An Iliad
Authors: Alessandro Baricco
An Iliad
Alessandro Baricco was born in Turin in 1958. The author of four previous novels, he has won the Prix Médicis Étranger in France and the Selezione Campiello, Viareggio, and Palazzo al Bosco prizes in Italy. He lives in Rome.
LSO BY
A
LESSANDRO
B
ARICCO
Without Blood
City
Ocean Sea
Silk
A few lines to explain the origin of this text. Some time ago I had the idea of reading the entire
Iliad
in public, to evoke the story as it was originally disseminated in the Homeric world. When I found someone willing to produce such an undertaking (the Romaeuropa Festival, later joined by Torino Settem-bre Musica and Musica per Roma), it was immediately clear to me that in fact the text as it has come down to us was unreadable, at least as I was imagining: it would take some forty hours and an extremely patient audience. So I thought of intervening, to adapt it to a public reading. I had to choose a translation, and was guided by that of Maria Grazia Ciani, because it was in prose, and because, stylistically, it was close to my own feeling. And then I carried out a series of interventions.
First of all, I made some cuts to suit the patience of a modern audience. I almost never cut entire scenes, but confined myself, as far as possible, to removing repetitions, which in the
Iliad are
of course numerous, and concentrating the text a little.
I tried never to summarize but, rather, to create episodes that were more succinct while still made of portions of the original text. Thus the bricks are Homeric but the mortar and the resulting edifice are transformed.
I said that I almost never cut entire scenes. This is the rule, but there is one obvious exception: I removed all the appearances of the gods. As we all know, the gods intrude quite often in the
Iliad,
to direct events and sanction the outcome of the war. They are probably the aspect of the poem most extraneous to a modern sensibility, and often break up the narrative, diffusing a momentum that should rightly be palpable. I wouldn’t have removed them if I had been convinced that they were necessary. But—from a storytelling point of view, and only that—they aren’t. The
Iliad
has a strong structure of human agency that emerges as soon as the gods are sidelined. Behind every action of a god the Homeric text almost always cites a human one that duplicates the divine gesture and brings it, so to speak, down to earth. However much the divine exertions transmit a sense of the incommensurable so familiar in life, the
Iliad
shows a surprising obstinacy, still, in endowing events with a logic that has man as the ultimate actor. If, therefore, the gods are banished from the text, what remains is not so much a godless and inexplicable world as a very human story in which men live out their destiny as if fluent in a ciphered language whose code they know almost in its entirety. In sum: taking the gods out of the
Iliad
is probably not a useful way to gain an understanding of Homeric civilization, but it seems to me a very good way of bringing into relief the essentially human story obscured by the metaphysics of its age, retrieving the story and thus bringing it into the realm of contemporary narrative. As Lukács observed: the novel is the epic of a world deserted by the gods.
The second intervention I made is stylistic. Maria Grazia Ciani’s translation is in a living language rather than a philological jargon. I tried to continue in that vein. From the lexical point of view I tried to eliminate the archaic that would distance us from the heart of things. And then I looked for a rhythm, a consistency of pace, the breath of a particular speed and a special slowness. I did this because I believe that to receive properly a text that comes from so far away in time it is necessary above all to sing it to our own music.
The third intervention is the most obvious, even if not as important as it might seem. I have made the narrative subjective. I chose several characters from the
Iliad
and let them tell the story, supplanting the external, unitary, Homeric narrator. For the most part, it’s a purely technical move: instead of saying, “The father took his daughter in his arms,” in my text the daughter says, “My father took me in his arms.” It’s obviously a stratagem dictated by the work’s intended audience, just as Homer’s method was suited to his. When Homer told his story the mythology and the characters were entirely familiar to his listeners. Today’s audience would on the whole not know the particulars. At the same time, its expectations are for a certain intimacy that Homer cannot provide. At a public reading, giving the reader a modicum of personality to lean on, as it were, prevents him from slipping into a boring impersonality. And for the audience of today, hearing the story from those who lived it makes it easier to become involved.
