(In the pandemonium that followed the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon, Thersites
was attacked by Odysseus and took refuge in his tent. Odysseus chased after him and after
boasting that he would kill him straightaway if he ever set eyes on him again, he went away
leaving the ugly warrior angrily muttering to himself.)

The scoundrel has disappeared. But
he’s watching me. I sense it, I can practically see him,
cowering in his mug’s dirty shell,
that spiteful eye nervily playing with vengeance
like an unearthed bone.
Ugly cur! I’d turn him into food
for the mongrels that with comic eagerness
ran to meet us we arrived in this slaughterhouse.
(Some campaign! For ten years now,
we’ve been offering the perfect regime
to a populace of drooling tetrapods:
freedom for them to foul on us,
equality in the rending of our guts,
fraternity with the tics that feast
on the shortfall of our blood.
Fine! Fine! With grunts filled with rotten teeth
and bubonic spasms generation upon generation
will laud the endurance of the Greeks:
that persistent honing of a name
that wasn’t even a rod.)
Drunkard! I’d drown him in the blood
that he so meticulously nurtures,
devouring others’ hopes and dreams and expectations,
if I didn’t know that his wolves would run wild
blinded by the smell of their brother’s death.
Blinded by the smell!
Imbeciles; incompetents!
When have you ever felt something whole?
When have you ever recognized something pure?
When have you ever toiled for something your own?
“All this slaughter can be endured by a soul
only as individual stimuli,” Nestor says.
Where does the old man find such composure?
He assumes those unwashed failures of sound limb
have a soul.
That permanently good intention sickens me.
He nurtures it in his plinth gaze like a pet wound:
obese, arrogantly laconic, irritatingly slothful.
Some kind of immunity must be keeping it alive
after so many infectious denials.
A warrior has to know when he’s in danger of crying.
There are no eagles among people.
I can’t imagine prudence as a knife
that you leave on the dining table, when you go out to battle.
That image is one of the old man’s best,
though not the most popular in a herd unable to comprehend
the meaning of a sentence with more than three words.
I cannot conceive of a system of values that you wash
and hang out to dry when it gets soaked in wanton blood.
That image is mine.
Except that I am not willing in poetic verse
to play up to the hypocrisy of the assemblies.
They came here for plunder and parade
the wounded honor of their race
like an old whore among the carcasses.
(But only up to a point are the dead harmless).
I came here for plunder and I know I may end up
from one day to the next as plunder.
There’s nothing I can do about that.
(Nothing more by me).
“The ugliest man who came to Ilium.
Bandy‐legged and lame in one foot.
His shoulders curved forward
meeting over his chest.
And above, an elongated head
with a little hair on its crown.”
Just so, my blind bard, just so!
The ugliest man, but not the only one,
though perhaps the most appropriate for supplying material
intended to stimulate words’ natural slothfulness.
Words are slothful, my dear friend, I can assure you.
They have a mania for sitting on what they want to say,
until it stinks.
Then, they fly to another… coop, let’s say.
What can you do during that short flight?
At any rate your winged words may be a decent idea.
I very much doubt if you know that.
As for me, I know what I know, what I must do, what I can hope.
I’ll go out even if it means a bloodbath.
I need to pee.

*Translated by David Connolly.