What do you guys think of the work of Nikos Kazantzakis?

What do you guys think of the work of Nikos Kazantzakis?

Has anybody here read his masterpiece (the book that he at least judged his masterpiece):
>The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel
It is divided into twenty-four rhapsodies as is the original Odyssey and consists of 33,333 17-syllable verses. It was composed over a long period of time, from 1924 to 1938.
I have read somewhere that it’s language is extremely dense and metaphorical, and that it reads like a 1000 page-long Shakespeare play.
Here’s what Wikipedia says about it:
>Odysseus (Ulysses) returns to Ithaca and decides to undertake new adventures after he quickly becomes dissatisfied with his quiet family life and they too with his brutality. First he travels to Sparta to save Helen, the wife of the king of Sparta Menelaus, whose abduction by Paris had led to the Trojan War. He goes to Crete where a conspiracy dethrones the king. He is abandoned by Helen who runs off with a black slave and continues to Egypt where again a workers' uprising takes place. He leaves again on a journey up the Nile eventually stopping at the lake-source. Upon arrival his companions set up camp and he climbs the mountain in order to concentrate on his god. Upon his return to the lake he sets up his city based on the commandments of his religion. The city is soon destroyed by an earthquake. Odysseus laments his failure to understand the true meaning of god with the sacrifice of his companions. His life transforms into that of an ascetic. Odysseus meets Motherth (an incarnation of the Buddha), Kapetán Énas (English: Captain Sole, literally "Captain One", a Greek folk expression for people who are insubordinate and single-minded to a fault), alias Don Quixote, and an African village fisherman, alias Jesus. He travels further south in Africa while constantly spreading his religion and fighting the advances of death. Eventually he travels to Antarctica and lives with villagers for a year until an iceberg kills him. His death is glorious as it marks his rebirth and unification with the world.

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Here is the translation. Odysseus remembers Calypso:

I rushed to the prow headlong, tried to pierce the fog,
and saw a thickly wooded isle, a snaky path,
a beach of yellow sand that spread like scattered wheat,
and on the shore a young girl stood and held her breasts,
and all her blue-black body steamed as poured from bronze.
Two slender jet-black leopards leapt and danced about her,
licking her rounded belly and her small-shaped feet
while she smiled broadly with her thick black hair unbraided,
and her man-eating teeth like stars flashed in the fog.
Her breasts leapt high like two wild beasts to welcome me,
and I said, trembling, 'I've not seen a deeper face of death!
My soul, do not betray man's narrow pass to virtue!'
But when I'd washed myself within her golden rooms
and food was spread in the cool grove, and winecups foamed,
and heard her sweet voice, then my duty was all forgotten.
'My dear, you've washed and eaten till your veins flow free,
your sturdy body glows like a crisp youth of twenty;
welcome, beloved, let's play in bed with fun and frolic'
She spread a layer of marjoram, a layer of basil,
and like a thousand-year-old cave, her bed resounded.
The sun stood still, the soul rolled down her curly pit
and vanished, man's bright face became pig-snouted till
the sleepless flame that trembles high between man's brows
went out, for fragrant flowers, virtues, shames, and love,
alas, grow on the surface only, wither in haste away,
and Mother Mud grips firmly in our deepest roots.
How to forget, dear God, the joy that shook my loins
when I saw virtue, light, and soul all disappearing!
With twisted hands and thighs we rolled on burning sands,
BOOK II
a hanging mess of hissing vipers glued in sun!
Slowly my speech turned mute within me, hearth-flames choked,
the infected mind, weighed down with flesh, plunged in my guts,
for just as insects slowly sink and drown in amber,
so in my turbid mind beasts, trees, and mortals sank.
In time my heart was battered to a mess of fat
where passions flared and vanished in a torpid daze
till we plunged, grunting, deep into a bestial pit.
I lay well fitted in foul flesh, while man's great cares,
his hopes, flames and ascensions flew in scattering air.
Farewell the brilliant voyage, ended! Prow and soul
moored in the muddy port of the contented beast!
O prodigal, much-traveled soul, is this your country?"
Then the world-wandering athlete sighed and scowled with wrath;
for a long time he gazed upon the flames in silence
but all at once a jolting laughter brimmed his throat:
"God, if this is our country, the mind has many skills
to rip it up with all its roots and build a prow!"

literally never heard of this
looks neat tho

This are the first lines of the Prologue:

PROLOGUE
synopsis
O Sun, great Oriental, my proud mind's golden cap,
I love to wear you cocked askew, to play and burst
in song throughout our lives, and so rejoice our hearts.
Good is this earth, it suits us! Like the global grape
it hangs, dear God, in the blue air and sways in the gale,
nibbled by all the birds and spirits of the four winds.
Come, let's start nibbling too and so refresh our minds!
Between two throbbing temples in the mind's great wine vats
I tread on the crisp grapes until the wild must boils
and my mind laughs and steams within the upright day.
Has the earth sprouted wings and sails, has my mind swayed
until black-eyed Necessity got drunk and burst in song?
Above me spreads the raging sky, below me swoops
my belly, a white gull that breasts the cooling waves;
my nostrils fill with salty spray, the billows burst
swiftly against my back, rush on, and I rush after.
Great Sun, who pass on high yet watch all things below,
I see the sun-drenched cap of the great castle-wrecker:
let's kick and scuff it round to see where it will take us!
THE ODYSSEY
Learn, lads, that Time has cycles and that Fate has wheels
and that the mind of man sits high and twirls them round;
come quick, let's spin the world about and send it tumbling!
O Sun, my quick coquetting eye, my red-haired hound,
sniff out all quarries that I love, give them swift chase,
tell me all that you've seen on earth, all that you've heard
and I shall pass them through my entrails' secret forge
till slowly, with profound caresses, play and laughter,
stones, water, fire, and earth shall be transformed to spirit,
and the mud-winged and heavy soul, freed of its flesh,
shall like a flame serene ascend and fade in sun.
You've drunk and eaten well, my lads, on festive shores,
until the feast within you turned to dance and laughter,
love-bites and idle chatter that dissolved in flesh;
but in myself the meat turned monstrous, the wine rose,
a sea-chant leapt within me, rushed to knock me down,
until I longed to sing this song—make way, my brothers!

