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About The Odyssey
About the Author Homer is a legendary ancient Greek epic poet, traditionally said to be the creator of the epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey. Homer's works form the groundwork of the Western Canon and are universally praised for their genius. Their formative influence in shaping many key aspects of Greek culture was recognized by the Greeks themselves, who considered him as their instructor. Robert Fitzgerald's versions of the Iliad, the Aeneid, and the Oedipus cycle of Sophocles (with Dudley Fitts) are also classics. At his death, in 1985, he was Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard. Product Description The classic translation of The Odyssey, now in paperback. This edition also features a map, a Glossary of Names and Places, and Fitzgerald's Postscript. Line drawings precede each book of the poem. Robert Fitzgerald's translation of Homer's Odyssey is the best and best-loved modern translation of the greatest of all epic poems. Since 1961, this Odyssey has sold more than two million copies, and it is the standard translation for three generations of students and poets. Farrar, Straus and Giroux is delighted to publish a new edition of this classic work. Fitzgerald's supple verse is ideally suited to the story of Odysseus' long journey back to his wife and home after the Trojan War. Homer's tale of love, adventure, food and drink, sensual pleasure, and mortal danger reaches the English-language reader in all its glory. Of the many translations published since World War II, only Fitzgerald's has won admiration as a great poem in English. The noted classicist D. S. Carne-Ross explains the many aspects of its artistry in his Introduction, written especially for this new edition. Winner of the Bollingen Prize Review “A masterpiece . . . An Odyssey worthy of the original.” ―William Arrowsmith, The Nation “Here 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.” ―Seamus Heaney Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The Odyssey BOOK IA GODDESS INTERVENESSing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story of that man skilled in all ways of contending, the wanderer, harried for years on end, after he plundered the stronghold on the proud height of Troy. He saw the townlandsand learned the minds of many distant men, and weathered many bitter nights and days in his deep heart at sea, while he fought only to save his life, to bring his shipmates home. But not by will nor valor could he save them, for their own recklessness destroyed them all--children and fools, they killed and feasted on the cattle of Lord Hlios, the Sun, and he who moves all day through heaven took from their eyes the dawn of their return. Of these adventures, Muse, daughter of Zeus, tell us in our time, lift the great song again. Begin when all the rest who left behind them headlong death in battle or at sea had long ago returned, while he alone still hungered for home and wife. Her ladyship Kalypso clung to him in her sea-hollowed caves--a nymph, immortal and most beautiful, who craved him for her own. And when long years and seasonswheeling brought around that point of time ordained for him to make his passage homeward, trials and dangers, even so, attended him even in Ithaka, near those he loved. Yet all the gods had pitied Lord Odysseus, all but Poseidon, raging cold and rough against the brave king till he came ashore at last on his own land. But now that godhad gone far off among the sunburnt races, most remote of men, at earth's two verges, in sunset lands and lands of the rising sun, to be regaled by smoke of thighbones burning, haunches of rams and bulls, a hundred fold. He lingered delighted at the banquet side. In the bright hall of Zeus upon Olympos the other gods were all at home, and Zeus, the father of gods and men, made conversation. For he had meditated on Aigsthos, dead by the hand of Agammnon's
