Finally, what a cyclops looks like from the front,
at least according to Jacobus Sluperius.
I've finally started reading The Odyssey, in the translation by Emily Wilson that I was hearing such great things about, and it's terribly good. I haven't met the Cyclops yet. I'm only on Book Five, so I haven't even met Odysseus, but I'm also glancing at the eighteenth-century translation by Alexander Pope to compare accounts, and I feel you're missing out if you've only read Pope. He makes no mention, for example, of Calliope's island being covered in celery.
Another account I'd like to draw readers' attention to however – in addition to the three film adaptations mentioned back in October - is this hour-long radio Odyssey penned by my landlord David Reed for his gang "The Penny
Dreadfuls", all of whose comedies have now been put online for ever, it seems. In allowing himself to dwell on the more absurd qualities of Odysseus'
heroism, David's adaptation unwittingly, but beautifully, illustrates
not only the many niggling questions Natalie Haynes would later let Odysseus'
wife Penelope voice in A Thousand Ships, but also Emily Wilson's reasons for working on her own translation. Robert Webb plays Odysseus in this one, and Elpenor - the crew member he meets as a ghost in Hades whom he hadn't even realised was dead - sounds pleasingly like Jim Howick's Pat from Ghosts. Finely focused comic adaptations rather than spoofs – although they spoof the clichés of adaptation very well – I recommend the whole "Penny Dreadfuls" oeuvre. They might make you cleverer. They make me miss writing.
Ooh ooh ooh, I had two of the best work days in recent memory listening to the entire back catalogue of the Penny Dreadfuls! Please thank Mr Reed for me. There were some – including The Odyssey – that I'd completely missed the first time around; I don't think R4 promoted them at all. As goofy freestyle adaptations with strong performances and surprise bursts of pathos they are in the same family as the Muppets – far too small a family but I'll take what I can get! Listening to them all in one go clued me in to the running gag of Margaret Cabourn-Smith's recurring witch character, so that was a nice Easter egg. Do you know if there are any more in the pipeline?
ReplyDeleteI was going to say on the last Cyclops post, while the Greeks were evidently capable of representing faces from the front (cf. masks) it's very difficult to stage the blinding of Polyphemus on a 2D surface in anything but profile view. Odysseus, spear, Polyphemus – to see them all clearly they need to be lined up horizontally, roughly perpendicular to the viewer.
I read somewhere that elephant skulls may have inspired the cyclops myth, as they have one large cavity in front, yet none of the representations of cyclops use elephantine anatomy to negotiate the awkward clash with the nose bridge if you tried to centre one eye on a human. Hmm.
This is as far as I know the first year in a while without a Penny Dreadfuls commish but that might have more to do with David's schedule than anything else.
ReplyDeleteI did consider the problems of showing a cyclops being blinded side on, but you could definitely cheat it out so Odysseus and his spear are still side on. Maybe that would just look like they'd missed.
There is, or at least was, a very convincing sculpture of a cyclops next to a elephant's skull by the jazz escalator in the loppy of the Geological Museum next to the National History Museum, and I've noticed a lot of modern cyclops art can be mapped onto elephants' skulls.