contains everything: “transparent tufts of things with oculiform organs”, “shells of extraordinary beauty” and the scent of orange at sunset, and herons and sea crows, and endless water.
Oswald, who graduated from Oxford in “Classics” and is now professor of Poetry at that same university, had already celebrated the sea in Woods, etc., of 2005, (“What is water in the eyes of water?”), and the river in Dart (2002) and in A Sleepwalk on the Severn (2009). In Nobody back to the poems whose mythology he had touched upon in Falling Awake (2016: “Tithonus”) and that he had faced head-on with Memorial: a collection with a very strong impact on the mind that thinks about death and on the ear that listens. Perfectly edited and translated by Pretto and Sonzogni, Memorial is, the author tells us, “a translation of the atmosphere ofIliade, not his story ». It is a translation (better, “transcreation”, as wanted by another who had tried in the same undertaking, the Brazilian Haroldo De Campos), of the enargeia of the Homeric poem, of the “unbearable brilliance of reality” emanating fromIliade.
Two hundred names of warriors
More than two hundred names of Greek and Trojan warriors who died in the War are listed in the book, from Protesilaus to Hector: all simple soldiers. A “memorial” is dedicated to each of them, a obituary, and each of these is based on a Homeric simile of rare power. “The first to die was Protesilaus / Resolute man who soon rushed into the dark / Many sailed with him on forty black ships / Leaving behind those flowered cliffs / Where a bed of grass covers everything / Piraso Itone Pteleo Antrone / He died in the leap of those who seek the landing first / He left the half-built house / His wife ran out clawing his face / Podarce the less capable brother / He took the lead but it was a long time ago / He has been lying in the Negro land for thousands of years // As the wind rustles / The waves begin to roar / A long note gradually louder / The water exhales a deep sigh / As a jolt of earth / When I zephyr a cross field / Voluptuous and curious / Without anything to find “.