The Odyssey

Robert Fagles's stunning modern-verse translation-available at last in our black-spine classics lineSoon to be a major motion picture directed by Christopher NolanA Penguin ClassicThe Odyssey is literature's grandest evocation of everyman's journey through life. In the myths and legends that are retold here, renowned translator Robert Fagles has captured the energy and poetry of Homer's original in a bold, contemporary idiom and given us an Odyssey to read aloud, to savor, and to treasure for its sheer lyrical mastery. This is an Odyssey to delight both the classicist and the general reader, and to captivate a new generation of Homer's students.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

“Wonderfully readable... Just the right blend of roughness and sophistication. (Ted Hughes) Robert Fagles is the best living translator of ancient Greek drama, lyric poetry, and epic into modern English. (Garry Wills, The New Yorker ) Mr. Fagles has been remarkably successful in finding a style that is of our time and yet timeless. (Richard Jenkyns, The New York Times Book Review )”

Praise for Robert Fagles Translation of The Odyssey

“Wonderfully readable... Just the right blend of roughness and sophistication.”—Ted Hughes

“Robert Fagles is the best living translator of ancient Greek drama, lyric poetry, and epic into modern English.”—Garry Wills, The New Yorker

“Mr. Fagles has been remarkably successful in finding a style that is of our time and yet timeless.”—Richard Jenkyns, The New York Times Book Review

Homerwas probably born around 725BC on the Coast of Asia Minor, now the coast of Turkey, but then really a part of Greece. Homer was the first Greek writer whose work survives. He was one of a long line of bards, or poets, who worked in the oral tradition. Homer and other bards of the time could recite, or chant, long epic poems. Both works attributed to Homer - theIliadand theOdyssey- are over ten thousand lines long in the original. Homer must have had an amazing memory but was helped by the formulaic poetry style of the time.In the Iliad Homer sang of death and glory, of a few days in the struggle between the Greeks and the Trojans. Mortal men played out their fate under the gaze of the gods. TheOdysseyis the original collection of tall traveller's tales. Odysseus, on his way home from the Trojan War, encounters all kinds of marvels from one-eyed giants to witches and beautiful temptresses. His adventures are many and memorable before he gets back to Ithaca and his faithful wife Penelope. We can never be certain that both these stories belonged to Homer. In fact 'Homer' may not be a real name but a kind of nickname meaning perhaps 'the hostage' or 'the blind one'. Whatever the truth of their origin, the two stories, developed around three thousand years ago, may well still be read in three thousand years' time.Robert Fagles(1933-2008) was Arthur W. Marks '19 Professor of Comparative Literature, Emeritus, at Princeton University. He was the recipient of the 1997 PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation and a 1996 Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His translations include Sophocles'sThree Theban Plays, Aeschylus'sOresteia(nominated for a National Book Award), Homer'sIliad(winner of the 1991 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award by The Academy of American Poets), Homer'sOdyssey, and Virgil'sAeneid.Bernard Knox(1914-2010) was Director Emeritus of Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C. He taught at Yale University for many years. Among his numerous honors are awards from the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the National Endowment for the Humanities. His works includeThe Heroic Temper- Studies in Sophoclean Tragedy, Oedipus at Thebes- Sophocles' Tragic Hero and His TimeandEssays Ancient and Modern(awarded the 1989 PEN/Spielvogel-Diamonstein Award).

By its evocation of a real or imaged heroic age, its contrasts of character and its variety of adventure, above all by its sheer narrative power, the Odyssey has won and preserved its place among the greatest tales in the world. It tells of Odysseus' adventurous wanderings as he returns from the long war at Troy to his home in the Greek island of Ithaca, where his wife Penelope and his son Telemachus have been waiting for him for twenty years. He meets a one-eyed giant, Polyphemus the Cyclops; he visits the underworld; he faces the terrible monsters Scylla and Charybdis; he extricates himself from the charms of Circe and Calypso. After these and numerous other legendary encounters he finally reaches home, where, disguised as a beggar, he begins to plan revenge on the suitors who have for years been besieging Penelope and feasting on his own meat and wine with insolent impunity.

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