Product Description

Homer's best-loved and most accessible poem, recounting the great wandering of Odysseus during his ten-year voyage back home to Ithaca, after the Trojan War. A superb new verse translation, now published in trade paperback, before the standard Penguin Classic B format. Please note that this is a 'roughcut' edition and as such the pages have uneven edges.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #163121 in Books
• Published on: 1997-11-27
• Original language: Greek
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 560 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
With the Trojan war finally over after many long years, Odysseus wants nothing more than a swift journey home where his throne and beloved wife, Penelope, await him. But Poseidon, the sea god, bears a grudge against him and plans to prevent his return across the wine-dark sea to Ithaca. Many tests of strength and character ensue as Odysseus's journey stretches out over the years, taking in a multitude of strange and wonderful places and creatures. That's the basic plot of the epic poem Homer told nearly 3,000 years ago, but, even now, a new English translation is a true literary event. The ancient story is told in easy-going, beautiful poetry, the characters speak naturally and the action moves along briskly. Even the gods come across as real people, despite the divine powers they constantly exercise. The Odyssey really is a gripping, fast-moving read.

About the Author
ROBERT FAGLES was winner of the 1996 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Customer Reviews

Epic achievement
Since you ask me, you word-hungry Amazonians,
How I came solate in life to the end of a tale
That schoolchildren read in comic books,
A tale that is one of the sturdy legs
Of the table on which our culture rests
Since you ask, I will tell you, and gladly, too.

My journey started, though you grin in disbelief,
In ninth-grade Latin class, where "Ulysses"
Duped the cyclops by calling himself "Nemo."
Then a deep sleep fell over me,
And I knew no more Homer, not in Greek or Latin
Or English or even the strange tongue
Of the network miniseries, while Sun
Drove his blazing chariot round Earth
One hundred hundred times.

In this sleep I wandered the world of letters,
Homerless but unable to avoid the homeric:
Achilles' heel, the Sirens' song,
Calypso, the Trojan Horse, and swinemaking Circe--
Crouched like Scylla, aswirl like Charybdis,
Threatening cultural death to epic ignorance.

At last I found my literary Tiresias,
The New York Times Book Review.
I shook from this seer the name Fagles,
And so guided, I made my way home at last,
Through a translation that rings of a heroic time,
A time when men were stronger and grander than we,
When women were more beautiful,
And when, granted, sexual equality wanted
A few millennia's labor;
But even so, a rendering as modern
As anything DeLillo, new god of the underworld,
Or the infinitely jesting Wallace
Can lay before us.

The best, in fine, of both worlds, an epic worthy
Of the blind bard and of his heroes, his heroines,
And the deathless denizens of Olympus.

"I long to be homeward bound" Simon and Garfunkle
The Trojan War is over and one of our hero kings is lost. His son (Telemachus) travels to find any information about his father's fait. His wife (Penelope) must cunningly hold off suitors that are eating them out of house and home.

If he ever makes it home Odysseus will have to detect those servants loyal from those who are not. One absent king against rows of suitors; how will he give them their just deserts? We look to Bright Eyed Pallas Athena to help prophecy come true.

Interestingly all the tales of monsters and gods on the sea voyage was told by Odysseus. Notice that no on else survives to tell the tale. So we have to rely on Odysseus' word.

Many movies took sections of The Odyssey, and expanded them to make interesting stories those selves.

Not just the story but the way in which it is told will keep you up late at night reading.

Back to Homer
Fangles' version of Homer's epic marks a return to the origin of epic poetry. The Odyssey was meant to be read aloud! Fangles' verse speaks to today's reader (instead of at or down at him or her) and retains Homer's poetic grace. Amen. I loved The Odyssey when I first read it (a prose edition) in 8th grade, but this retelling of it blew me away.