Selected Product:
| The Odyssey
Paperback
Author: Robert Fagles, Homer
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Release Date: 1999-11-29
ISBN-10: 0140268863
ISBN-13: 9780140268867
List Price: $16.00
Average Customer Rating:
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Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
If The Iliad is the world's greatest war epic, then The Odyssey is literature's grandest evocation of everyman's journey though life. Odysseus's reliance on his wit and wiliness for survival in his encounters with divine and natural forces during his ten-year voyage home to Ithaca after the Trojan War is at once a timeless human story and an individual test of moral endurance.
Fagles finds the translator's "middle ground" amidst controversy
| Customer Rating: | About the Odyssey itself, I can add no greater praise than that which has already been deservedly heaped onto one of humankind's greatest literary creations. This particular version is graced with an excellent introduction and notes by Bernard Knox, and what I consider to be a very good translation by Robert Fagles.
The translation style stirs up controversy, with one highly rated review here going so far as to suggest that Fagles' version is not even worthy of being called a translation. In his enlightening translator's postscript, Fagles argues that being too literal results in "too little English" and that being too literary means "too little Greek". In his attempt to create a modern English version, Fagles seeks a happy medium between the two: whether this results in a middle ground or a no-man's-land is up to the reader to decide.
While others clearly disagree, I find Fagles' style immensely satisfying and readable, with an appropriate mix of ancient nobility and modern accessibility. More so than with the Iliad, I found a number of phrases that were perhaps a bit "too colloquial" for my tastes (e.g. it is a bit jarring to see idiomatic modern phrases like "cease and desist" in a translation of a ~3000 year old text) but for me these were few and far between and did not distract from the overall elegance of his translation. Many who prefer a more literal style take issue with Fagles' liberties regarding the syntactic order of epithets, but I felt that he was very effective in conveying the substance of these epithets while converting their style into a form more palatable to the reader of English, a language which seeks to avoid the kind of formulaic repetition which is a necessary convention in ancient Greek.
Above all, Fagles is very clear and explicit about his choice of style, making it easy for the reader to decide whether this style matches his or her expectations. Any translation is ultimately a retelling, and given the gulf of millennia and culture between Homer's Greece and the modern reader, even reading the original in ancient Greek will not faithfully recreate the experience of Homer's contemporaries hearing this tale for the first time. Therefore, assuming technical accuracy exists (which appears to be the case with all of the well known translations of Homer's works), the choice of which one to read ultimately is one of style. The philosophy of translating is a murky realm, with no definitive conclusions about the merits of staying true to the letter of the original versus the spirit of the original--tradeoffs are inevitable. So in the end, find the version that speaks most clearly to you. For me, that version was Fagles'. |
great book
| Customer Rating: | | i really enjoyed this translation of homers epic poem. it was very informative and touched on the key points from the original. and i would know because i speak greek and have read the original text! |
A great classic read, even for a high school student
| Customer Rating: | Robert Fagles' translation of The Odyssey puts the text into modern language that makes this book ideal for teaching in a high school English classroom. I read this in my high school English classroom and, contrary to most students my age, enjoyed it immensely. He keeps the flow of Homer's prose while making the text easy to understand.
This is a great book, and as a Kindle owner, I was happy to see it available. I would also like to see The Iliad as translated by Fagles available for the Kindle. |
Outstanding Value and Translation
| Customer Rating: | | Outstanding value, good quality book for the price and outstanding translation by Robert Fagles. I highly recommend the Odyssey and Iliad combination by same publisher and both are translated by Fagles. |
Great quality, understandable translation.
| Customer Rating: | First of all, don't buy this book if you don't have a college-level reading level.
This book is of excellent quality! I love it. Buy this book if you want a copy of the Odyssey. |
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