A aventura incessante de Ulisses: Kazantzakis e José Miguel Silva

Abstract

Always invoked by the literary tradition, the travel of Ulysses confi rms, in some works, the ideal of the nostalgic hero bounded for home in order to achieve his nóstos, and, in other works, it reaffi rms the impetus of the eternal sailor. In Nikos Kazantzákis’ text, the legendary Ulysses appears again but as a man that is dissatisfi ed with his return home. The author builds his character based on the fi rst Ulysses, shaping, during the Modern era, the epic poem Odyssey: a modern sequel (1938). From book XXII, line 477, in Homer’s poem, Ulysses is taken to a new itinerary abandoning Itaca defi nitively. Although Nikos Kazantzákis’ text is based upon Homer’s text, using similar characters and the same epic structure, Kazantzákis, as a man of the Modern era, composes the new Ulysses as the representative man of the modern world, close to Nietzsche and Bergson’s philosophies, as well as to the Buddhism. As a character «between worlds», Kazantzákis’ Ulysses, is, at the same time, a character that incorporates the matters of modernity – nihilism, hopelessness, multiplicity. Contemporarily, José Miguel Silva fi nds in the theme of the Homeric Odyssey the material and the form to write Ulisses já não mora aqui. This article presents the confrontation of the thematic similarities and the differences of composition between the Greek modern poet and of the Portuguese poet’s work.