Odyssey 1.51 · Book 1, lines 51–54
Calypso's island and her Titan father
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νῆσος δενδρήεσσα, θεὰ δʼ ἐν δώματα ναίει, Ἄτλαντος θυγάτηρ ὀλοόφρονος, ὅς τε θαλάσσης πάσης βένθεα οἶδεν, ἔχει δέ τε κίονας αὐτὸς μακράς, αἳ γαῖάν τε καὶ οὐρανὸν ἀμφὶς ἔχουσιν.
A wooded island, and a goddess dwells in the halls there, the daughter of Atlas, of baneful mind, who knows the depths of all the sea, and himself holds the tall pillars that keep earth and heaven apart.
Word by word
The setting
Athena describes the island where Odysseus is held and the goddess who holds him. The nymph is Calypso; here she is identified by her father, Atlas — the Titan who in early Greek cosmology holds apart the pillars of sky and earth at the world's edge.
A note on this passage
Athena fills in the island and its keeper. It is green and wooded; a goddess lives there — Calypso, though Athena names her only by her father: the daughter of Atlas, the Titan of baneful mind who sounds the depths of every sea and holds up the great pillars that keep the sky off the earth.
The genealogy is doing the work. Odysseus's captor is not a minor local spirit but the child of a world-bearing Titan, a figure from the old order that ruled before the Olympians. Placing Calypso in that lineage — ‘of baneful mind,’ at the sea's farthest reach, beside the pillars of the cosmos — tells you what holds Odysseus: not a jailer but the deep structure of the world itself, at its edge.
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