Omeros.

• Author: Martin, Jorge Hernandez

Homer's work has served as a wellspring of Western consciousness through the ages, and in this epic narrative Derek Walcott draws on it to make memorable poetry out of the lives and circumstances of Saint Lucian fishermen. His title, Omeros, evokes the name of the mythical Hellenic bard, and his narrator describes how as a child having heard a young foreign woman pronounce Homer's name, he never forgot its sound:

O was the conch-shell's invocation, mer was

both mother and sea in our Antillean patois,

os, a grey bone, and the white surf as it crashes

In his art, Walcott has set out to "prolong the mighty line of Marlowe and Milton," and the verses of Omeros introduce an Antillean voice to the origins of that European chorus.

Walcott's book represents a Caribbean interpretation of Homer's work, and as such should be considered part of the line of translations that, starting with Livius Andronicus, stretches to the present in English through Alexander Pope, George Chapman, Robert Fitzgerald, and the more than two hundred complete and partial versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey to have appeared since then, culminating in the latest creations of Robert Fagles, Allen Mandelbaum, and Christopher Logue. However, Walcott's version should not be considered so much a translation as a transmutation of the original texts. Omeros filters the Greek epic tales through a Caribbean worldview that resists, takes possession of, rearranges, and expands their premises. Thus, with an omnipresent sea remaining as background, the heroes of this poem are not kings but nobles of another sort. According to Walcott, Philoctetes, Hector, and Achilles are fishermen or taxi drivers eking out a living on land and sea, and Helen is an imperious Saint Lucian housemaid.

The poem's references to the Greek work are both explicit and implicit. Homer puts in an appearance as Seven Seas: "a black fisherman, his stubbled chin coarse as a dry sea urchin's."

True to his description in the Iliad, Philoctetes suffers from a wound in his leg that incapacitates him and causes him to roam over the island seeking a cure. In the meantime, he attempts to reconcile himself with Hector and Achilles, who are vying for Helen's love. The poem's narrator also shares Odysseus's wanderlust: At one point in the story he travels in time to Homer's Greece; at another, he describes scenes out of Dante's Divine Comedy. Later, we witness the Battle of the Saints, which took place between the colonial...