WHY DO THE SIRENS LOOM SO LARGE? Joyce recently sent me back to the Odyssey and I was surprised, as I often am on returning to this deep-hulled volume, by the brevity of what lives in my head as a major passage. The action — Odysseus being lashed to the mast by his wax-deafened crew, the Sirens singing their honeyed song, the ship sailing on to new danger — takes place over a mere 37 lines of Emily Wilson’s 12,110 line translation: just 0.3% of the story. The episode looms much larger than its few lines, though, insistently employed, invoked and parodied across a variety of media, from theatre to cartoon. We have been seduced, it seems, by Odysseus’ brief encounter with seduction. Something about it strikes a chord. Perhaps, though, I should quibble with my own maths. 37 lines misses the mark, because Odysseus sails past the Sirens not once but three times. First, Circe sits the weary traveller down and warns him of the dangers he will face: the Sirens, and then the doomed choice between Scylla and Charibydis. Circe tells him how to cheat the Sirens: by lashing himself to the mast he will be able to listen to their song but survive to tell the tale, to hear but not to heed. Then, Odysseus relays these instructions to his crew, almost word for word. Finally, the action itself occurs, but by this time we’ve already heard the story twice. This is part of the Odyssey’s rich texture of repetition, of stories told and retold, accounts recounted. But it also turns the Sirens episode into a different kind of story. Circe’s advice inverts other instructions Odysseus is given on his journey; where usually he is told how or where to find things, here he is told how to move past the thing he will inevitably find. The Sirens is a tale of being told how to listen to something that makes no attempt not to be heard.