Front cover image for The Odyssey

The Odyssey

Homer (Author), Robert Fagles (Translator), Bernard Knox (Writer of introduction)
"When Robert Fagles' translation of the Iliad was published in 1990, critics and scholars alike hailed it as a masterpiece." "Now Robert Fagles presents us with the Odyssey, Homer's best-loved and most accessible poem, recounting the arduous wanderings of Odysseus during his ten-year voyage home to Ithaca, after the Trojan War. If the Iliad is the world's greatest war story, then the Odyssey is literature's grandest evocation of everyman's journey through life. Odysseus' reliance on his wit and wiliness for survival in his encounters with divine and natural forces is at once the human story and an individual test of moral endurance. In the myths and legends that are magnificently retold here, Fagles has captured the energy and poetry of Homer's original in a bold, contemporary idiom and given us an Odyssey to read aloud, to savor, and to treasure for its sheer lyrical mastery." "Renowned classicist Bernard Knox's superb Introduction and textual commentary provide new insights and background information for the general reader and scholar, intensifying the strength of Fagles' translation. This is an Odyssey to delight both the classicist and the public at large, and to captivate a new generation of Homer's students."--Jacket
Print Book, English, 1997
Penguin Books, New York, 1997
Young adult literature
541 pages : maps, genealogical tables ; 22 cm
9780780776616, 9780140268867, 0780776615, 0140268863
37908303
Introduction: Spelling and pronunciation of Homeric names
Maps: Homeric geography : Mainland Greece
Peloponnese
Aegean and Asia Minor
Inset: Troy and vicinity
Homer: Odyssey : Athena inspires the prince
Telemachus sets sail
King Nestor remembers
King and queen of Sparta
Odysseus- Nymph and shipwreck
The princess and the stranger
Phaeacia's halls and gardens
A day for songs and contests
In the one-eyed giant's cave
The bewitching queen of Aeaea
The kingdom of the dead
The cattle of the sun
Ithaca at last
The loyal swineherd
The prince sets sail for home
Father and son
Stranger at the gates
The beggar-king of Ithaca
Penelope and her guest
Portents gather
Odysseus strings his bow
Slaughter in the hall
The great rooted bed
Peace
"This [pbk.] edition contains minor revisions of the text"--Page 496
Originally published: New York, New York : Penguin, 1996
Translated from the ancient Greek