The Odyssey and the Ends of Translation The act of translation, in the narrow sense, as an inter-lingual process, does not take place in the Odyssey—at least on the diegetic level: navigating through the Mediterranean labyrinth, Odysseus converses with diverse characters, communities and peoples without encountering any difficulties with regard to their manifold dialects or local speech habits. He communicates with perfect ease; neither he nor his interlocutors need an interpreter or translator. Obviously, the world of the Odyssey coheres through a universal idiom (the language of fiction itself which, in this case, appears as ‘Greek’) that makes any notion or concrete task of translation dispensable (it will be Heliodors’ Aithiopika which breaks out of this circle of linguistic unity and enter the echo chamber of polyglossia and incomprehensible tongues; and unlike Odysseus, the protagonist Charikleia—due to her own skills or with the help of a cultural “intermediary”—can move masterfully between two languages). 1 However, the curious absence of the linguistic gap or difference in the Homeric text may not altogether do away with the concept of translation, but rather postulate its absolute ‘possibility’ by putting forward the idea of uninhibited communication without any loss or rest in a cosmos of innumerable topographical, cultural and political distinctions. By mapping foreign spaces and possible worlds, discoveries and exchanges, proximities and exclusions, encounters with the absolute Other, the savage and the hostis (as a ‘guest’ or ‘enemy’) the text can be read as a constant reflection on and incessant application of translational processes. It appears as an illustration of translation’s linguistic, intercultural, philosophical and political aspects. First, the Odyssey contains and exemplifies the dominant of every translation, namely to mediate between and conciliate two different if not opposing claims, bids, demands, interests, entitlements, titles. These claims—the unending richness and law of source and target language with all their possible denotations and connotations—compel the translator, who is called or invocated by two voices or tongues at once, to act as an ad-vocate of both spheres. ‘Here’ and ‘there’ demand (endless) negotiations, endlessly delaying the always unjust choice of this rather than that, of one word before another. This is the task of Odysseus who must mediate between source/target, departure/arrival, sea/land, Poseidon/Zeus, between the Gods who are never reconcilable, so that the journey cannot come to an end (when it does, it is only made possible by an act of injustice). The epos demonstrates how Odysseus, just like any other translator, is caught in what Derrida calls an “economy of in-betweenness”. 2 He must halt between alternatives as the one God prohibits his return home and refuses forgiveness (the aspect of guilt, debt, indebtedness, giving, forgiving and mercy constitute the religious as well as economic poles of translation), whereas the other commands the opposite. These, then, are the ends of translation: first, the ideal aim to meet and comply with all possible claims, and, second, to bring translation itself to its conclusion. However, in the end Zeus has to send Hermes, “an interpreter, a messenger, a thief and a deceiver in words, a wheeler-dealer”, 3 to promote this improbable homecoming. 1 Cf. Reinhard Babel, Translationsfiktionen. Zur Hermeneutik, Poetik und Ethik des Übersetzens, transcript: Bielefeld 2015, p. 37ff. 2 Jacques Derrida, “What is a Relevant Translation?”, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 27, No. 2 (winter, 2001), pp. 174-200, here p. 179. 3 Cratylus, 43, translated by C.D.C. Reeve.