Swimming to Cleveland

What, really, do the sirens of The Odyssey have in common with the WNBA's newly minted franchise and roster to-be?

The jokes sort of write themselves, right?

Or if they don’t write themselves you’ve probably seen some of them. Maybe you can imagine how they go. Like, What will a man do to find a name for his new WNBA franchise? Well, he’ll watch one single Chris Nolan movie and name the whole-ass team after some girl characters that are barely even on screen. And re: those sexy dangerous girl characters, well they actually canonically only ever make their music for men.

That’s the obvious one, right? Like it’s kinda grimly funny that Dan Gilbert’s considerable marketing / PR Apparatus chose a whole slant about a group of fearsome ladies who resent being told to shut up, and are now making sure their “powerful new voice[s]” will be heard — except, isn’t the whole thing from Homer onward that if a man has any wits at all he will absolutely not listen to them? Or at least he’ll follow Circe’s witchy instructions (thanks babe) to plug the boys’ ears with wax and get them to tie him up real good just to make sure he can’t abandon himself completely and go swim over there and starve to death. Don’t listen, or at least physically restrain yourself so you don’t end up with the huge pile of decaying dudes rotting on the beach!

So I guess another joke, not exactly writing itself at this point considering all of the above leg work, but another joke might go something like The Cleveland Sirens! “Hear The Call!” Yet another way for men to drive themselves completely insane by paying attention to the WNBA! Ha ha. Maybe the Sirens will sing about trans women, that would really do the trick. Imagine if they even hired one of us! Just kidding, never gonna happen. Unless…? Just kidding. Ha ha.

You can twist it around pretty easily though, if you want. Sure, the whole strictly symbolic gesture towards women’s empowerment/“women’s voices” would have felt a little played out even in 2017, let alone in 2026, given, you know, The State Of Things, but maybe it’s even a little canny. Like, yeah baby, “Hear the Call!” If you’re on Team Siren, you’ll be having a grand old time singing along with these feathered baddies (originally they were feathered, the mermaid/siren thing didn’t show up until a bit later, and whatever, myths are meant to be riffed on, so pop off, Gilbert Apparatus). So sing along if you like, but listener beware! If you’re not with the squad, you might go nuts and make an absolute ass of yourself and freestyle across Lake Erie and ruin your life and become totally estranged from your wife and kids as you waste away into nothing. In Cleveland, no less! The perils of the discourse. Not our problem. Kinda funny when you tell it like that.

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The thing I really like to think about, though, is what are these Sirens actually even singing about? Nolan’s no help, he makes Matt Damon screw up his face and talk about how the song was like a “delicious itch” or something.

Hmm.

To The Text!

As usual, the text of the Odyssey is pretty interesting! Before we hear what they sing, Circe warns Odysseus that the Sirens’ song, which they use to enchant or seduce any hapless sailor, is λιγυρῇ (lih-gü-ray-ee) rendered by Emily Wilson as “piercing.” Pretty nice, and I definitely do not have anything approaching Wilson’s acumen, but she only gets to pick one word for her translation (tough! thankless!), so since I am pretty into this stuff, and since I can read some Greek and know how to click around an online lexicon, I feel confident saying that λιγυρῇ has a little more to it.

It’s related to another word, λιγύς (lih-güs), that mostly shows up to describe the clear, sweet tone of articulate speech, song, and instrumentation, though it also attaches to the wailing lamentation of grief and pain. Our form, λιγυρῇ, is used much less frequently: elsewhere in Homer it describes a blast of wind, the scream of a whip, and the call of a bird. In Hesiod (roughly Homer’s contemporary), it marks the sound of locusts, and, I think importantly, a poet’s craft, i.e. the audible quality of oral/aural epic (more on this shortly).

I understand Wilson’s reluctance, given her refreshingly clear-eyed sensitivity towards the subject matter (that is: women’s voices), to choose a more dictionary-endorsed “shrill,” which, lol. But “piercing” doesn’t quite capture the full extent of it either. Because the Sirens’ song, with this one adjective, might acquire shades of musical and intellectual clarity, the keening wail of a mourner, the boom and rush of the wind, the menacing shriek of a whip, the sweet call of a bird, the searing drone of locusts, and the divinely inspired chant of a poet. Not for nothing: it seems to me that these referents can be divided into the intelligible products of human social activity (speech, song, poetry, instrumentation, mourning) and the less intelligible but no less forceful products of animal and atmospheric behavior (wind, bird, locust). The whip kind of curiously sits between the categories—social, but not exactly intelligible or artistic, maybe more purely mechanical?

