Max Porter

And I draw a lot of inspiration from my kids coming home.

And I worry that if I'm in some little writing shed somewhere, I'll make bad decisions.

Oh, he's just good, isn't he, Homer?

I read The Odyssey kind of continually.

I read it every year.

There is always a version of The Odyssey by my bed, be it a children's retelling that I'm reading my kids or a graphic novelization or a new translation I'm interested in or an old translation I'm comparing it to.

The point about Homer is that there is no Homer.

There is just the oral tradition and there is the way in which stories are transmitted.

You know, a 19th century odyssey is profoundly different from a 21st century odyssey.

A prose odyssey is profoundly different from a verse translation.

So in a way, the odyssey for me has become a kind of working model of what literature is and can be.

And also the sheer quality.

of the poetry of Homer, the way that Homer describes the world and the way in which we might wrestle with things that matter to us all, i.e.

migration, the movement of people, war, trauma, indebtedness, parental failure, parental love, sex.

Oh, God, everything.

It's all in there.

So I see it as a kind of sweet shop that I'm free to go and gorge myself in whenever I want.

I guess there would be, in the same way as there might be a feminist reading of the Odyssey that recasts or looks slantwise at Penelope's experience, there would be an ecological reading of the Odyssey.

And especially, I think, in terms of how human...

The idea of language as an imprisoning thing, whereby if I describe the dawn as rosy red and the following morning I describe it as red-fingered and the following morning I describe it as pink-tinged, I am putting my own linguistic and political and social system on the dawn.