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Product Description
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.
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.
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First Sentence
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
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format: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.
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.
34 of 38 people found the following review helpful
Format: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.
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.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format: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.
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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Most Recent Customer Reviews
"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. Read more
Published on 29 April 2007 by bernie
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! Read more
Published on 29 Aug 1999
¤ Paltry, Un-Homeric Sequel to the Illiad ¤
The Illiad is a jewel, a human epic in the best possible sense of the term. The Odyssey, however, is a pathetic, lost little child of a poem, obviously written by some eager, but... Read more
Published on 22 July 1999
Homer is not for morons!
There some people who are not ready to ready and understand the greatness of his thought, richness of language, solid vision of reality, desire for the sublime things and... Read more
Published on 13 July 1999
A decent adventure story
I enjoyed reading this story, yet I think much of its acclaim comes from its age. At times it does seem to ramble a bit. Read more
Published on 21 Jun 1999
Stick with the Fitzgerald
Apparantly, it is possible to go wrong with The Odyssey. Fitzgerald is 100x better.
Published on 21 Jun 1999
Great translation of the Odyssey
This was a great translation of The Odyssey. Having looked at a few other translations, the fact that this was the best appeared blatantly in my face. Read more
Published on 4 Jun 1999
Amazon.com's listings for Homer get no stars!
This is a review of your listings for "Homer": they are in excreble condition compared to your otherwise well-constructed listing/bibliographies. Read more
Published on 21 May 1999
Captivating, humanizing
Put aside everything you are reading and read this Fagles translation---or buy the unabridged Odyssey on tape (available on Amazon. Read more
Published on 19 May 1999
It's an adventure reading this book
The plot of "The Odyssey" is very good- Odysseus, the hero, wants to come home for the first time in 20 years, while his son looks for him. Read more
Published on 13 May 1999
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