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| Ajax drags Cassandra from Palladium (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Oswald p. 47:
Like a deer in the hills wounded
Keeps running in pain
There are dogs following her bloodprints
But she goes on and on escaping into loneliness
To the very breaking of her being
Until it happens in some shadowy wood on a hilltop
She gives up
And the dogs set about eating her
But at last at evening a lion appears
A huge angel wandering the hills laying claim to the dead
And the dogs scatter
This is Oswald's translation of the simile from book 11 when Odysseus is fighting desperately, on his own, surrounded by Trojans, until Ajax (the greater) gets there to save his bacon. And it's a weird simile in Homer, because the wounded deer, in Homer, has run as far as it can, and died, and is being eaten by the jackals. The lion (sent by a god, says Homer) isn't there to save the deer, which is dead anyway. The lion scatters the jackals so it can devour the deer itself. But the deer is Odysseus, the jackals are the Trojans he's fending off, and the lion, Ajax, arrives to save, not kill him; so Odysseus is not the victim at all, and may even be the lion.
Oswald makes two changes that shift everything. One is the placement of the simile, which Oswald puts after the death of Othryoneus, who came to Troy and offered to drive off the Greeks in exchange for the hand of Cassandra, and went off to battle and died, "and everyone laughed and laughed, except Cassandra". And second, Oswald makes the deer feminine; in Homer it's masculine. So the deer is Cassandra, wounded and bleeding, attacked by jackals - Ajax the lesser - and finally made a meal of by the lion, Agamemnon, who scatters the other rapists and takes her home to the slaughter. In fact Oswald didn't have to change this simile at all, in her usual fashion; all she had to do was re-point it, towards an actual victim.
Have a look at the Poem of the Week (below). A more sympathetic look at Penelope than Atwood gave us, but that's not hard.
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