ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the Ulysses tradition from the perspective of Jorge Luis Borges's revisionary account of the myth. It demonstrates that Borges conflates the Greek, Italian, and Irish avatars of the legendary hero through his use of the metaphor of the ancient explorer and a specific type of nautical imagery. One tradition argues that Ulysses is punished for his legendary deceitfulness, chiefly for his plotting of the ruse of the wooden horse that led to the fall of Troy. The other camp, however, states that his punishment results from his more daring, nautical enterprise to embark on a final sacrilegious journey to reach the lands forbidden to man. If for Theodor Adorno, the roaring of the sea stands as the sound of epic discourse, this ever-flowing resonance travels from ancient Greece to twentieth-century Ireland in order to converge in the gigantic aquatic catalogue meticulously described in 'Ithaca'.
