Odyssey

Attributed to Homer, it is one of the founding works of Western literature and one of the most enduring narratives about return, identity, and the power of words. Written around the 8th century BC, the epic follows Ulysses on the long journey back to Ithaca after the Trojan War.

A ten-year journey marked by shipwrecks, deception, monsters, and gods. But The Odyssey is, much more than an adventure, a meditation on human persistence in the face of chaos, on the desire for home, meaning, and recognition.

By inventing the figure of the wandering hero, Homer created an archetype that continues to echo throughout all subsequent literature. From Dante and Cervantes to Joyce and Walcott. Every modern narrative of displacement and loss, every attempt to return to an inner place, ultimately springs from The Odyssey.

Reading this poem is a return to the origin, to the word that creates the world and preserves it, through the written word. So that we may understand what remains human, despite everything that changes.

About Homer, little is known for certain. He is believed to have lived between the 9th and 8th centuries BC and is traditionally also credited as the author of the Iliad. His figure wavers between myth and history, but the impact of his work is absolute. Homer was not merely the first poet of the West — he was the first to show that to narrate is to understand the world, and that literature is, from the very beginning, an endless return.