An Iliad Read online

  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.

  ALSO BY ALESSANDRO BARICCO

  Without Blood

  City

  Ocean Sea

  Silk

  Contents

  A Note on the Text

  Chryseis

  Thersites

  Helen

  Pandarus • Aeneas

  The Nurse

  Nestor

  Achilles

  Diomedes • Odysseus

  Patroclus

  Sarpedon • Telamonian Ajax • Hector

  Phoenix

  Antilochus

  Agamemnon

  The River

  Andromache

  Priam

  Demodocus

  Another Kind of Beauty: Note on War

  A Note on the Text

  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

  Chryseis

  It 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.”

  Achilles told him not to be afraid, but to say what he knew. He said, “As long as I live, no one among the Achaeans will dare raise a hand against you. No one. Not even Agamemnon.”

  Then the seer took courage and said, “When we offended that old man, suffering came upon us. Agamemnon refused the ransom and would not give up the daughter of Chryses: and suffering came upon us. There is only one way to rid ourselves of it: restore to Chryses that girl with the sparkling eyes, before it’s too late.” Thus he spoke, and he sat down.

  Agamemnon rose, his heart brimming with black fury and his eyes flashing fire. He looked at Calchas with hatred and said, “Prophet of doom, you have never given me a favorable prophecy. You like to reveal only evil, never good. And now you want to deprive me of Chryseis, whom I desire more than my own wife, Clytemnestra, and who rivals her in beauty, intelligence, and nobility of spirit. Must I give her up? I will do so, because I want the army to be saved. I will do it, if so it must be. But find me a prize to replace her immediately, because it is not right that I alone, among the Achaeans, should remain without honor. I want another prize for myself.”

  Then Achilles said, “How can we find you a prize, Agamemnon? The spoils have already been divided, and it wouldn’t be fitting to start over again from the beginning. Give back the girl and we’ll repay you three, four times over when we capture Ilium.”

  Agamemnon shook his head. “You don’t deceive me, Achilles. You want to keep your prize and leave me with nothing. No, I will give back that girl and then I’ll come and take what I like, and maybe I’ll take something from Ajax, or Odysseus, or maybe I’ll take something from you.”

  Achilles looked at him with hatred. “You insolent, greedy man,” he said. “And you expect the Achaeans to follow you into battle? I didn’t come here to fight the Trojans—they haven’t done anything to me. They haven’t stolen oxen or horses from me, or destroyed my harvest: my land is divided from theirs by shadowy mountains and a roaring sea. I’m here because I followed you, arrogant man, to defend Menelaus’s honor and yours. And you, you bastard, dog face, you couldn’t care less, and threaten to take away the prize I fought for? No, it’s better that I return home rather than stay to be dishonored, fighting to win treasures and riches for you.”

  Then Agamemnon answered, “Go if you want, I won’t beg you to stay. Others will gain honor at my side. I don’t like you, Achilles: you love quarrel, strife, war. You’re strong, it’s true, but that’s a gift. Leave, go home and rule in your own house. You are nothing to me, and I’m not afraid of your anger. Let me tell you this: I will send Chryseis back to her father, on my ship, with my men. But then I’ll come to your tent and take for myself the beautiful Briseis, your prize, so that you’ll know who is the stronger, and all men will learn to fear me.”

  Thus he spoke. And it was as if he had struck Achilles a blow to the heart. And the son of Peleus was about to unsheathe his sword and certainly would have killed Agamemnon if at the last minute he had not mastered his fury and stopped his hand on the silver hilt. He looked at Agamemnon and in a rage said:

  “You with the face of a dog, the heart of a deer—you coward. I swear on this scepter that the day will come when the Achaeans, all of them, will long for me. When they are dropping under Hector’s assaults, they will long for me. And you will suffer for them, but will be able to do nothing. You will only remember the day you insulted the best of the Achaeans, and go mad with rage and remorse. That day will come, Agamemnon. I swear it.”

  Thus he spoke, and hurled the gold-studded scepter to the ground.

  When the assembly broke up, Agamemnon ordered one of his ships brought down to the sea, assigned to it twenty men, and put in charge Odysseus, the wily one. Then he came to me, took me by the hand, and led me to the ship. “Beautiful Chry-seis,” he said. And he let me return to my father and my homeland. He stood there, on the shore, watching the ship set sail.

  When he saw it disappear over the horizon he called two men among his loyal followers and ordered them to go to the tent of Achilles, to take Briseis by the hand and lead her away. He said to them, “If Achilles refuses to give her up, then tell him that I will come and get her, and it will be much worse for him.” The two soldiers were called Talthybios and Eurybates. They set off reluctantly along the shore of the sea and finally reached the camp of the Myrmidons. They found Achilles sitting beside his tent and his black ship. They stood before him and said nothing, because they were frightened and in awe of the king. So it was he who spoke.

  “Come,” he said. “You’re not at fault in all this— Agamemnon is. Don’t be afraid.” Then he called Patroclus and told him to fetch Briseis and hand her over to the two soldiers, so that they could lead her away. “You are my witnesses,” he said, looking at them. “Agamemnon is foolish. He doesn’t think about what will happen, he doesn’t think about when he might need me to defend the Achaeans and their ships. To him nothing matters in the past or the future. You are my witnesses, that man is a fool.”

  The men set off, retracing their path beside the swift ships of the Achaeans, drawn up on the beach. Behind them walked beautiful Briseis. Sadly she went—and reluctant.

  Achilles watched them go. And
then he went and sat alone on the shore of the white-foaming sea, and burst into tears, with the infinite ocean before him. He was the lord of the war and the terror of every Trojan. But he burst into tears and like a child began calling his mother. From far away she came, then, and appeared to him. She sat beside him and stroked him gently. Softly, she called him by name. “My son, why did I bring you into the world, I, your unhappy mother? Your life will be short enough. If only you could spend it without tears and without sorrow.”

  Achilles asked, “Can you save me, Mother? Can you do it?”

  But his mother said only, “Listen to me: stay here, near the ships, and don’t go into battle. Hold on to your anger against the Achaeans and don’t yield to your desire for war. I tell you: one day they will offer you shining gifts, and they’ll give you three times as many, for the insult you received.” Then she disappeared, and Achilles sat there, alone. His soul was filled with rage for the injustice he had suffered, and his heart was consumed by yearning for the cry of battle and the tumult of war.

  I saw my city again when the ship, commanded by Odysseus, entered the harbor. The sails were lowered, the ship approached the mooring under oars. The crew threw the anchors over and tied the stern ropes. First they unloaded the animals for sacrifice to Apollo. Then Odysseus took me by the hand and led me to land. He guided me to the altar of Apollo, where my father was waiting for me. He let me go, and my father took me in his arms, overcome with joy.

  Odysseus and his men spent the night beside their ship. At dawn they raised the sails to the wind and departed. I saw the ship speed lightly as the waves foamed around the prow. I saw it disappear over the horizon. Can you imagine what my life was then? Every so often I dream of dust, weapons, riches, and young heroes. It is always the same place, on the shore of the sea. There is the smell of blood and of men. I live there, and the king of kings throws to the winds his life and his people, for me: for my beauty and my charms. When I wake there is my father at my side. He caresses me and says, It’s over, my daughter. It’s all over.