Joseph Brodsky's "Odysseus to Telemachus"

A Pens and Poison Poetry Analysis

Nostos—the Greek concept of homecoming—has appeared in countless retellings of the Odysseus myth, from Joyce’s Ulysses in prose fiction to the Cohen brothers’ O Brother Where Art Thou in film. I recently stumbled upon a lesser-known retelling of The Odyssey in Joseph Brodsky’s poem “Odysseus to Telemachus” and wanted to write a bit about why this poem moved me. It’s been a while since I did a poetry analysis post, anyhow, and it’s time to jump back in with a lesser-known poem.

In “Odysseus to Telemachus,” Joseph Brodsky, a Russian expat and Nobel Prize-winning poet, reimagines Odysseus through the lens of his own exile from the Soviet Union, lending a unique perspective to Homer’s timeless tale.

Let’s read the poem below. I have pulled up the translation from poets.org.

My dear Telemachus,
                   The Trojan War 
is over now; I don’t recall who won it. 
The Greeks, no doubt, for only they would leave
so many dead so far from their own homeland. 
But still, my homeward way has proved too long. 
While we were wasting time there, old Poseidon, 
it almost seems, stretched and extended space.

I don’t know where I am or what this place 
can be. It would appear some filthy island, 
with bushes, buildings, and great grunting pigs. 
A garden choked with weeds; some queen or other. 
Grass and huge stones . . . Telemachus, my son! 
To a wanderer the faces of all islands 
resemble one another. And the mind 
trips, numbering waves; eyes, sore from sea horizons, 
run; and the flesh of water stuffs the ears. 
I can’t remember how the war came out; 
even how old you are—I can’t remember.

Grow up, then, my Telemachus, grow strong. 
Only the gods know if we’ll see each other 
again. You’ve long since ceased to be that babe 
before whom I reined in the plowing bullocks. 
Had it not been for Palamedes’ trick 
we two would still be living in one household. 
But maybe he was right; away from me 
you are quite safe from all Oedipal passions, 
and your dreams, my Telemachus, are blameless.

As I am fortunate enough to have access to the original Russian text (which you can access here), I will quote from the original in several places throughout my analysis (with translations, of course). As an aside, I am very excited to be bringing Russian poetry to you all—a lot of us are familiar with the Russian novelist beasts, but I find that Russian poetry is less widely disseminated. I aim to amend that through this post (and hopefully through future posts as well).

With that said, let’s turn to the poem.

“Odysseus to Telemachus” is written from the perspective of the seafarer Odysseus, who embarks on a protracted journey home to Ithaca after the Trojan War. Brodsky’s poem is a vision of a letter written from a father to an abandoned son. The poem begins with a jaded observation about the war, and as we progress through the text, we witness Odysseus becoming increasingly indifferent to the destruction around him, losing sensitivity to anything that does not directly affect his son—including the flux of the world and the passage of time.

As Odysseus heads home from the Trojan War, the diction with which he describes his surroundings creates a picture of destruction and corruption, which eventually become synonymous with change. One of the first memories that he recalls is the desolation of the Trojan War itself: “столько мертвецов/вне дома бросить могут только греки” (The Greeks, no doubt, for only they would leave/so many dead so far from their own homeland). Odysseus blames the Greeks for the war and observes a destructive force in his people as he notes both their disregard for the homeland of the Trojans and their unadulterated thirst for victory. Odysseus seems to grow more pessimistic, noting the duration of his journey and the distractions that he encounters along the way. He tells Telemachus about his encounter with Calypso and some of the other islands he visits:

Какой-то грязный остров,
кусты, постройки, хрюканье свиней,
заросший сад, какая-то царица,
трава да камни. (11-14)

It would appear some filthy island,
with bushes, buildings, and great grunting pigs.
A garden choked with weeds; some queen or other.