Fourth intervention: naturally, I couldn’t resist the temptation to make a few additions to the text. You will find them in italics, so that there is no equivocation: they are like forthright restorations, in steel and glass, on a Gothic façade. Quantitatively, these interventions make up a minimal percentage of the text. For the most part, they bring to the surface intimations
that the
Iliad
could not express, given its own conventions, but hid between the lines. At times, they pick up pieces of the story handed down by other, later narrators (Apollodorus, Euripides, Philostratus). The most obvious case, although in a way anomalous, is the final monologue, that of Demodocus. As we know, the
Iliad
ends with the death of Hector and the return of his body to Priam: there is no trace of the horse and the fall of Troy. In the case of a public reading, however, it seemed to me treacherous not to tell how the war finally ended. So I borrowed a scene from the
Odyssey
(Book 8: at the court of the Phaeacians, an old bard, Demodocus, sings of the fall of Troy in the presence of Odysseus), and I set it inside, so to speak, the translation of some passages from
The Destruction of Troy,
by Triphiodorus, a book that probably dates from the fourth century
A.D.
and is not without a post-Homeric elegance.
The text that I thus obtained was read in public in Rome and Turin in the fall of 2004, and will probably continue to be read in the future, whenever some courageous producer finds the money to do it. For the record, I’d like to say that more than ten thousand (paying) people were present at the two readings, and that Italian radio broadcast the Rome performance live, to the great satisfaction of drivers on the road and people at home. Numerous cases were confirmed of people who sat in their parked cars for hours, unwilling to turn off the radio. All right, perhaps they were sick of their families, but, anyway, this is just to say that it went very well.
Now the text of this transformed
Iliad
is about to be translated into various languages, around the world. I realize that this adds paradox to paradox. A Greek text translated into an Italian text, which is adapted into another Italian text and finally translated into a text in, for example, Chinese.
Borges would undoubtedly have been ecstatic. The peril of losing the power of the Homeric original is certainly great. I can’t imagine what will happen. But I’d like to warmly thank the publishers and translators who have undertaken to be my traveling companions on one of the most bizarre literary adventures ever contrived.
To the gratitude I feel toward them I’d like to add a homage to three people who helped me immensely during the gestation of this text. I would probably still be thinking about whether to do the
Iliad
or
Moby-Dick
if Monique Veaute hadn’t decided, with her matchless optimism, that
first
I should do the
Iliad
and then
Moby-Dick.
What I now know about the
Iliad,
and didn’t know before, I owe entirely to Maria Grazia Ciani: she followed this strange project with a kindness that I could never have expected. If, finally, the project became a book, I owe it yet again to the care of Paola Lagossi, my teacher and friend.
A.B., MARCH 2005
I
t all began on a day of violence. For nine years the Achaeans had besieged Troy: often they needed provisions or animals or women, and then they abandoned the siege and went to get what they wanted by plundering the nearby cities. That day it was the turn of Thebes, my city. They seized what they wanted and brought it to their ships.
I was among the women they carried off. I was a beauty: when, in their camp, the Achaean chieftains divided up the spoils, Agamemnon saw me and wanted me for himself. He was the king of kings, and the commander of all the Achaeans: he brought me to his tent, and to his bed. He had a wife, at home, called Clytemnestra. He loved her. But that day he saw me and wanted me for himself.
Some days afterward my father came to the camp. His name was Chryses, and he was a priest of Apollo. He was an old man. He brought splendid gifts and asked the Achaeans, in
exchange, to set me free. As I said: he was an old man and a priest of Apollo. All the Achaean chiefs, after seeing and listening to him, were in favor of accepting the ransom and honoring the noble figure who had come to them as a suppliant. Only one among them was not won over: Agamemnon. He rose and railed brutally against my father, saying to him, “Go away, old man, and don’t show yourself again. I will not give up your daughter: she will grow old in Argos, in my house, far from her homeland, working at the loom and sharing my bed. Go now, if you want to go with your life.”
My father, frightened, obeyed. He went away in silence and disappeared along the shore of the sea—you might have said
into
the sound of the sea. Then, suddenly, death and suffering fell upon the Achaeans. For nine days, arrows flew, killing men and beasts, and the pyres of the dead blazed without respite. On the tenth day, Achilles summoned the army to a meeting. In front of all the men he said, “If things continue like this, we’ll have to launch our ships and go home in order to escape death. But let’s consult a prophet, or a seer, or a priest who can tell us what is happening and free us from this scourge.”
Then Calchas rose, the most famous among the seers. He knew all the things that have been, are, and will be. He was a wise man. He said, “You want to know the reason for this, Achilles, and I will tell you. But swear that you will protect me, because what I’m going to say will offend a man who has power over all the Achaeans and whom all the Achaeans obey. I’m risking my life: swear that you will protect me.”