The Odyssey by Homer;

Short description:

Also included is a pronunciation glossary and character index.

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Long description:

A bold new translation that preserves the swiftness, austerity, and clarity of the original.

"Tell us, Goddess, daughter of Zeus, start in your own place:

when all the rest at Troy had fled from that steep doom

and gone back home, away from war and the salt sea,

only this man longed for his wife and a way home."

Homer's Odyssey, at once an exciting epic of strife and subterfuge and a deeply felt tale of love and devotion, stands at the very beginning of the Western literary tradition. From ancient Greece to the present day its influence on later literature has been unsurpassed, and for centuries translators have approached the meter, tone, and pace of Homer's poetry with a variety of strategies. Chapman and Pope paid keen attention to color, drama, and vivacity of style, rendering the Greek verse loosely and inventively. In the twentieth century, translators such as Lattimore kept rigorously close to the sense of each word in the original; others, including Fitzgerald and Fagles, have departed further from the language of the original, employing their own inventive modern style.

Poet and translator Edward McCrorie now opens new territory in this striking rendition, which captures the spare, powerful tone of Homer's epic while engaging contemporary readers with its brisk pace, idiomatic language, and lively characterization. McCrorie closely reproduces the Greek metrical patterns and employs a diction and syntax that reflects the plain, at times stark, quality of Homer's lines, rather than later English poetic styles. Avoiding both the stiffness of word-for-word literalism and the exaggeration and distortion of free adaptation, this translation dramatically evokes the ancient sound and sense of the poem. McCrorie's is truly an Odyssey for the twenty-first century.

To accompany this innovative translation, noted classical scholar Richard Martin has written an accessible and wide-ranging introduction explaining the historical and literary context of the Odyssey, its theological and cultural underpinnings, Homer's poetic strategies and narrative techniques, and his cast of characters. In addition, Martin provides detailed notes—far more extensive than those in other editions—addressing key themes and concepts; the histories of persons, gods, events, and myths; literary motifs and devices; and plot development. Also included is a pronunciation glossary and character index.

McCrorie's new translation can be recommended without reservation to the generations of students to whom it is bound to be assigned and to any reader who'd like to get as close to the original as is possible without reading the original Greek. It is refreshing, accurate, and direct.
—Jay Kenney, Bloomsbury Review

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Table of Contents:

Translator's Preface
Introduction, by Richard P. Martin
The ODYSSEY
1. Trouble at Home
2. A Gathering and a Parting
3. In the Great Hall of Nestor
4. With Menelaos and Helen
5. A Raft on the High Seas
6. Laundry Friends
7. The Warmest Welcome
8. Songs, Challenges, Dances, and Gifts
9. A Battle, the Lotos, and a Savage's Cave
10. Mad Winds, Laistrugonians, and an Enchantress
11. The Land of the Dead
12. Evil Song, a Deadly Strait, and Forbidden Herds
13. A Strange Arrival Home
14. The House of the Swineherd
15. Son and Father Converging
16. Father and Son Reunite
17. Unknown in His Own House
18. Fights in the Great Hall
19. Memory and Dream in the Palace
20. Dawn of the Death-Day
21. The Stringing of the Bow
22. Revenge in the Great Hall
23. Husband and Wife at Last
24. Last Tensions and Peace
Notes, by Richard P. Martin
Names in the Odyssey
Bibliography, by Richard P. Martin

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