Word: odysseus
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...Diamantopoulos, routed to Athens via Siberia, found the tedious ten-day train ride much duller than Odysseus' wanderings. From his window he saw no Sirens, Circes or Cyclopes, only desolate sidings and troop trains drumming west...
Trelawny and Byron decided to liberate Greece. But when Byron died at Missolonghi, Trelawny was not with him. He had met another "glorious being," a patriotic Greek outlaw named Odysseus, "a Bolivar who might become a Washington." They hunted bears and Turks together. Soon Trelawny (in a Greek kilt) was living with the Odysseus family in their mountain cave, had married Odysseus' half sister. But she was too fond of European fashions, and they parted. "Marriage," wrote Trelawny, "is a most unnatural state of things...
...Calypso was a legendary sea nymph who delayed Odysseus for seven years of his wanderings. Few Trinidadians have heard of her, believe that their Calypso is a native word meaning old French & Spanish music...
Echoed and re-echoed throughout the Cantos are two ancient legends-the Homeric tale of Odysseus' journey through Hades, the Ovidian tale of the seamen who, while kidnapping Bacchus, were transformed to dolphins as their ship, becalmed, sprouted grape-laden vines. The legends appear indiscriminately in ancient. Renaissance and modern dress, according to whichever time or whatever place Poet Pound's eruditely literate, expatriated sensibilities lead him to be thinking about. The resultant confusion is only skin-deep -since to any man, anywhere, any time, life may seem like Hell; and some sea-change in men or matter...
...title is misleading, for it is primarily an anthology of the great knockouts of literature. For straight graphic writing, Homer's account of Odysseus' one-punch victory over Irus, and of Epeios' equally effective slugging of Euryalos, make subsequent reports on fisticuffing seem cloudy and selfconscious. When Euryalos was hit, he leaped up "as when beneath the North Wind's ripple a fish leapeth" and was forthwith dragged from the ring with his legs trailing, spitting clotted blood, his head drooping awry...