The Odyssey, teachers and rock songs

In the early afternoons we’d wait for teacher Yolly T. in the subject described as world literature, or in the midmornings for Prof. Naida R. to learn how the heroes of the Trojan War called each other dogface which sounded like both insult and endearment, you never know about these Greeks who a standup comic once said were “all homosexuals.” Then in the late afternoons there was Josie M., maestra nonpareil, who regaled us with stories about the world’s end or maybe also its beginning, a clash of swords and lingering sunsets in rain-soaked beaches in the now gutted Faculty Center, while select students hid behind the old reliable dark glasses in order not to be called to recite about dogface and Agamemnon, Patroclus and Achilles, Briseis and Clytemnestra, she of the trigger name, and poor toddler Astyanax, son of Hector thrown from the burning walls of Troy.

The translation of choice of the day was by Robert Fitzgerald, and copies of both Iliad and Odyssey lie dusty and almost forgotten somewhere in the apartment, how we soldiered through the verses then just to get to the root of the narrative, who killed whom and what other’s wife was stolen, not out of lust but mere one-upmanship, a toxic masculinity ahead of its time, who are we to moralize about the dynamics of war where men could only shadowbox with the fading grandeur of an ancient world?

And when the teacher finally called us to ask what we thought of a particular passage, we could only say, “Nice!”

All those footnotes got us sidetracked for a while, as if they were a separate story in themselves, no Cliff Notes or study guides to help simplify or provide the gist of things at the turn of a page, no comics version either as in the case of the Noli and Fili in high school, though we did get to read the original Rizal tomes long after graduating, never too late to appreciate a good book when the opportunity presents itself, i.e., with time on our side and copies of the subject work handy, no teachers to guide us through the dark corridors of metaphor, hyperbole, allusion.

Pure entertainment, Nolan’s film is, and it works on multiple levels, have to block out whatever remembered intricacies from the Fitzgerald translation, and what you have is pure breathtaking cinema, Hollywood sure but not necessarily a bad thing if it raises a glass to the classics, sends copies of Homer’s poems flying off the shelves in North American bookstores, before you know it, there will be translations in Filipino, Tagalog or Baybayin whatever you call it, if there isn’t one already by a national artist, no doubt, putting into local context Bourne among the mindboggling beasts and equally mind-bending beauties, whatever lesson there is is not lost on those who stay the course of text.

Who can forget then the power trio Cream song of the late ‘60s, Tales of Brave Ulysses, after Odysseus’ Latin name, and the pioneering use of the wah-wah pedal by Eric Clapton, who also co-wrote the song that relives the hero’s interminable journey home and “how his naked ears were tortured/ by the sirens sweetly singing/ For the sparkling waves are calling you/ To kiss their white laced lips.”

The verse that follows goes thus: “And you see a girl’s brown body/ Dancing through the turquoise/ And her footprints make you follow/ Where the sky loves the sea…” can’t be anyone but Calypso played by Charlize Theron, land of the lotus eaters around the corner while Jack Bruce sings and Ginger Baker’s drums roll like distant thunder.

In a now-shuttered record store and dry goods shop in Dumaguete called Pelrico’s, near the marketplace since turned into a sea of tinigol, you could purchase a copy of Steely Dan’s seminal album “Aja” in the late ‘70s, where one of the songs on Side Two is Home at Last:

“Well the danger on the rocks is surely past/ Still I remain tied to the mast/ Could it be that I have found my home at last/ Home at last.”

This is not so much for Nolan, who breathed new life into a classic, but for our teachers who first made us aware that such books existed and to whom a dog-faced student (not Argos) could only reply “Nice, nice,” when asked to recite behind dark glasses. — Juaniyo Arcellana