Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic In the opening moments of The Return, the new movie from Italian director Uberto Pasolini, actor Ralph Fiennes washes up on a Greek beach. He is long-haired, naked and covered in scars. The Odyssey, the inspiration for Pasolini’s film, is a Greek epic poem written around the 7th century BC which invites readers both ancient and modern to question whether wartime killers can reintegrate into peacetime. Fiennes plays Odysseus, the poem’s central hero, as a decaying warrior who has spent 10 years sabotaging his voyage home to his island of Ithaca, out of fear of looking his family in the eye.The Odyssey survives as 12,109 lines of scanned verse, probably composed by a single poet we call Homer before evolving through an oral performance tradition. It is told from the competing perspectives of Odysseus and his son Telemachus, who has grown up without him. The wanderings of Odysseus — 10 years fighting the War of Troy, 10 years lost at sea — turn him from Greek civilisation’s most suave intellectual into a dishevelled brute.Yet the poem and many of its adaptations are also celebrated for an interest in the domestic space and the world of women. In The Return, Odysseus’s wife Penelope is played by Juliette Binoche; Pasolini intersects scenes of the crashing waves around the beaches of Ithaca with shots emphasising the rise and fall of her loom. In modern literature, Odysseus’s visits to the hearths of different women across Greece have provided the key source material for a new generation of feminist novelists, eager to retell these stories from the female perspective.The original poet of ‘The Odyssey’ imbues Helen with magic power and feminine mystique. Barker sees a victim of domestic violenceThe most successful recent example of Homeric retellings remains Pat Barker’s acclaimed trilogy of novels about the Trojan War. In The Women of Troy, the second in Barker’s trilogy, we meet Helen, said to be the most beautiful woman of a generation and blamed in Greek mythology for inspiring the conflict. All versions agree that Helen disappeared from the home of her Greek husband, the Spartan king Menelaus, then turned up on the other side of the Aegean Sea in the bed of the Trojan prince Paris: whether voluntarily or not has been contested by storytellers for nearly three millennia. When Barker introduces us to Helen, she has been reclaimed by Menelaus, seized from the ruins of a defeated Troy.Barker’s Helen is desperate to lay her hands on drugs. “There are drugs that make people forget — even if somebody they love dies, they don’t feel it, they don’t cry, they don’t mourn.” The world believes her to be reconciled with Menelaus, but Barker’s narrator notices layers of bruises across her throat — “from angry red fingermarks all the way through blue and black to the mottled yellow and purple of old injuries”. Keeping Menelaus drugged may be her only salvation. “When I looked at her,” reflects the narrator, “I didn’t see the destructive harpy of the stories and gossip; I saw a woman fighting for her life.”For any reader, the scene is distressing. To those in the know, it has added impact as a dark inversion of a scene from Homer. Barker’s Troy trilogy is most overtly inspired by The Iliad, the first Homeric epic, which focuses on the military engagements of the Trojan War. Yet this vignette of Helen as domestic drug-pusher comes straight from The Odyssey. In the original, desperate for news of his father, Telemachus visits Menelaus and Helen, who are living together back in Sparta. Homer, like Barker, attributes to Helen a knowledge of drugs. Unlike Barker, he presents her home life with Menelaus as a domestic idyll. When Helen offers her husband drugs, it is as a concerned wife attempting to soothe away the horrors of PTSD — as far as a Mediterranean Iron Age poet can describe such a dynamic. The original poet of The Odyssey imbues Helen with magic power and feminine mystique; Barker, a 21st-century feminist novelist, sees a victim of domestic violence.Barker was not the first feminist novelist to take on Homer. In 2005, Margaret Atwood retold the story of Odysseus’s homecoming from the perspective of Penelope in her novella The Penelopiad. The book was notable for also giving voice to 12 maids mentioned only in passing by Homer, hanged by Telemachus for the crime of sexual intimacy with the thugs occupying Ithaca in Odysseus’s absence. Atwood acknowledges what Homer did not: that like many women living under occupation, they have been victims, not collaborators.This is a theme that also runs through Barker’s novels, and through Madeline Miller’s magnificent 2018 novel Circe. In Homer, Circe is a witch who turns Odysseus’s comrades into pigs when they land on the island where she lives alone; Miller superbly reimagines her life as a story of survival and self-defence. Unlike some other feminist retellings, Miller’s novel is notable for its portrayal of a heroine with agency. Barker’s narrators negotiate small compromise after small compromise; Miller’s heroine fights back.Miller’s novel also avoids the trap of condemning Odysseus as yet another male oppressor. Feminist writers who dismiss Odysseus are missing out on a gift of a character. Odysseus is the perfect hero for the modern age. He is not macho but clever. Homer announces in the opening lines of The Odyssey that he will tell the story of “a man with many tricks”; Emily Wilson, our generation’s most significant translator of Homer, translates this as “a complicated man”. In Odyssey, an enjoyable new telling of his story for beginners, written by the actor Stephen Fry, Odysseus’s patron goddess Athena greets him affectionately as “you rogue, you trickster, you huckster, you charlatan, you cheat, you devious two-faced fraud”. Nonetheless, Fry cuts the massacre of the maids, rather than tackle its moral challenges.Like modern heroes, Odysseus is self-made. Although his tiny island of Ithaca grants him the title of “king”, it can contribute only scant resources to the grand Greek coalition that lands in Troy. Odysseus earns his place at the highest councils of this alliance not because he musters as many fighters as other regional kings, but because he has the sharpest mind. In a modern west built on the ideal of meritocracy, Odysseus flatters all our self-conceptions.By the aftermath of the first world war, English-language writers were already turning to The Odyssey as a guide to writing about postwar societies. Its non-linear structure has also made it a gift for modernist writers, most famously James Joyce, whose 1922 novel Ulysses recast Odysseus’s wanderings around the Greek seas as a day in the life of Leopold Bloom, a bibulous Jewish drifter roving around the city of Dublin.Like many male writers, Joyce was also drawn to the poem’s concern with father-and-son dynamics. Readers can find a more positive father-son story in The Odyssey: A Father, a Son and an Epic, an award-winning memoir by the sharp-eyed classicist Daniel Mendelsohn, whose own translation of The Odyssey, likely to foreground its formal structures, is expected next year.As western societies continue to feel their foundations shake, the next generation of novelists will probably take inspiration from The Odyssey’s depiction of a civilisation in crisis. In his 2019 Booker-shortlisted novel An Orchestra of Minorities, the Nigerian writer Chigozie Obioma casts Odysseus as a modern migrant, trafficked from Nigeria to Northern Cyprus and learning to survive. We owe Barker, Atwood and Miller a debt of gratitude for reminding us that a narrative about the aftermath of warfare is inevitably a narrative about the trauma of sexual violence. Nonetheless, it may be time to return Odysseus — migrant, hustler, survivor — to the centre of his story.Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café and subscribe to our podcast Life & Art wherever you listen
