{"id":489,"date":"2008-01-12T04:59:00","date_gmt":"2008-01-12T12:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=489"},"modified":"2008-01-12T04:59:00","modified_gmt":"2008-01-12T12:59:00","slug":"homer-was-no-greek","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/homer-was-no-greek\/","title":{"rendered":"Homer was no Greek"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>Homer statue in front of the University in Freiburg<\/span><\/div>\n
In this day and age, Homer studies seem to be happening at a happy & far distance from the more contentious areas of the Human Sciences even if the directions they take, or their preferred focus may differ from country to country and continent to continent. The German Homer studies specialist Barbara Patzek recalls how in the days of Louis XIV a heated debate over Homer suggested that maybe it was time to let those dusty old epic poems slide into oblivion \u2013 the result of which debate was the first complete translation of the Homeric epos and the beginning of that poet’s rise to fame throughout Europe, leading eventually to the establishment of a full-blown historical-critical science, including a philological wing, as well as more adventurous undertakings, such as Schlieman’s. Today, she argues, a simplified overview of the field would pitch the anglo-american oral poetry investigations making claims for a flowing, dynamic text changing over time and without a specific single poet behind it, against the German research tradition based on the hermeneutic attempt to extract a genuine author from the narrative structure and perceived unity of the Iliad<\/span>.<\/p>\n

But here comes Raoul Schrott<\/a>, the German poet, translator, travel writer, novelist and anthologist (his brilliant Die Erfindung der Poesie \/ The Invention of poetry<\/span> is a worthy companion to Charles Doria and Harris Lenowitz’s Origins: Creation Texts from the Ancient Mediterranean,<\/span> this latter unhappily long out of print). Asked by Radio Hessen to produce a new translation of the Iliad<\/span> (he already had done one of the Gilgamesh epic), he set to work and finished a first draft after two years of hard labor. While waiting for reader reports he started working on a preface that was meant to be short and to the point. A year \u2013 and a series of investigative travels & travails \u2013 later, he is still working on it, though there is a now a book foreseen for publication this March. Meanwhile he published an article on the results of his investigation in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, which has caused quite a controversy.<\/p>\n

Schrott’s thesis in fact is that Homer was no Greek at all \u2013 or certainly not a pure product of Greece and Greek culture, but rather a citizen of Cilicia<\/a>, and that the “Troy” of the Iliad is probably a Cilician city (Karatepe, Schrott suggests), the most famous 10 year siege thus decribing another occasion all together. The Cicilians, for example, as the Austrian Assyrologist Robert Rollinger informed Schrott, called each other “Acheans” and “Danaeans” in pre-Homeric times. Obviously, Schrott admits, “a little” Troy does stick to the Homeric description. But most importantly, what Schrott does is to uncover strong undercurrents of oriental poetics in the Homeric text \u2013 i.e. the poet of the Iliad had grown up on what today we call Near Eastern texts: his own poem thus becomes (once again or for the first time) a very writerly undertaking, in fact, a truly intertextual artifact drawing on “oriental” culture not as simple aesthetic citation (a kind of antiquarian “orientalism” one finds often enough on Greek vases) but as a direct reworking of literary and mythological motifs, metaphors and images to be found in the great Near Eastern poems, such as Gilgamesh.<\/p>\n

Obviously Schrott doesn’t give it all away in the FAZ-article: it is a teaser preparing the publication of his book in March. But if his investigations are accurate (& I tend to trust him) then we may now have the bridge to (and the fundament of) Greek \/Western Kulchur. And it does lie, even as it discovers and invents its poetics, in the Near East in a much more material way than we had ever thought. My first impulse on reading Schrott’s article<\/a> and Patzek’s response<\/a>, was to pick up the phone and call Charles Olson in Gloucester (ugh, 38 years too late for that!): I would have loved to hear him on how these finds fit into his own cultural mappings, as he had foreseen that fit, in, for example the opening sentence of his review of Cyrus H. Gordon’s Homer and the Bible, where he writes: “An important thing is done here: an “East Mediterranean literature” is blocked out, as of and inside 1400 BC, of such size and import that Homer’s poems belong to it, the Old Testament (through the Patriarchal narratives), recently published Late Egyptian stories, and the Ras Shamra poems.”<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Homer statue in front of the University in Freiburg In this day and age, Homer studies seem to be happening at a happy & far distance from the more contentious areas of the Human...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=489"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}