Sailors on Board, Heroes en Route: From the Aegean World to Modern Stage

Homer’s Odyssey provides a perfect case for showing the eternal return of the Greek myths in contemporary literature, and culture: tales of Ulysses’ journeys have always been popular, till nowadays. He is the only survivor of an entire crew: he safely arrived home alone, and soon left, heading for a new journey. Today, in a way, he keeps coming back, on and on: in all sort of books, in fine arts, inside and outside theatres. Ulysses and his myth are also ‘surfing the web’, as I proved with a recent survey on the use of the terms Odyssey, and Ulysses, on the Internet. Moreover, the last decades recorded, all over the world, an increasing amount of modern versions of Odyssey, and related myths. I focus particularly on the most recent translations and adaptations for the stage: many of them are dedicated to those who did not come back home – unlike Ulysses – or did not survive at all. In 2010, for instance, the Italian director Marco Martinelli (Ravenna Teatro) wrote Rumore di Acque (Noise in the Waters), a play later translated into English and French. Ulysses’ myth and its happy end are reversed, in his antiheroic Odyssey, inspired by the tragic death of immigrants, in the shipwreck of their boats, while they try to reach Southern Italy and Sicily. The play was staged in Lampedusa (the island on Italy’s Southern border where many ship land, and many more corpses are found), in Europe, and in U.S.A. In the meanwhile, other international projects inspired by Ulysses’ journeys tell us the ‘Odyssey of Nobodies”, while thousands of unnamed sailors keep challenging the waves, as they have done since the Minoan Age, across the Mediterranean Sea.