Rosenfingrad

The Odyssey has fascinated me ever since the first time I read it 1980 as a preparation for James Joyce's Ulysses. In the choral work Rosy-fingered I have chosen text fragments from depictions of the dawn, of the son Telemachus, the goddess Pallas Athena, the central song of the 11th and the curse of the Cyclops.

One of the charms of Homer's texts is the beautiful epithets that appear extensively, probably to facilitate memorization, Odysseus is "the many-cunning", Athena the "owl-eyed" and the goddess of dawn Eos is the "rosy-fingered":

II.1

Now when the child of morning, rosy-fingered Dawn
-Samuel Butler, The Project Gutenberg

There are many depictions of sailing. Here's an example from the central eleventh song:

XI:8

…a fair wind that blew dead aft and staid steadily with us keeping our sails all the time well filled; so we did whatever wanted doing to the ship’s gear and let her go as the wind and helmsman headed her. All day long her sails were full as she held her course over the sea, but when the sun went down and darkness was over all the earth, we got into the deep waters of the river Oceanus
-Samuel Butler, The Project Gutenberg

Ezra Pound's poem The Cantos opens with a quotation from the first Latin translation of the Odyssey, which in turn is translated into Old English. Pound's choice of text to quote has partly guided my choice, e.g. The Curses of the Cyclops, the fragment that concludes Rosenfingrad. In English:

IX:534

Shalt return through spiteful Neptune, over dark seas,
Lose all compaions
- Ezra Pound, Canto I

The regularity of the hexameter presented a difficulty. I have solved it with a sparse work with different time signatures to vary the length of the stressed syllables.

Thanks to Ingvar Björkeson, whom I admire and know from his translations of Dante and Homer, and who has freely allowed me to use fragments of his translation.

HS