Word: polyphemus
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...offered to "make the man immortal, ageless, all his days." But Odysseus says no. He wants to go home. Those who have never read any translation of the Odyssey will find much that is familiar in Fagles' retelling of the hero's homeward adventures. The cannibalistic one-eyed giant Polyphemus; Circe, the temptress who turns her prospective lovers into swine; the Sirens, whose songs lure seafarers to shipwreck: we have somehow heard of all of them...
Which is a biologist's way of saying horseshoe crabs are repulsive. The scientific name, Limulus polyphemus, loosely translates as "slant-eyed Cyclops." But horseshoe crabs are not really crabs at all. They are arthropods, distant relatives of scorpions and spiders...
...over them; in the middle is a table, perhaps a sacrificial altar, and the whole cave is strewn with what seem to be mummified joints of meat. These are not identifiably human; if anything, they resemble small legs of lamb. But they suggest the dread cave of the Cyclops Polyphemus in the Odyssey, strewn with fragments of unspeakable meals. The title is The Destruction of the Father...
Without waiting for an answer, he and his fellow conspirators proceed to annihilate a classic. The epic adventures are turned into a few friezes reminiscent of a sixth grade pageant: Polyphemus, the Cyclops, bears a strong resemblance to a Sesame Street Muppet; Telemachus (Russ Thacker) might have escaped from a G-rated Disney film. The celebrated dancing and fighting is reduced to a series of galvanic gestures and deafening groans. The groans may be distinguished from the songs easily: the songs have words. Those lyrics, which act upon the mind like nepenthe, are also by Segal, a classics scholar...
...moral philosophy was a matter of passion and visual expression, not of strict archaeology and attention to sources . . . The fumes of history filled his brain, not its dry facts." When the fumes wove in harmony with the demands of visual truth, Turner became an epic dramatist-as Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus shows, with that sublime apparition of a galleon, canvas flapping and looping, escorted by Nereids through a lake of fire and vapor, under the dimly discernible, looming profile of the giant...