4/6/2023 0 Comments The odyssey bookThe Odyssey, for me, today, is a complex whole seen in multiple refractions through lexicons and reference grammars, books and articles, friends and colleagues and students, the several English translations I’ve read in full, and an assortment of others I’ve dipped into. There is so much power and grace in Homer’s poetry that a reader responsive to a few partial strands of it can find in them a wholly satisfying experience, and every translator whose work I have read has detected and magnified something in the original that I had not found by other means. But I am not just giving the professionals faint praise for being no worse at their task than a blundering sophomore. I first learned that when I did a homework assignment, about half a century ago, by looking up all the words in a passage and writing down, one by one, a meaning for each that seemed possible when I read through the mishmash on my page, I was astonished to find beauty in it. Homer’s talent is surprisingly hard to kill. Somewhere among the fifty-six complete versions published in English from 1615 to 2008, there may be one that loses all the life and feel of the original, but I haven’t come across it yet. The poem appears in as many guises as Odysseus himself. Eickhoff) or in a style that manages to be rapid, direct, and formal all at once (Lawrence of Arabia, under the pen name T.E. Murray) or in wild flights of excess (R.L. There are verse translations that march in boots (Richmond Lattimore) or amble along in sensible shoes (Albert Cook), or glide (Ennis Rees) or dance (Allen Mandelbaum) or dance a jig (Robert Fitzgerald) and there are prose translations that speak in archaisms (A.T. I have never met a translation of the Odyssey I didn’t like. Translated by Joe Sachs, Paul Dry Books, 2014
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