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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.
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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.
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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. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Rollicking verse translation,
By
This review is from: The Odyssey (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)
Fagles' verse translation is fantastic. It rollicks along boisterously, mainly in blank hexameters, sometimes shrinking to smaller lines for more domestic scenes, tugging the reader along with the ebb and surge of the oceans that throw Odysseus to and fro.
A verse translation, compared to prose, is so much more dynamic. Here, for example, is T.E.Lawrence's prose toward the end of Book 5: "Exactly as when a squid is dragged out from its bed the many pebbles come away in the suckers of its arms, so did the skin peel off Odysseus' strong hands against the stones. Then the billows closed over his head." Where Lawrence ends the paragraph there, Fagles elides the passage into the next event, imitating the breathlessness of Odysseus in his battle against the sea: "Like pebbles stuck in the suckers of some octopus dragged from its lair - so strips of skin torn from his clawing hands stuck to the rock face. A heavy sea covered him over, then and there unlucky Odysseus would have met his fate..." With the 'clawing hands' and 'heavy sea', Fagles can make the plight of Odysseus more graphically desperate.
33 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Epic achievement,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Odyssey (Hardcover)
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 this sleep I wandered the world of letters, At last I found my literary Tiresias, The best, in fine, of both worlds, an epic worthy
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An excellent tale,
By
This review is from: The Odyssey (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)
As noted on earlier reviews these two, the first "The Iliad", and now "The Odyssey" have become the translations read for pure enjoyment. No longer does one `know' of the classics but never read them, now we read them too. Thankfully, Robert Fagles has produced a translation worthy of the original sense of Homer's great poem. It captures well the suffering and tragedy Odysseus went through in his journey full of trials and tribulations from the great ogre, the Cyclops, to the beautiful Calypso and finally one of his greatest tests, the suitors seeking his wife's approval after 20 years absence from his homeland.
As usual the introduction by Bernard Knox is highly informative and shows real depth of understanding of Homeric poetry, an invaluable aid in the full comprehension of the poem. In addition, the extra maps of the Homeric world as well as a glossary of terms and a section detailing some of the characters in more depth provide an excellent background which may be missing in a non-classical education. Certainly, this is the translation to use when teaching of classic poetry in schools since the child is captivated by the flow of the story and the fast pace which keeps one glued to the book, although not as pacy as The Iliad it is a different sort of story. Unlike the Iliad, which is replete with battles and war, The Odyssey is the story of a journey and is of a different tune. I once tried to read an earlier translation of The Odyssey a few years ago and found it stuffy and staid, this is no longer true of Fagles work. I felt throughout that Fagles kept to the aura of the original even when substituting more modern expressions for the older ones e.g. "holding nothing back" is obviously a modern phrase but it captures what the poem is saying and that is what is important i.e. capturing the poem as a whole. This has been ably achieved. An excellent book.
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