Homer Continued

THE ODYSSEY: A MODERN SEQUEL (824 pp.)--Nikos Kazantzakis, translated by Kimon Friar--Simon & Schuster ($10).

Masterpieces of literature are hard to come by and even harder to recognize. This is particularly true when they are written in verse, and when they presumably lose their pristine shine in the process of translation. It has taken 20 years for The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel to reach English in hexameter from its original modern Greek. The poem has not been translated into any other language and so is virtually unknown outside its native Greece. But in it, chances are, U.S. readers have a masterpiece at hand, in a fine translation.

When Author Nikos Kazantzakis died last year at 74, he was known to U.S. readers mostly for his novel Zorba the Greek, a flashing testament to the proposition that every minute of life should be lived to the sensuous, sensual hilt. At least twice, reportedly, he failed to win the Nobel Prize by the narrowest of margins. By taking for his own the name of Homer's poem, by adopting Odysseus as his own hero, Kazantzakis has underlined the audacity of his undertaking. His 33,333 lines measure its vastness. But the poem's real boldness lies not so much in affinities or in size as in what it sets out to do: to relate man to the earth and his own appetites, to describe his need for God and the tortuous spiritual route of the search, and finally to show how man attempts to exorcise his private and worldly devils in a never-ending quest, not for peace of mind but for freedom of soul.

The Birth of Doubt. Author Kazantzakis begins just about where Homer left off. Odysseus has come home, slain Penelope's suitors and re-established his authority. Now Penelope, whom he has not seen for 19 years, bores him. His gentle son Telemachus seems soft and dull and disapproves of his cunning, brutal father who lives as if life were a permanent state of war. With five devoted and adventurous companions, Odysseus builds a new boat and leaves his island home to begin a second odyssey, which is to end in a spiritual trial by fire and death.

He has no plan, no itinerary. He visits Helen of Troy and her husband Menelaus in Sparta. Helen is still beautiful, but the King has become a fat and greedy landlord whose subjects are on the edge of revolt. Helen and Odysseus are, up to a point, two of a kind. When he suggests that they run off, she agrees, and they slip away to Crete. There the King is old and sterile; there, too, the people talk revolution and the blond barbarians from the north are muscling in. The old King marries Helen, and Odysseus, after adventures of fierce brutality, leaves Crete without her and sails to Egypt.

Already Odysseus has begun to question, to doubt. To his surprise, he begins to find newborn sympathies with slaves and common folk. The old Greek gods have become objects of scorn, and what started as a mindless search for adventure has now become a journey of selfdiscovery. In Egypt he and his pals thieve and loot, fight against the depraved rulers and finally lead a ragged army to the headwaters of the Nile. There Odysseus builds a Utopian city-state in which marriage is outlawed, children are held in common, and the old and weak are left to die. At first all goes well under Odysseus' rule; then the city is destroyed by a volcanic eruption. Odysseus becomes an ascetic who wanders over Africa, famed as a holy man but farther from God than ever. He sets off in a skiff and sails into the Antarctic, recapitulates his life and dies full of wisdom, humility and doubt, not having found his soul but having gained nobility in the search.

Then flesh dissolved, glances congealed,

the heart's pulse stopped,

and the great mind leapt to the peak

of its holy freedom,

fluttered with empty wings, then upright

through the air

soared high and freed itself from its

last cage, its freedom.

All things like frail mist scattered till

but one brave cry

for a brief moment hung in the calm

benighted waters:

''Forward, my lads, sail on, for Death's

breeze blows in a fair wind!"

Beyond the Pagan World. The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel is a huge repository of bloody adventure, eroticism, brutal sights and sounds, magnificent descriptions of the earth, sea and sky and all their wonders. Man's coarsest appetites and his noblest aspirations exist side by side in Odysseus, and he is as ready to seduce a simple girl by pretending to be a god as he is to admit his doubts about himself and the human condition:

I'm not pure, I'm not strong, I cannot

love, I'm afraid!

I'm choked with mud and shame, I

fight but fight in vain

with cries and gaudy wings, with voyages

and wiles

to choke that quivering mouth within

me that cries 'Help!'

A thin, thin crust of laughter, mockery,

voices, tears,

a lying false fac,ade--all this is called

Odysseus!"

Kazantzakis takes his hero far beyond the pagan world that Homer's knew. He confronts him with characters reminiscent of Buddha, Christ, Faust and Don Quixote so that Odysseus can try his own view of God and man against theirs. He agrees with none of them, thus underscoring Kazantzakis' belief that each man must make his own spiritual odyssey; no one else can make it for him, no ready-made belief can serve for each individual. The search is one for freedom--freedom from the demands of Odysseus' heart and mind. Kazantzakis seems to say: not until Odysseus is delivered from doubt, fear and even hope can he reach anything close to serenity. That he is never delivered does not matter; God may even be the search for God.

Rivalry with God. Many a devout reader may find this note jarringly impious and pessimistic. Kazantzakis is neither. Like Zorba, Odysseus exults in life, and even during his lowest moments he is seldom without gusto. There are times when he thinks he is better than God, times when he thinks that man ought to help God rather than the other way around. He never accepts defeat:

"You fool, how in your greatest need

can you abandon

most glorious man who lives and fights

to give you shape?

You fill our hearts with cries and vehement

desires,

then sink your ears in silence and refuse to listen;

but man's soul will fight on, you coward,

without your help!"

His heart leapt high, spurned Death, and

in the black air cut

a thousand roads to fly through on a

thousand wings,

then, screeching like a hawk, strove to

unwind what fate had woven.

Kazantzakis labored on and off over a period of twelve years to produce a book of singular power and beauty. Translator Kimon Friar, a poet and scholar of Greek descent, received from Kazantzakis himself the ultimate praise: that the translation was as good as the original. Whether or not that is so, as it now reads, The Odyssey is by all odds the most impressive literary achievement of many a year. It bears out the feeling Kazantzakis once expressed, in describing a form of spiritual conversion he underwent during a solitary retreat in the mountains: "Since then I have felt ashamed to commit any vulgar act, to lie, to be overcome by fears, because I know that I also have a great responsibility in the progress of the world. I work and think now with certainty, for I know that my contribution, because it follows the profound depths of the universe, will not go lost."

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