The Odyssey

by Homer Narrated by Mark Nelson

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Centuries old and still captivating readers, The Odyssey has become a genre in and of itself. Join Odysseus and Co. as they trick a cyclops, outsmart syrens and vie for survival against the ever-crafty creatures of Greek mythology. Told in beautiful verse, it’s time to grab an oar and help paddle this crew back home to Ithaca.

Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns driven time and again off course, once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy. So begins Robert Fagles' magnificent translation of the Odyssey, which Jasper Griffin in The New York Times Review of Books hails as "a distinguished achievement." If the Iliad is the world's greatest war epic, then the Odyssey is literature's grandest evocation of everyman's journey though life. Odysseus' reliance on his wit and wiliness for survival in his encounters with divine and natural forces, during his ten-year voyage home to Ithaca after the Trojan War, is at once a timeless human story and an individual test of moral endurance. In the myths and legends that are retold here, Fagles has captured the energy and poetry of Homer's original in a bold, contemporary idiom, and given us an Odyssey to read aloud, to savor, and to treasure for its sheer lyrical mastery.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Praise for Robert Fagles Translation of The Odyssey

“Wonderfully readable... Just the right blend of roughness and sophistication.”—Ted Hughes

“Robert Fagles is the best living translator of ancient Greek drama, lyric poetry, and epic into modern English.”—Garry Wills, The New Yorker

“Mr. Fagles has been remarkably successful in finding a style that is of our time and yet timeless.”—Richard Jenkyns, The New York Times Book Review

Bloomsbury Review - Jay Kenney

McCrorie's new translation can be recommended without reservation to the generations of students to whom it is bound to be assigned and to any reader who'd like to get as close to the original as is possible without reading the original Greek. It is refreshing, accurate, and direct.

Bryn Mawr Classical Review - G.S. Bowe

Edward McCrorie's translation of the Odyssey into English hexameter has much to recommend it . . . I have developed an appreciation for the clarity and briskness of McCrorie's verse.

Classical Bulletin - Emily Anhalt

Bold new translation.

Choice

A lively and engaging version of Homer's Odyssey that brilliantly blends pleasurable readability with fidelity to the original. . . McCrorie has simplified the choice of an English Odyssey even in a field of very skillful competitors (Lattimore, Fitzgerald, Mandelbaum, Fagles, Lombardo), providing the best available verse translation of the Odyssey for Greekless readers.

Anglo-Hellenic Review

McCrorie has produced an epic with its own rhythms, idioms and developing pleasures.

Kirkus Reviews

2017-09-04
Fresh version of one of the world's oldest epic poems, a foundational text of Western literature.Sing to me, O muse, of the—well, in the very opening line, the phrase Wilson (Classical Studies, Univ. of Pennsylvania) chooses is the rather bland "complicated man," the adjective missing out on the deviousness implied in the Greek polytropos, which Robert Fagles translated as "of twists and turns." Wilson has a few favorite words that the Greek doesn't strictly support, one of them being "monstrous," meaning something particularly heinous, and to have Telemachus "showing initiative" seems a little report-card-ish and entirely modern. Still, rose-fingered Dawn is there in all her glory, casting her brilliant light over the wine-dark sea, and Wilson has a lively understanding of the essential violence that underlies the complicated Odysseus' great ruse to slaughter the suitors who for 10 years have been eating him out of palace and home and pitching woo to the lovely, blameless Penelope; son Telemachus shows that initiative, indeed, by stringing up a bevy of servant girls, "their heads all in a row / …strung up with the noose around their necks / to make their death an agony." In an interesting aside in her admirably comprehensive introduction, which extends nearly 80 pages, Wilson observes that the hanging "allows young Telemachus to avoid being too close to these girls' abused, sexualized bodies," and while her reading sometimes tends to be overly psychologized, she also notes that the violence of Odysseus, by which those suitors "fell like flies," mirrors that of some of the other ungracious hosts he encountered along his long voyage home to Ithaca.More faithful to the original but less astonishing than Christopher Logue's work and lacking some of the music of Fagles' recent translations of Homer; still, a readable and worthy effort.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940172944932
Publisher:	Erika
Publication date:	04/22/2021
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

I

Athene Visits Telemachus

Tell me, Muse, the story of that resourceful man who was driven to wander far and wide after he had sacked the holy citadel of Troy. He saw the cities of many people and he learnt their ways. He suffered great anguish on the high seas in his struggles to preserve his life and bring his comrades home. But he failed to save those comrades, in spite of all his efforts. It was their own transgression that brought them to their doom, for in their folly they devoured the oxen of Hyperion the Sun-god and he saw to it that they would never return. Tell us this story, goddess daughter of Zeus, beginning at whatever point you will.

All the survivors of the war had reached their homes by now and so put the perils of battle and the sea behind them. Odysseus alone was prevented from returning to the home and wife he yearned for by that powerful goddess, the Nymph Calypso, who longed for him to marry her, and kept him in her vaulted cave. Not even when the rolling seasons brought in the year which the gods had chosen for his homecoming to Ithaca was he clear of his troubles and safe among his friends. Yet all the gods pitied him, except Poseidon, who pursued the heroic Odysseus with relentless malice till the day when he reached his own country.

Poseidon, however, was now gone on a visit to the distant Ethiopians, in the most remote part of the world, half of whom live where the Sun goes down, and half where he rises. He had gone to accept a sacrifice of bulls and rams, and there he sat and enjoyed the pleasures of the feast. Meanwhile the rest of the gods had assembled in the palace of Olympian Zeus, and the Father of men and gods opened a discussion among them. He had been thinking of the handsome Aegisthus, whom Agamemnon’s far-famed son Orestes killed; and it was with Aegisthus in his mind that Zeus now addressed the immortals:

‘What a lamentable thing it is that men should blame the gods and regard us as the source of their troubles, when it is their own transgressions which bring them suffering that was not their destiny. Consider Aegisthus: it was not his destiny to steal Agamemnon’s wife and murder her husband when he came home. He knew the result would be utter disaster, since we ourselves had sent Hermes, the keen-eyed Giant-slayer, to warn him neither to kill the man nor to court his wife. For Orestes, as Hermes told him, was bound to avenge Agamemnon as soon as he grew up and thought with longing of his home. Yet with all his friendly counsel Hermes failed to dissuade him. And now Aegisthus has paid the final price for all his sins.’

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Odyssey"
by .
Copyright © 2010 E. V. Homer.
Excerpted by permission of Penguin Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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