This division plops the Sirens uneasily between the soothing order of human activity and the beautiful, sometimes terrifying power of the outside world. Imagine hearing all that in one song! But I’m getting ahead of myself. Λιγυρῇ is how they sound. What are they actually singing about?

Odysseus tells us, and I’m just going to quote from Wilson’s translation at length here:

They knew our ship was near, and started singing.

‘Odysseus! Come here! You are well-known
from many stories! Glory of the Greeks!
Now stop your ship and listen to our voices.
All those who pass this way hear honeyed song,
poured from our mouths. The music brings them joy,
since we know everything the Greeks and Trojans
suffered in Troy, by gods’ will; and we know
whatever happens anywhere on earth.’

Their song was so melodious, I longed
to listen more (Od. 12.182-193 trans. Wilson).

That’s right! The Sirens, singing in the poet’s own dactylic hexameter, are recounting the whole saga of the Trojan War. Which is to say: they are singing the dang Iliad! And presumably the rest of the massive oral poetic tradition, now mostly lost to us, including the war’s causes, its twists and turns, the sack of Troy, and, finally, the conquering heroes’ respective journeys home. In fact, they have divine knowledge of every event on earth, so it’s not too far a stretch to presume they are also singing the dang Odyssey, which they themselves are currently in the middle of! No wonder Odysseus wants to keep listening.

But because I want to eventually yank us back to Northeast Ohio, let me put all my cards on the table. I think it’s pretty neat that the Sirens are granted, in these few short lines, a narrative privilege that really only Odysseus ever shares access to. The Sirens sing the epic, of which they are currently a part, in the epic’s own formidable polyphonic register. Remember λιγυρῇ, and the Sirens’ placement and tendency to sing with the power of the human and non-human worlds? Well. They are on the same level as Homer, and they are singing, among many other things, their own story.

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The WNBA is in an interesting and tricky place right now. Labor’s tireless efforts have led to a recent surge of audience interest, and, finally, with plenty of kicking and screaming, a bit more investment from ownership. The W is still sorely neglected by that class, but it’s clear that the calculation has changed somewhat. The people in charge have decided that a larger investment in the product will lead to still larger profits. Reader, you are probably familiar with the results: more investment leads to better wages and conditions for the players, more ways to watch, and still more eyes on the action. This means there are also more people talking about the league.

The effects of this uptick in discourse have been discouragingly predictable (things get worse, fast, and in specific ways when Capital trains its eye upon your project). Stupid and malicious people are finding it extremely profitable to say stupid and malicious things. Increased hate speech and targeted harassment are not coincidental.

Do you really need me to give you examples? I already subtweeted Sophie Cunningham up top, and at this point, the less said about her, the better. Ok, non-Sophie edition: fine, here you go. The song surrounding the WNBA is definitely piercing, and it is definitely causing a lot of people to go overboard and try to swim to Cleveland. I haven’t even mentioned legalized gambling’s complete penetration of the sports media landscape, and the W is no exception. Did you know that the WNBPA’s current slogan is “Bet On Women?”

All of this makes me think about the future Cleveland Sirens. Surely these contradictions will not recede by the time they take the floor in 2028. Surely they, and the rest of the league, will be going to work while also trying, as always, to chart their own courses through treacherous waters. They will have stories to tell about it. They will be singing their own songs. But sometimes songs need translators to help the audience grasp what they’re listening to.

Among the many brilliant parts of Emily Wilson’s Odyssey, a few moments from her translator’s note now jump out to me. Her efforts in translation have been, she writes, “to make sure that a reader can feel inside the characters in the poem, to convey the ways that each character [...] has her or his own distinctive point of view [...] I hope readers can see each character, even the minor ones, as people with a rounded, complete perspective on their lives.” And later: “Throughout my work on this translation, I have thought hard about my different responsibilities: to my readers; to the need to make sense; to the urge to question everything; to fiction, myth, and truth; to the demands of rhythm and the rumble of sound”. Any prospective translator within earshot of the Sirens will share a similar set of responsibilities. And if the league in 2028 looks anything like the league in 2026, there will certainly be a rumble of sound.

Who’s listening?