The Odyssey

Homer’s Odyssey is still enchanting readers after thousands of years * Guardian *Surely the best and truest Odyssey in the English language * Herald Tribune *Fitzgerald is taking his place beside Chapman and Pope in the unbroken lineage of English Homeric translations…it has the economy and soar of a poet * George Steiner *A strong salty flavour of its own. And it makes you see things * C.S. Lewis *The Homeric poems are interesting…because of the way in which they present human shocks and surprises… It is the surprising twist that war brings to the domestic…which makes Homer repeatedly shocking * London Review of Books *Of all bookes extant in all kinds, Homer is the first and best…writ from a free furie, an absolute and full soule * George Chapman *

Homer is a much-debated figure traditionally considered to have composed the two great oral poems The Odyssey and The Iliad in eighth or seventh-century-BC Greece.

Robert Fitzgerald was Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory Emeritus at Harvard University. He was a member of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He published four volumes of his own verse during his lifetime. His translations of The Odyssey and The Iliad, and of Virgil’s Aeniad, won him many honours and are universally acknowledged to be among the finest of their kind this century. He died in 1985.