Homeric Moments: Clues to Delight in Reading the Odyssey and the Iliad

by Eva Brann

Book Overview

Fifty years of reading Homer--both alone and with students--prepared Eva Brann to bring the Odyssey and the Iliad back to life for today's readers. In Homeric Moments, she brilliantly conveys the unique delights of Homer's epics as she focuses on the crucial scenes, or moments, that mark the high points of the narratives: Penelope and Odysseus, faithful wife and returning husband, sit face to face at their own hearth for the...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0967967570
• ISBN13: 9780967967578
• Release Date: September 2002
• Publisher: Paul Dry Books
• Length: 326 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.3" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Useful as both guide and foil.

Brann's book serves beautifully as an adjunct to the reading of Homer. As I imply in my title, I found myself sometimes disagreeing with her interpretation but even then her learning has to be acknowledged. Let me start off by pointing out what she offers to the first time reader of The Odyssey as well as to someone who has read it several times in their life. First, if you are like me and ignorant of the Greek, reading Brann will make you realize how much of the story, the art of Homer you are missing. She points out many times how the names of individuals reflect their character (The grandfather of Odysseus, a notorious pirate, thief and raider is named Autolycos, The Wolf Himself). She points out how certain words in Greek have multiple meanings that translators must choose between inevitably missing out on some of the slippery insight offered in the original. For example, when Odysseus returns to Ithaca(see the Fagles translation, Book 13, Lines 295-6), the goddess Athena tells him that "I knew deep down that you would return at last, with all your shipmates lost". This phrase about Odysseus' "Returning" (Brann points out helpfully that 'returning' is practically a technical term in The Odyssey) occurs several times throughout the epic. The thing is that the word translated "lost" can also mean "destroyed" or "killed". The certainly changes the meaning of the line applied to Odysseus. Secondly, Brann is a very thoughtful reader who concentrates her intelligence on all aspects of the story. The Odyssey is not told linearly. We start off very much toward the end of the tale. Much of the story is told by Odysseus to other characters. Brann provides time lines that point out symmetries that might well be missed by inattentive readers (like myself). For example: "Just when a middle-agted Odysseus tells a young princess that he will pray to her as a deity all his life, a youthful Telemachus tells anelderly queen that he will worship her as a divinty when he gets home" (Braan, p. 256) This sort of insight if useful not just for deepening our appreciation of what Homer is doing but in teaching how to read all books that are worthy of our concentrated reading. Thirdly, Brann gives you an introduction into the way that Homer had penetrated the souls of many of the writers who make up the Western Canon and modern authors. In fact, I found myself wishing she would edit an anthology of all the writers and poets who have thought hard about and written passionately about incidents in Homer. She quotes many throughout her book: Shakespeare, Keats, Montaigne, Wallace Stevens, Auden, Pound, Edwin Muir, Tennyson, Rupert Brooke and ad infinitum. I guarantee you that some of the quotes are of such beauty as to send you scurrying off to look up the complete original. Bonus!! So what are my doubts about Brann? She is what I would call a loose Straussian. This is not a bad thing-in my own way, so am I. As such, she is given over to the sort of hermeneutic oddities t

The ultimate guide to Homer

If you ever felt that it would be nice to have an incredibly perceptive and understanding scholar by your side as you read the Iliad or the Odyssey, you will find it in this wonderful book. It picks on central issues but wears its learning lightly. What a treat!

Cliff's Notes on Steroids

I read this book concurrently with The Odyssey. Both were wonderful. I just can't say enough about Brann's book, though. It is clear that she knows the text backwards and forwards, and that she loves it. Her enthusiasm and her delicate, careful, thoughtful insight helped me immensely to understand, appreciate, and savor The Odyssey. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. I wish there could be a book like this for all of the classic texts.

A virtuoso work

Homer is, sadly, too often intimidating to the general reader who believes, wrongly but understandably, that he is archaic, irrelevant, and likely to be unreadable. After all, a book length poem -- as the contemporary high-schooler would say, give me a break. Eva Brann accomplishes, remarkably, two quite different achievements. First, she shows that even after nearly three millenia Homer remains completely relevant and accessible to the contemporary reader. Second, she provides insights which make the poem far more enjoyable to read, and demystifies many of the aspects which might confuse the modern reader.She does this with a subtle but delightful wit, and with a patient wisdom honed in forty years of teaching.Homer is not simply about the Trojan war and its aftermath, but is about what it means to live a life of honor and integrity. Brann understands this perfectly, and indeed echos it in her book, which is not simply about how to enjoy Homer, but is itself about what it means to be a successful human.Brann's academic home, St. John's, is one of the few colleges in the country -- probably in the world -- to abandon the concept of academic departments and to focus on the teacher as a guide to the great minds of history rather than as the teacher in his or her own right. This is the perfect background from which she writes a book which is rich in scholarship but in no way academic or professorial.

The Canon Without the Retort

Brann has done a delightful thing in writing Homeric Moments, and in so doing has won, with her much-glancing and everywhere-sparkling wit, a battle in the War on the WC. While many react to the relegation of the essential books to the backshelves of decaying library stacks, Brann has placed one copy of Homer in a magic box so that boys and girls one day, after all the Seven Volumes of Harry Potter are written and digested (a little boy wizard goes a long way), might find something that is more moving than magic, more charming than charmed. I think many of us who would advocate for the traditional canon are quite aware that nobody's been reading it for years and years. I went off to college in the early 70's (yes, to the place where she taught--although I read Homer with two other incredible teachers, and I don't believe there was a single faculty member in the entire school who couldn't teach Homer). My friends who went to other schools did not read Homer. Or Plato. Certainly not Euclid. Absolutely not Apollonius of Perga on the Conic Sections. So the fiery umbrage over reading books "not like us" seems a little like the lady protesting too much over what is more insubstantial than sound and more fleeting than fury. Yes, I love reading the outraged and wonderful arguments of Harold Bloom--but he's only written for those of us who are so made as to delight utterly in our own pretensions and affectations. Or worse, for those who simply want to buy that lovely big book in the hopes of reading it someday--and who know people seeing it lying around on the sofa will be far more interested in what Bloom has to say about everything than what Ben Johnson has to say about anything (well, enough to read the New York Times Review of Books to find out what Bloom might have to say about something).Brann has written for anyone, and she just well might succeed in getting a few people off on a race that only starts with Homer--once you start you can't stop,--and you'll be reading Lucretius, Heroditus, Cervantes, Joyce, Tolstoy. It's one of the few ways we have before us to earn the space we take up in this world--letting Homer and his ilk say to us what they would have us hear and teach us what we know we ought to know. There is a side to the Brann's book, though, that I never expected. The most casual comments about learning (i.e., that you start to learn wisdom only after becoming who you are--finishing the growing up part--because if you aren't who you are, then who's there to grow wise), are stunningly beautiful. Her years of learning are informed by her years of teaching, and the interplay of these two essential, and entirely contrasting, enterprises in the life of a real teacher illuminate this book with a sweetness that I believe few of us get to experience in the halls of academe. Her delight with Homer reflects, I think, her delight with her own luck at being alive in the world--this is apparent from the smile on her face in the tiny photo on the ba