#stephen mitchell

The path into the light seems dark,

Wrapt in herself she wandered. And her deadness was filling her like fullness. Full as a fruit with sweetness and with darkness was she with her great death, which was so new that for the time she could take nothing in.

It has even occurred to some readers that the whole long account of Odysseus’s adventures during the ten years after Troy may be a lie. Most of us read the story naively, like ten-year-olds, enjoying the venture into the world of folklore, which is so unlike the relatively realistic main tale of the Odyssey. But from the Cretan stories that Odysseus tells after his return to Ithaca, we know what a convincing liar he can be. What if the entire content of Books 9 through 12 is an elaborate, spur-of-the moment “stretcher,” as Huck Finn would have said—Lotus-eaters, Cyclops, Aeolia, Laestrygonians, Circe, underworld, Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, the whole marvelous tale? After all, the only corroboration we have from the narrator of the poem is that Poseidon hates Odysseus for blinding the eye of his son Polyphemus. Might this one incident be true and the rest merely “outrageous lies [that] seem like the truth”? Perhaps the character Odysseus is one of the great poets of the world, nestled like a matryoshka doll inside the tale told by one of the great poets of the world. Indeed the poem does have a “tendency to incorporate itself, to reflect itself as in a mirror...especially at banquets when the bards sing,” as Italo Calvino has written. Calvino even imagines that the song of the Sirens “is nothing more or less than the Odyssey...Who better than the Sirens could endow their own song with this function of magic looking glass?” Since the Sirens exist only within Odysseus’s story, this would be yet a third level of Russian dolls, a mirror reflecting a mirror reflecting a mirror.