John Simmons writes: Is Homer the most influential writer of all time? We don’t know much about whoever he, she or they might have been, and we don’t know with any certainty how old The Iliad and The Odyssey are. Let’s just say it’s getting on for 3,000 years since they were first written or spoken.

That makes them among the first works of literature. They brought us the power of storytelling, and for that we should give them the highest praise. This is particularly so when we observe the contemporary cultural scene and that new versions of Homer are constantly popping up in literature, opera, ballet, drama, film – genres of every kind.

I’ll confine myself to literature. It’s how we still think of Homer, as a writer of two epic poems that are based in the Trojan War and its aftermath. My earliest engagement with Homer came as a twelve-year-old schoolboy trying to read parts of The Iliad in its original Greek. That challenge lasted three years until I gained my O-level (B-grade). I never reached high linguistic levels but I have a lifetime of gratitude that I did read some Homer in its original form. In doing so I read about rosy-fingered dawn and the wine-dark sea, and those phrases recurred not just throughout the works of Homer but in my appreciation of all literature down the centuries. Metaphors, similes, personification, lyrical poetry, the power of mythology.

After that schoolboy immersion I have kept my interest through translations – some dull, unimaginative prose but, every so often, gripping versions in poetry. My most recent rereadings of The Odyssey have been the versions by Robert Fagles and Emily Wilson. It’s interesting how different they are: the Fagles more consciously epic poetry; the Wilson more focused on storytelling, while maintaining a regular pentameter. Yet both are accurate translations of the original. Compare how they tackle the opening words:

Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns
driven time and again off course, once he had plundered
the hallowed heights of Troy.
Many cities of men he saw and learned their minds,
many pains he suffered, heartsick on the open sea,
fighting to save his life and bring his comrades home.”

(Translation by Robert Fagles)

Tell me about a complicated man,
Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost
when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy,
and where he went, and who he met, the pain
he suffered on the sea, and how he worked
to save his life and bring his men back home.

(Translation by Emily Wilson)

These are not just two versions of a translation, but different ways of seeing the world. Wilson is in a distinct minority of female translators of Homer, which brings a new perspective in itself. There are also aspects of Homer – misogyny, the easy acceptance of slavery, the all-too-human flawed characters of the gods – that new readers need to make an accommodation with. After all, it really was a different world then, a world barely touched by literacy. That was all in the future, and future literacy would owe much to Homer as reading’s source material.

Contemporary readers need to face these issues but scruples and moral doubts are generally overcome by the power of Homer’s storytelling. If we find problems with the Greek gods’ ability to wreak havoc on human lives, to torture and rape people less powerful than themselves, to kill and maim with hardly a thought for suffering, we can simply look at the world around us and compare their behaviour with that of modern rulers.

This is what great literature does: it allows us to see the world vividly and question it from different perspectives and reach our own conclusions. If I love reading The Odyssey it does not mean that I accept Odysseus as a perfect role model for modern times. But it does mean that it engages me in thought beyond a simplistic response to the moral questions raised by exposure to the Homeric world – and then reacting to the similarities, not just the differences, between ancient and modern worlds. We respond to what remains universal in Homer.

In my latest rereading of The Odyssey I took this response one step further. Rather than just to engage as a reader, I should also engage as a writer. What should I write inspired by Homer? I had no wish and no ability to contribute another translation to those published over the centuries, interpreting Homer’s world for the sensibilities of changing times. George Chapman’s translation, published in 1615, had John Keats, two centuries later, wonder-struck like ‘some watcher of the skies/ When a new planet swims into his ken’.

The title of Keats’ famous sonnet, ‘On first looking into Chapman’s Homer’, became the starting point for my writing odyssey around Homer’s world. One evening a few months ago I wrote a poem ‘On last looking into Homer’s Odyssey’. Perhaps a similar sense of wonder seized me as Keats had expressed in his poem? Was this a one-off, a shooting star rather than a new planet? Over the following weeks, I wrote a new poem every week triggered by a continuing rereading of The Odyssey in the two translations I have referred to. A little further into this exploration I discovered a podcast by Mary Beard and Charlotte Higgins called ‘Instant Classics’ in which they analysed and joyfully discussed Homer’s work. I heard that a new film by Christopher Nolan, based on The Odyssey, would be released later this year.

My own writing was loosely following the chronology of Homer’s epic, so I set myself the aim of writing 24 poems to mirror the 24 ‘books’ of The Odyssey. It became clear to me that the sheer variety of Homer’s work, as well as its influence on world literature over centuries, meant that I needed to write my own ‘Homeric’ poems in different forms. Without claiming any direct lineage to Homer’s verse, I wanted to use forms of poetry from distinct cultures. I wrote haibuns/haikus (Japan), pantoums (Malaysia), Ghazals (Persia), sonnets (originally Petrarch in Italy) as well as more modern poetic forms. For me, Homer’s poem was the foundation of all world literature, so I wanted to suggest that belief in the nature of the poetic responses not just in the narrative content of my own writing.

I had decided that I should not veer too far from the content of Homer’s story. There was inspiration enough so I felt no temptation to, for example, create poems set in a modern London office or on a mission to outer space. I would keep closely to the original stories and to the places where they were set. In recent times various locations have inspired my writing with poems triggered by Berlin and Seville, and a novel by Paris. But I had never been to the Greek islands, except in my imagination through reading Homer. Much as the thought of sailing around the Aegean appealed, I decided to simply get on with the writing and head towards the Ithaca in my imagination.

It has been an extraordinary journey, and it continues. Each Friday evening (such is my writing habit) I sit down at my desk and write poems inspired by The Odyssey. It has been the most reliable and fruitful source of inspiration of my writing career. It will not lead to the equivalent of an epic poem but will be closer to the modern tradition of a poetry pamphlet that I hope to have published in the next year. Even in this way Homer continues to shape the responses of a changing world. There are always new creative interpretations to discover, following his example of taking traditional stories, finding a different perspective and telling those stories anew.

Homer lives!

On last looking into Homer’s Odyssey

There’s no getting away from it, or so
Odysseus might reflect, as he’s sea-washed home,
sadder, wiser, angrier, all that is true,
everything’s more so than anything before.
Older too.

He clutches his clichés in a rosy-fingered dawn,
and strides up from the sea’s foaming fringe,
bearing them like life-circle stones polished by time
and tide, clinking one memory against another,
rhyme on rhyme.

But now remember this, for it became a poem framed
before life was called a journey, by a journeyman who,
being first, could never be wine-dark stained
by a surfeit of tropes, and so his vital meaning
ever remains.