I first read The Odyssey during the summer holidays when I was 15 years old. Parked under the shade of the mulberry tree in our Brisbane backyard, I would read, grab a few mulberries, then read some more, my fingers sometimes staining the pages dark purple. It was a secondhand Penguin Classics edition, translated by E.V. Rieu, its yellowing paper and creased spine, to my teenage eyes, somehow as ancient as the work itself.
Every time I read the Homeric epithet “wine-dark sea” – one of the repeated formulas that bear the imprint of the epic’s oral beginnings, such as “dawn, fresh and rosy-fingered” and “Zeus the thunderer” – I’d feel as though my purple fingerprints had somehow become part of the poem.
