Poetry · A way to begin
Omeros
Derek Walcott · 1990
Synopsis
On Saint Lucia, two fishermen, Achille and Hector, fight over the beautiful Helen, while Philoctete, another fisherman, suffers from a wound. Major Plunkett and his wife Maud, settled on the island, have their own story, and the narrator weaves into the tale that of his own life, which takes him as far as the United States. Seven Seas, an old blind man, stands in for Homer: the poem transposes the dramas of the Iliad and the Odyssey to the twentieth-century Caribbean.
Context
The poem came out in New York from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1990. Its main setting is Saint Lucia in the last years of the twentieth century, with returns to the eighteenth century. Two years later the Swedish Academy crowned the author, and the presentation speech hailed this book as his major work. It remained without a French translation until March 2026, when Franck Collin published the first one with Classiques Garnier, presented as that of an “oceanic poem”.
Who it is for
For reading a modern epic of the Caribbean, where the Greek heroes bear the names of Saint Lucian fishermen.
Prizes and reception
Nobel Prize for the author two years after its publication; translated into French thirty-six years later.
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