“The Odyssey” by Homer (post 3): Opening lines contain an invocation of the Muse, which is not just a literary convention or a metaphor for inspiration.

In the new translation by Emily Wilson, these are the opening lines:

“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 in the storms at sea, and how

he worked to save his life and bring his men

back home. He failed to keep them safe; poor fools,

they ate the Sun God’s cattle, and the god

kept them from home. Now goddess, child of Zeus,

tell the old story for our modern times.

Find the beginning” (1).

The usual controversy about the opening lines revolves around translation of the Greek word “polytropos” (literally, many turns)—Odysseus is a man of many turns—which Wilson has translated as “complicated.”

There is usually no controversy about Homer’s invocation of the Muse (the goddess, a child of Zeus), which is assumed to be nothing more than an epic poem convention and a metaphor for the author’s inspiration.

But people who have read this whole blog know better. Fiction writers may actually hear the voice of an alternate personality who knows the story that the writer is going to tell before the writer’s regular self knows it.

For example, the bestselling novelist Sue Grafton calls it her “Shadow,” a Jungian term for the unconscious, but Grafton (regular personality) says she converses with Shadow and that Shadow knows Grafton’s stories before Grafton does.

Are all muses female? No. Another contemporary writer discussed in this blog, Stephen King, says that the alternate personality he converses with and refers to as his “muse” is male.

Are Grafton and King speaking metaphorically or joking? I used to think so. But read the posts on all 150 fiction writers I discuss in this blog, and you will realize that when fiction writers say such things in nonfiction articles and books, they mean it.

Fiction writers take their writing process very seriously.

1. Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. Emily Wilson. New York, WW Norton, 2018.