A decade or so ago, the Ministry of Culture in Colombia started a programme of travelling libraries. Donkeys would take books to remote villages, leave them for a few weeks, then go back and collect them. In one village, according to Alberto Manguel, only a single volume was not handed back to the donkey-man. It was a Spanish translation of Homer’s Iliad. The villagers refused to return it because it reflected their own lives so directly: “A war-torn country in which mad gods mix with men and women who never know exactly what the fighting is about.”

Manguel’s biography of The Iliad and The Odyssey starts from the idea that our culture remains hugely dependent on these ancient Greek epics – the first literary creations of the West. Even if we have never opened the pages of Homer, we know that “all life is battle” (that’s The Iliad) and “all life is a journey” (The Odyssey). Or, as the critic Harold Bloom neatly put it: “Everyone who reads and writes in the West is still a son or daughter of Homer.”

There is at first sight something faintly depressing about the idea that, almost 3,000 years on, we are still enthralled – or, to put it more brutally, enslaved – to the works that first launched our literary tradition. And the notion that we are still busy reinventing Homer, from James Joyce to the Coen Brothers (in O Brother, Where Art Thou?), is almost shaming. But, as Manguel argues, that sense of enslavement is offset by the fact that “Homer” himself, as an author, has almost no identifiable character at all, is lost in the mists of time and is almost certainly plural (nobody now imagines that the same person composed both The Iliad and The Odyssey). “Homer” is, in other words, a cipher that places few constraints on the project of creative reinvention.

Manguel illustrates this with a dizzying and for the most part hugely enjoyable tour of that Homeric project, from antiquity to the present day: from Virgil’s remaking of The Iliad and The Odyssey into the Roman national epic, to scholars in medieval Baghdad who could recite Homer word for word from memory, and to the dramatic retelling of The Iliad by Alessandro Baricco – a parable of modern war that played to thousands in Rome in 2005.

Manguel, a native of Argentina and an international polymath, offers examples that are refreshingly far-flung and a useful corrective to the tendency in this country to make Homer an honorary Briton. Here he gives us Homers from South America, Spain, the Danish Virgin Islands, Mexico, and more. All the same, I missed a couple of British favourites. It was sad not to find a word for Gladstone, one of the few prime ministers in the world to have written two substantial volumes on these epics. Even sadder that there is no mention of Christopher Logue’s War Music, which outclasses Baricco in its exposure of the violence of The Iliad (as well as including Logue’s unforgettable “Homeric” coinages such as “c***struck Agamemnon”).

Manguel’s gifts as a polymath do come at a price. His dizzying tour is not always particularly well researched. While lamenting the fact, for example, that Schliemann’s gold from his excavation at Troy disappeared from Berlin in 1945, he doesn’t seem to have caught up with the fact that it was found again, safe and sound, in Moscow’s Pushkin Museum in the early 1990s. And when he discusses the debates in Britain in the 1860s about how Homer should be translated, he gets the protagonists in a terrible muddle. The nub of the question was, should Homer be turned into a weird, foreign and archaic-style English, or should it sound like colloquial, “natural” English (an important question, given that on average almost one new English translation of Homer was published each year through the 19th century)? But it was not, as Manguel thinks, Cardinal John Henry Newman who argued against domesticating Homer into nice English verse, it was his younger brother, religious doubter and classicist, Francis William. Both will be turning in their graves.

Slips aside, this is hugely stimulating read – even if prompting more questions about the future of this Homeric project over the next centuries. I will not be the only reader to wonder, gloomily, quite how strong our enslavement is likely to remain. The fact that even Manguel thought it prudent to give readers a rather plodding book-by-book crib to both The Iliad and The Odyssey as his first chapter is, I am afraid, a warning sign.

HOMER’S THE ILIAD AND THE ODYSSEY: A Biography by Alberto Manguel
Atlantic £12.99 pp304

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