Like many of Joseph Brodsky’s poems, Odysseus to Telemachus examines the corruptive effects of empire on the individual. In Torso (1977), the subject is the Roman Empire, described as “the end of things,” a place where a person finds the grass turned into stone. In Odysseus to Telemachus, however, the treatment of political power is less obvious. Often developing a tension between Homer’s cunning Odysseus and Brodsky’s own vision of the man as quietly introspective, the poem never addresses government directly. Instead, by humanizing Odysseus and his poignant separation from his son, Telemachus, the poem treats exile as a devastating consequence of power.
With a dropped line of direct address, this ode acts as both a persona poem and an epistle to Telemachus, for Odysseus is still not home. The poem employs irony, reiteration, and allusion to treat the theme of exile, all characteristic of Brodsky’s work. In the first stanza, irony is used to distance Odysseus from his status as a Trojan War hero. Brodsky’s Odysseus cannot “recall who won” the war, though he deduces that the Greeks did as “only they would leave / so many dead so far from their own homeland.” Here, readers familiar with The Odyssey know that the Greeks not only won the war, but that Odysseus was largely responsible for their victory by designing the infamous Trojan horse.
What follows is ambiguous: perhaps Odysseus literally does not remember the war; perhaps he does not want to remember. In either case he is othering his own side by referring to the Greeks as an autonomous “they” while the outcome of the war becomes nebulous compared with the death it incurs. In the world Brodsky creates for Odysseus, even the politically charged divinities of the Greek pantheon hold little meaning compared with the loss of family.
In the second stanza, Odysseus’s reference to “some filthy island, / with bushes, buildings, and great grunting pigs” (where he feels utterly disoriented) alludes to the island of Circe where Odysseus’s men were changed into swine. Here, Odysseus describes the enchantress Circe—later his lover for a year, and in many myths the mother of his son Telegonus—as “some queen or other,” at once rendering her anonymous and inconsequential. Instead, he emphasizes again to his son what his memories do not hold: “I can’t remember how the war came out; / even how old you are, I can’t remember.”
Ultimately, in the third and final stanza, Odysseus begins to doubt his role as a father. Such doubts, however, are in the end what attest to his humanity, making the ramifications of his 20-year absence all the more moving. “Away from me,” he tells his son, “you are quite safe from all Oedipal passions. / And your dreams, my Telemachus, are blameless.”
Bibliography
Bethea, David M. Joseph Brodsky and the Creation of Exile. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994.
Brodsky, Joseph. “Odysseus to Telemachus.” In A Part of Speech, poem translated from Russian by George L. Kline. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981.
Polukhina, Valentina. Joseph Brodsky: A Poet for Our Time. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Rigsbee, David. Styles of Ruin: Joseph Brodsky and the Postmodernist Elegy. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999.
Categories: British Literature, Literature, World Literature
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