Harper Collins The Odyssey of Homer, Fiction, Paperback, Richmond Lattimore
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Price: £10.99
Brand: Harper Collins
Description: ' The best translation there is of a great, perhaps the greatest poet."--New York Times. Harper Collins The Odyssey of Homer, Fiction, Paperback, Richmond Lattimore - shop the best deal online on thebookbug.co.uk
Category: Books
Merchant: Harper Collins
Product ID: 9780061244186
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Dimensions: 135x203mm
ISBN: 9780061244186
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Author: John Sheldon
Rating: 5
Review: This is not a new translation, the translator Richard Lattimore died a few years ago, but it is one of the best blank verse translations I have ever read (the other really good one is by Francis Caulfeild, but you would be lucky to find a copy now). The translator has attempted to reproduce in English blank verse the style and idiom of Homer's original Greek version (dating from about 2600 years ago). I am not qualified to comment on the technicalities of Lattimore's Greek-English translation, but I have been enjoying The Odyssey in English translations for several decades now and know a 'good read' when I find one. There is a very good introduction which, yes, gives the plot away, but that does not matter as Homer's original audience knew the story well anyway - what made Homer's Odyssey so good was the way he told it; and in essence it is the same thing that makes Lattimore's translation so good - there is a freshness that keeps you reading, and although I have read a number of different versions, each of them several times, this book is still compulsive reading. The introdction also covers the construction of the story, which starts halfway through, then fills in the earlier events like a 'flashback' before continung to the end (yes, Homer thought of this way of telling a story long before our current film/TV industry did). There is an exhaustive and very helpful glossary, mostly concerning the identities of the numerous people and gods who appear or are referred to in the story. Yes, this is a recommended book to anyone who wants something a bit more demanding than airport pulp fiction and who can be patient with and open to the idiosyncracies of a very old, and comparatively expansive, writing style. The "Odyssey" of Homer (P.S.)
Author: Roman Clodia
Rating: 4
Review: People are generally supposed to be either an 'Iliad' person or an 'Odyssey' person and I have to confess that I'm definitely an 'Iliad' person. Even so, this is THE translation of the Odyssey, whether you're a student or a general reader. Lattimore amazingly maintains the narrative drive of the original with a sense of the majestic sound and rhythm of the language so that you know you're reading an 'epic' - in all senses of the word. Hailed as a fantasy/romance depicting the Greek's engagement with the outside world that they were coming into contact with through colonisation, or a meditation on what it means to be civilised and urban as opposed to being 'natural' such as the cyclops or Circe, this is still a wonderful story with which anyone can engage. Where the Iliad is about dissolution, death and the breaking of all human bonds, the Odyssey is about reconciliation, restitution and homecoming. Odysseus (the Roman Ulysses) is a Greek 'everyman' struggling to make it home from Troy to his faithful wife Penelope while facing the challenges (both martial and sexual) of his opponents, and on his journey meets and defeats the sirens, the cyclops, Sylla and Charybdis, Circe, Kalypso and a host of other obstacles. For me, one of the most fascinating and poignant episodes is where we see Helen back at home in Sparta with her husband Menelaus who has brought her back from Troy. Essential reading as one of the foundations of European literature, this is a far better translation that the prose Penguin or Oxford versions.
