 Trade In this Item for up to £6.95
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in The Odyssey: Bks.1-12 for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £6.95, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
Product Description
Product Description
A substantial introduction covers many of the questions that lie behind the poem, including a thorough summary of Homeric grammar; the text is elucidated with full annotations, indexes and bibliography.
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organise and find favourite items. |
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
There are no customer reviews yet on Amazon.co.uk.
5 star
4 star
3 star
2 star
1 star
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
2 reviews
17 of 17 people found the following review helpful
Great text; so-so edition
13 April 2008
This and its companion volume are *the* student texts with commentaries that one would want to use to read the complete Odyssey at a beginning or intermediate level. The introduction is very thorough and provides a good summary of Homeric scholarship up to the time when it was written (1950s), comments on some of the distinctive features of Homeric grammar and syntax, and gives helpful overviews of words for parts of ships and houses that make it easier to understand what's going on in certain parts of the story. It would have been nice for a glossary to be included, but you can't have everything. A great example of the type of student editions of Greek/Latin texts that were once so common.
But I have to be a little frustrated with Bristol's presentation of this fifty-some year old text. I must start by saying that I appreciate their making available at a reasonable price a book that would certainly otherwise be out of print, as they do for many classical texts; this is a great service to the unfortunately small group of modern students of the classics. But the method by which this old text is reproduced leaves something to be desired.
I would imagine that what has been done is the old text has been scanned into a computer and is now reproduced as graphical images--i.e. the actual text of the book has not been re-typeset in a format that could be edited or manipulated, but we are looking at essentially photocopies of the original pages of the book. The result is that the text is often somewhat blurry. This problem is especially bad with the Greek text in the introduction and in the commentary in the back (which is in a smaller font size than the main Greek text, which is generally readable). Often the accents, breathing marks, and even the letters themselves become blobs that are either indecipherable, or at least require a good deal of squinting to make out. I imagine that someone with worse eyesight than I have might find some of it unuseable.
In contrast, I have an earlier edition of the second volume of this text (Odyssey 13-24) which reprints the same introduction. Although this earlier edition is about 3/4 the size of this printing, the text is much clearer and more legible--presumably because it was printed from the original plates, and not photocopies of them.
Ideally, the text would be re-set digitally, and a new copy of it could be crisper and clearer than the original. Perhaps this would be too labor-intensive (and would require a proofreader with a detailed knowledge of ancient Greek) to be cost effective--but then again, the list price of this book ($32, at least twice the list price of a modern paperback of the same length) should lead one to expect a certain level of quality in the product. So I'm happy that it exists, but it has room for improvement.
But I have to be a little frustrated with Bristol's presentation of this fifty-some year old text. I must start by saying that I appreciate their making available at a reasonable price a book that would certainly otherwise be out of print, as they do for many classical texts; this is a great service to the unfortunately small group of modern students of the classics. But the method by which this old text is reproduced leaves something to be desired.
I would imagine that what has been done is the old text has been scanned into a computer and is now reproduced as graphical images--i.e. the actual text of the book has not been re-typeset in a format that could be edited or manipulated, but we are looking at essentially photocopies of the original pages of the book. The result is that the text is often somewhat blurry. This problem is especially bad with the Greek text in the introduction and in the commentary in the back (which is in a smaller font size than the main Greek text, which is generally readable). Often the accents, breathing marks, and even the letters themselves become blobs that are either indecipherable, or at least require a good deal of squinting to make out. I imagine that someone with worse eyesight than I have might find some of it unuseable.
In contrast, I have an earlier edition of the second volume of this text (Odyssey 13-24) which reprints the same introduction. Although this earlier edition is about 3/4 the size of this printing, the text is much clearer and more legible--presumably because it was printed from the original plates, and not photocopies of them.
Ideally, the text would be re-set digitally, and a new copy of it could be crisper and clearer than the original. Perhaps this would be too labor-intensive (and would require a proofreader with a detailed knowledge of ancient Greek) to be cost effective--but then again, the list price of this book ($32, at least twice the list price of a modern paperback of the same length) should lead one to expect a certain level of quality in the product. So I'm happy that it exists, but it has room for improvement.
1 of 7 people found the following review helpful
pretty good
21 Feb 2009
Amazon Verified Purchase
Delivered when it said it would be. A few pages smashed up in delivery, not bad though.
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
