Description

If the Iliad is the world’s greatest war epic, the Odyssey is literature’s grandest evocation of an everyman’s journey through life. Odysseus’ reliance on 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.

In the myths and legends retold here, Fagles captures the energy and poetry of Homer’s original in a bold, contemporary idiom, giving us an Odyssey to read aloud, to savour, and to treasure for its sheer lyrical mastery. Renowned classicist Bernard Knox’s superb introduction and textual commentary provide insightful background information for the general reader and scholar alike, intensifying the strength of Fagles’s translation. This Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition features French flaps and deckle-edged paper.

Publisher Review

"[Robert Fitzgerald's translation is] a masterpiece . . . An "Odyssey" worthy of the original." -"The Nation" "[Fitzgerald's" Odyssey" and "Iliad"] open up once more the unique greatness of Homer's art at the level above the formula; yet at the same time they do not neglect the brilliant texture of Homeric verse at the level of the line and the phrase." -"The Yale Review " "[In] Robert Fitzgerald's translation . . . there is no anxious straining after mighty effects, but rather a constant readiness for what the occasion demands, a kind of Odyssean adequacy to the task in hand, and this line-by-line vigilance builds up into a completely credible imagined world." -from the Introduction by Seamus Heaney