ATTENTION: EVENT CANCELED
Friday, January 7, 2022, there will be a new appointment with the literary review "Meetings under the tree",organized by the library Giunti al Punto di Asiago.
Giovanni Kezich will present to the audience his new book "Ulysses is not him - The great charade of Homer at the origins of consciousness".
The meeting will be held at the Council Chamber of the Municipality of Asiago at 17.00.
INFO AND RESERVATIONS
BOOKING to be made at the IAT Office of Asiago.
Access is allowed only to holders of reinforced green pass as per Decree Law no. 172 of 26.11.21.
For more information and reservations click on
BOOK "ULYSSES IS NOT HIM - Homer's great charade at the origins of consciousness" by Giovanni Kezich - Baldini+Castoldi
Passed for millennia as a wonderful and troubled story, at times bloody but destined to succeed, theOdyssey immediately displaces the reader with its fluctuating pace and its poor balance, given that the adventures of Ulysses between sorceress and cyclops, mermaids and sea monsters, which have so fascinated readers of all ages, they barely commit a sixth of a poem that is dedicated rather, in its preponderant part, to the preparations for a terrible and unmotivated massacre, that of the so-called "proci", penelope's suitors: a massacre that, in spite of so many façade phantasmagories, constitutes the true objective of the narrative. Yet, some glaring inconsistencies should immediately alarm: what is the purpose of Telemachus' inexplicable journey, risky and seemingly useless, which opens the poem? And why does Ulysses, awaited for ten years, reappear in Ithaca in perfect synchrony with his son's journey, and moreover alone, despite having left with a large following of ships and companions? And how is it possible that he is not immediately recognized by a faithful servant, his wife and his father?
Starting from these questions, Giovanni Kezich discovers in the poem a hidden plot that takes us away from the reassuring conventions of heroic poetry and introduces us to an enigmatic field like that of a mystery, an elusive and tendentious charade that tries to hide a certain truth by telling us another: as if the real goal of the Odyssey was not the glorification of the deeds of its protagonist, but the softening with the arts of poetry the remorse for the massacre of chilling brutality that, ten years after the fall of Troy, was consumed in a remote island left to itself, where the king had never returned.
Strengthened by a dazzling intuition matured in contact with Homer's text, "Ulysses is not him" is not the simple enunciation of an interpretative scoop, but an in-depth, illuminating and fascinating rereading of the most read and most loved poem in history:a bet, ambitious and highly cultured, which aims to reconsider the Odyssey as an anthropological document, that can perhaps tell us, of the ancient Greek civilization as of ourselves, much more than what we have been able to understand so far.
THE AUTHOR GIOVANNI KEZICH
Giovanni Kezich studied anthropology and archaeology in Siena and London, and dealt with oral poetry and rock pastoral graffiti, carnival masquerades and alpine culture, havingbeen for thirty years director of the Museum of Uses and Customs of the Trentino People of San Michele all'Adige.
He has published among other things: I poeti contadini. Introduction to the Eighth Popular Rhyme (1986), Some Peasant Poets. An Odyssey in the Oral Poetry of Latium (2013), Carnival King of Europe (2015, Gambrinus Prize), Carnival. La festa del mondo (2019) and, together with Marta Bazzanella, Shepherds Who Write. Pastoral Graffiti in the Uplands of Europe from Prehistory to the Modern Age, with a preface by M.J. Rowlands (2020). As an archaeophile periegeta, he translated and edited the diary of the Etruscan journey of D. H. Lawrence (Etruscan countries, with a contribution by Massimo Pallottino, 1985) and on the Odissiac theme Kefalonia. Homer's Ithaca. The Solved Riddle (2020) by N. G. Livadas.