Here, Odysseus describes a dirty island and paints a scene that is almost urban in nature, reminiscent of the filth of industrialization with its buildings, bushes, and pigs. The pigs are an allusion to the power of the enchantress Circe, who transforms Odysseus’s men into pigs and further delays their return to Ithaca. We can read the transformed pigs as emblems of the futility of homecoming; Odysseus, therefore, equates transformation with corruption and destruction—in this case, it is a destruction of his plans to return home. In the following line, he elaborates on his surroundings and alludes to Hamlet’s first important soliloquy, in which the Danish prince laments the change that his mother has undergone following King Hamlet’s death. “’Tis an unweeded garden,” Hamlet declares of his surrounding world, “That grows to seed” (see Hamlet 1.2.135-36). Recall that, at this stage in the play, Hamlet is faced with a stark change in his mother as she quickly abandons the memory of old King Hamlet and marries his brother Claudius. Hamlet remarks on and is disgusted by her supposed promiscuity, and as he contemplates Gertrude’s ability to move on from her husband so quickly after his death, he adopts a misogynistic worldview that, for him, represents the corruption of the world. You might remember that his soliloquy culminates in one of the most famous Shakespeare lines of all time: “Frailty, thy name is woman!” Similarly, Brodsky’s Odysseus draws a parallel between the fickle woman and the corruption of the world as represented by an unweeded garden. In alluding to Hamlet’s garden, therefore, Brodsky paints an Odysseus who becomes unable to accept the changing world around him; he is unsettled by the constant turbulence of his travels and concludes that the world must be corrupt. In the same line, after all, comes an off-handed mention “of some queen or other,” pointing, perhaps, to Odysseus’s own misogyny as he scorns the women around him—most notably Circe and Calypso—who have detained him in his journey.

Yet Odysseus does not cast his scorn or hatred exclusively on women—he is in, fact, wholly indifferent to the world around him. His description of the grass and rocks is especially poignant in the Russian, which reads “трава да камни.” The insertion of the particle “да” in the place of something more conventional such as “and” or “or” generates a sense of stark passivity; whatever Odysseus observes around him amounts to the same old story. “Все острова,” he continues, “похожи друг на друга” (all of the islands look like one another). He no longer cares to distinguish between the places he visits and longs only to return home. At the end of the long stanza, he reiterates his indifference about the war and then begins to look forward to his reunion with his son: “Не помню я, чем кончилась война,/ и сколько лет тебе сейчас, не помню” (I can’t remember how the war came out; /even how old you are—I can’t remember). He doesn’t remember how the war ended and perhaps doesn’t care. At this point in his journey, he only thinks about his son, his weariness reflected in the chilling announcement that he cannot even remember how old Telemachus is. Interestingly enough, the construction of these two lines is reminiscent of the Ancient Greek convention of chiasmus, where two grammatical structures are reversed over two phrases. In the Greek and Roman tradition, chiasmus typically connoted a reversal of sentiment or rhetorical antithesis—in our case, Brodsky first places subject and verb—“не помню”—at the beginning of first clause, and then at the end of the second clause. We can conjecture, then, that where Odysseus’s first thought is rife with indifference, his second thought demonstrates the exact opposite sentiment: Odysseus cares deeply for his son.

The epithets with which Odysseus addresses Telemachus, in fact, constitute the only example of tender diction that we receive in the entire poem. The first line sets the stage for the thought to which Odysseus continually returns: “Мой Tелемак” (My Telemachus). This compassionate address resurfaces at the beginning of the second stanza in line 22 and in the very last line of the poem. The remaining instance of Telemachus’s name is also accompanied by a tender description: “Милый Телемак” (Dear Telemachus). We can observe how Odysseus’s tone thus alters whenever he directly addresses his son, shifting from indifference to paternal love.

Indeed, Odysseus’s care for his son incites him to protect Telemachus from destruction at all costs. Just as all else around Odysseus, Telemachus must change with the passage of time; because Odysseus has seen so much change throughout his journey—change that he associates with ruin—he becomes increasingly protective of Telemachus, wishing to deflect any ruin that may come his way. Odysseus recognizes that Telemachus is no longer a child and reminiscences on how he used to protect him from potential danger as he reigned in oxen. In a sinister shift in tone, Odysseus realizes that he will no longer be able to keep his son from harm. At last, however, the dreadful thought is upon him—Odysseus might himself bring destruction to his son by coming home. “Без меня,” he thinks, “ты от страстей Эдиповых избавлен,/ и сны твои, мой Телемак, безгрешны” (away from me/ you are quite safe from all Oedipal passions,/and your dreams, my Telemachus, are blameless). Wearied by his travels, Odysseus’s primary preoccupation is homecoming, yet, as he approaches Ithaca and considers the most important thing he left behind—his son—it dawns on him that his homecoming might be a corrupting force in itself: Telemachus has grown up fatherless and has thus remained in innocence, free of the desire to murder his father, as in the famous Oedipus myth. Odysseus’s final realization—“Но может быть и прав он” (But maybe he was right)—thus casts a bleak and tragic shadow over the poem, for, in his great desire to protect his son from destruction, he realizes that his own nostos may be impossible.

In retelling the Odysseus myth, Brodsky thus offers us a more ominous portrait of Homer’s famous tale: as Odysseus’s love of Telemachus grows deeper, his final wish becomes to protect his son from corruption—even at the expense of his own paternal love.

And we can only ever guess how much of Odysseus’s pain in the poem is Brodsky’s own.

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