Homer without the irony is not worth it

And these are the first lines of Canto I:

BOOK I
synopsis
And when in his wide courtyards Odysseus had cut down
the insolent youths, he hung on high his sated bow
and strode to the warm bath to cleanse his bloodstained body.
Two slaves prepared his bath, but when they saw their lord
they shrieked with terror, for his loins and belly steamed
and thick black blood dripped down from both his murderous
palms;
their copper jugs rolled clanging on the marble tiles.
The wandering man smiled gently in his thorny beard
and with his eyebrows signed the frightened girls to go.
For hours he washed himself in the warm water, his veins
spread out like rivers in his body, his loins cooled,
and his great mind was in the waters cleansed and calmed.
Then softly sweet with aromatic oils he smoothed
his long coarse hair, his body hardened by black brine,
till youthfulness awoke his wintry flesh with flowers.
On golden-studded nails in fragrant shadows flashed
row upon row the robes his faithful wife had woven,
adorned with hurrying winds and gods and swift triremes,
and stretching out a sunburnt hand, he quickly chose
the one most flaming, flung it flat across his back,
and steaming still, shot back the bolt and crossed the threshold.
His slaves in shade were dazzled till the huge smoked beams
of his ancestral home flashed with reflected light,
and as she waited by the throne in pallid, speechless dread,
Penelope turned to look, and her knees shook with fright:
BOOK I
"That's not the man I've awaited year on year, O Gods,
this forty-footed dragon that stalks my quaking house!"
But the mind-archer quickly sensed the obscure dread
of his poor wife and to his swelling breast replied:
"O heart, she who for years has awaited you to force
her bolted knees and join you in rejoicing cries,
she is that one you've longed for, battling the far seas,
the cruel gods and deep voices of your deathless mind."
He spoke, but still his heart leapt not in his wild chest,
still in his nostrils steamed the blood of newly slain;
he saw his wife still tangled in their naked forms,
and as he watched her sideways, his eyes glazed, almost
in slaughter's seething wrath he might have pierced her through.
Swiftly he passed and mutely stood on his wide sill;
the burning sun in splendor sank and filled all nooks
and every vaulted cell with rose and azure shade.
Athena's altar in the court still smoked, replete,
while in the long arcades in cool night air there swung
the new-hung slaves, their eyes and swollen tongues protruding.
His own eyes calmly gazed in the starry eyes of night,
who from the mountains with her curly flocks descended,
till all his murderous work and whir of arrows sank
within his heart in peace, distilled like mist or dream,
and his wild tiger heart in darkness licked its lips.

How Nabokov disliked a writer who shared the same love for metaphorical language that he had? Writers with this particular style are very rare.

>“O brain, be flowers that nightingales may come to sing!”
― Nikos Kazantzakis, The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel

Though all the guests were ravenous, they still refrained,
turning their eyes upon their silent watchful lord
till he should spill wine in libation for the Immortals.
The king then filled a brimming cup, stood up and raised
it high till in the moon the embossed adornments gleamed:
Athena, dwarfed and slender, wrought in purest gold,
pursued around the cup with double-pointed spear
dark lowering herds of angry gods and hairy demons;
she smiled and the sad tenderness of her lean face,
and her embittered fearless glance, seemed almost human.
Star-eyed Odysseus raised Athena’s goblet high
and greeted all, but spoke in a beclouded mood:
“In all my wandering voyages and torturous strife,
the earth, the seas, the winds fought me with frenzied rage;
I was in danger often, both through joy and grief,
of losing priceless goodness, man’s most worthy face.
I raised my arms to the high heavens and cried for help,
but on my head gods hurled their lightning bolts, and laughed.
I then clasped Mother Earth, but she changed many shapes,
and whether as earthquake, beast, or woman, rushed to eat me;
then like a child I gave my hopes to the sea in trust,
piled on my ship my stubbornness, my cares, my virtues,
the poor remaining plunder of god-fighting man,
and then set sail; but suddenly a wild storm burst,
and when I raised my eyes, the sea was strewn with wreckage.
As I swam on, alone between sea and sky,
with but my crooked heart for dog and company,
I heard my mind, upon the crumpling battlements
about my head, yelling with flailing crimson spear.
Earth, sea, and sky rushed backward; I remained alone
with a horned bow slung down my shoulder, shorn of gods
and hopes, a free man standing in the wilderness.
Old comrades, O young men, my island’s newest sprouts,
I drink not to the gods but to man’s dauntless mind.”
All shuddered, for the daring toast seemed sacrilege,
and suddenly the hungry people shrank in spirit;
They did not fully understand the impious words
but saw flames lick like red curls about his savage head.
The smell of roast was overpowering, choice meats steamed,
and his bold speech was soon forgotten in hunger’s pangs;
all fell to eating ravenously till their brains reeled.
Under his lowering eyebrows Odysseus watched them sharply:
"This is my people, a mess of bellies and stinking breath!
These are my own minds, hands, and thighs, my loins and necks!"
He muttered in his thorny beard, held back his hunger
far from the feast and licked none of the steaming food.”
― Nikos Kazantzakis, The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel

>English Verse translation