The Odyssey
By Robert Fagles; Bernard Knox (Translator); Bernard Knox (Introduction by); (Notes by)
(Penguin Classics, Paperback, 9780143039952, 560pp.)
Publication Date: October 31, 2006
Other Editions of This Title: Hardcover,
Categories: Ancient, Classical & Medieval
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Robert Fagles's stunning modern-verse translation-available at last in our black-spine classics line
The 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.
Two great epics of ancient Greek literature, the Iliad, a classic war story, and the Odyssey, the tale of everyman’s journey through life, were believed to have been written by a single poet whom the Greeks named Homer. Nothing is known of his life. While seven Greek cities claim the honor of being his birthplace, ancient tradition places him in Ionia, located in the eastern Aegean. His birthdate is undocumented as well, though most scholars now place the composition of the Iliad and the Odyssey in the late eighth or early seventh century BC.
Robert Fagles is Arthur W. Marks ’19 Professor of Comparative Literature, Emeritus, at Princeton University. He is 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 previous translations include Sophocles’s Three Theban Plays, Aeschylus’s Oresteia (nominated for a National Book Award), Homer’s Iliad (winner of the 1991 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award by The Academy of American Poets) and Homer’s Odyssey.Bernard Knox is Director Emeritus of Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C.
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)
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