The Odyssey

Customer Reviews

• A nearly perfect conjunction of elements  Sep 9, 2001 (146 of 152 found this helpful)

  Fagle's translation of THE ODYSSEY in the Penguin edition is an almost perfect act of publishing. The translation itself manages to be enormously readable, highly poetic, and extremely accurate, all at the same time. The Introduction by Bernard Knox should serve as a model for all scholars who are called upon to write critical introductions for classic works of literature. And the book design is is extraordinary; this edition of Homer's classic is easily one of the most attractive paperback books in my library. I had read this once before in translation (in the old Rieu version), and then later translated much of it in a second year Greek class. But in neither instance did I enjoy it as much as reading the Fagles's translation.

  Aristotle did not think that people should study philosophy too early in life, and perhaps that is also true of reading Homer. Part of me feels that we make a mistake in our education systems by making students read THE ODYSSEY before they are in a position to appreciate it. If one looks through the reviews here, a very large number of very negative reviews by a lot of high school students can be found. I find this unfortunate. In part I regret that we are forcing younger readers to read this book before they have fully matured as readers. Perhaps the book and the students themselves would be better served if we allowed them time to grow a bit more as readers before asking them to tackle Homer.

  THE ODYSSEY is so enormously enjoyable (at least for this adult reader) that it is easy to forget just how very old it is. What impresses me is how readable it is, despite its age. There are very, very few widely read works older than THE ILIAD and THE ODYSSEY. And the gap between how entertaining these works are and those that come before them is gigantic. Try reading THE EPIC OF GILGAMESH or even THE HESIOD and then turning to THE ODYSSEY, and one can grasp my point. This is a very, very old work of literature, but it wears its age lightly. In the end, the greatest praise one can pay THE ODYSSEY is the fact that it can be read for fun, and not just because it is a classic.

• An arty, odd translation. And where are the epithets?  May 17, 2003 (118 of 131 found this helpful)

  Most reviewers love this translation, but after reading it, and comparing it to others (and to the Greek), I don't see why. It claims to be modern and energetic, but in fact its language is quite odd and hard to read -- excessively jaunty, with word order distortions entirely uncharacteristic of Homer. One wonderful thing about Homer is the smoothness and straightforwardness of his sentences. That's completely gone in this translation.
  
  In addition, Fagles radically distorts one of the distinctive features of Homer's verse -- the repetitive and famous epithets: "wily Odysseus", "much-suffering godlike Odysseus" etc. Many of them are just gone, but others are transformed beyond all recognition. The repeated formula "polumetis Odysseus" ('resourceful Odysseus'), for example, which ends 68 different lines in the Odyssey, turns out (by my count) to receive 48 different translations, only 12 of which have the form Adjective+Odysseus! Fagles did this on purpose: he wanted a modern-sounding text. If you like it, fine. But don't think this is a translation of the Odyssey! It's something between a translation and a retelling, and (in my view) a clumsy one at that.

• An excellent book.  Jun 20, 2001 (34 of 36 found this helpful)

  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 (NB my earlier mistake in the review on The Iliad) 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 word 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 transaltion 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, were it only the case of other great classics. I felt throughout that Fagles kept to the aura of the original even when substituting more modern expressions for the older ones eg "holding nothing back" is obviously a modern phrase but it captures what the poem is saying and that is what is important ie capturing the poem as a whole. This has been ably achieved. An excellent book.

• Epic achievement  Oct 7, 1997 (30 of 34 found this helpful)

  Since you ask me, you word-hungry Amazonians,
  How I came solate in life to the end of a tale
  That schoolchildren read in comicbooks,
  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.

• masterful  Dec 13, 1999 (32 of 37 found this helpful)

  Fagles' Odyssey is what Homer (the man, the organization, the woman -- whatever you believe Homer WAS) certainly intended the Odyssey to be. It is translated as poetry, and Fagles' experience in writing his own work and translating others' comes through here. Dactylic lines ('fast') pull you through the text at surprising speed, and spondaic lines ('slow') force you to slow down. The Greek comes shining through as never before, with more of its intricacies intact. For example, when a young Odysseus is described in the beginning of book 19, the phrase "a young boy on a mission" is given its own line. It DOES NOT have its own line in Greek, but it is, however, an enjambment (in which a word or short phrase "hangs over" in the following line for effect). This device might not have as much power in English, and might not strike the reader so heavily -- but it is meant to. We are meant to see a vignette of a young man, all alone and braving the world. Instead of mushing it in with another line, Fagles uses his poetic sense to make a whole line for the little "picture" of Odysseus. The liberties that Fagles DOES take with the text have a purpose, and a purpose that is achieved fully. Imagine this much attention being given to each line, and you might have an idea of why this is such a good translation. The second aspect of Fagles' translation that is truly excellent is his "ear" for Homer. the Odyssey was made to be PERFORMED, and not READ. Read aloud any other translation and you will find it does not have the same clarity or energy. I sincerely hope that this translation will live on. Fagles captures the genius and richness of Homer better than any other translator I have read in English. A huge majority of people who dislike Homer say they do because he is "so boring." I can't believe how someone who picks this up and reads it seriously might be unable to appreciate the intricacy and beauty, the care and precision with which every line is translated, and with which it was originally written.