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
"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
Book Description
The classic translation of The Odyssey, now in a Noonday paperback.
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. The Noonday Press 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.
The Noonday Press edition also features a map, a Glossary of Names and Places, and Fitzgerald's Postscript. Line drawings precede each book of the poem.
Winner of the Bollingen Prize
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. The Noonday Press 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.
The Noonday Press edition also features a map, a Glossary of Names and Places, and Fitzgerald's Postscript. Line drawings precede each book of the poem.
Winner of the Bollingen Prize
Ingram
Odysseus, the most heroic of the ancient Greek warriors, journeys home to Ithaca after the Trojan War.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
About the Author
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 1988, he was Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Odyssey
BOOK I
A GODDESS INTERVENES
Sing 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 townlands
and 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 seasons
wheeling 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 god
had 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 son, Orests, and spoke his thought aloud before them all:
"My word, how mortals take the gods to task! All their afflictions come from us, we hear. And what of their own failings? Greed and folly double the suffering in the lot of man. See how Aigsthos, for his double portion, stole Agammnon's wife and killed the soldier on his homecoming day. And yet Aigsthos knew that his own doom lay in this. We gods had warned him, sent down Herms Argeiphonts, our most observant courier, to say: 'Don't kill the man, don't touch his wife, or face a reckoning with Orests the day he comes of age and wants his patrimony.' Friendly advice--but would Aigsthos take it? Now he has paid the reckoning in full."
The grey-eyed goddess Athena replied to Zeus:
"O Majesty, O Father of us all, that man is in the dust indeed, and justly. So perish all who do what he had done. But my own heart is broken for Odysseus, the master mind of war, so long a castaway upon an island in the running sea; a wooded island, in the sea's middle, and there's a goddess in the place, the daughter of one whose baleful mind knows all the deeps of the blue sea--Atlas, who holds the columns that bear from land the great thrust of the sky. His daughter will not let Odysseus go, poor mournful man; she keeps on coaxing him with her beguiling talk, to turn his mind from Ithaka. But such desire is in him merely to see the hearthsmoke leaping upward from his own island, that he longs to die. Are you not moved by this, Lord of Olympos? Had you no pleasure from Odysseus' offerings beside the Argive ships, on Troy's wide seaboard? O Zeus, what do you hold against him now?"
To this the summoner of cloud replied:
"My child, what strange remarks you let escape you. Could I forget that kingly man, Odysseus? There is no mortal half so wise; no mortal gave so much to the lords of open sky. Only the god who laps the land in water, Poseidon, bears the fighter an old grudge since he poked out the eye of Polyphemos, brawniest of the Kyklopes. Who bore that giant lout? Thosa, daughter of Phorkys, an offshore sea lord: for this nymph had lain with Lord Poseidon in her hollow caves. Naturally, the god, after the blinding--mind you, he does not kill the man; he only buffets him away from home. But come now, we are all at leisure here,let us take up this matter of his return, that he may sail. Poseidon must relent for being quarrelsome will get him nowhere, one god, flouting the will of all the gods."
The grey-eyed goddess Athena answered him:
"O Majesty, O Father of us all, if it now please the blissful gods that wise Odysseus reach his home again, let the Wayfinder, Herms, cross the sea to the island of Oggia; let him tell our fixed intent to the nymph with pretty braids, and let the steadfast man depart for home. For my part, I shall visit Ithaka to put more courage in the son, and rouse him to call an assembly of the islanders, Akhaian gentlemen with flowing hair. He must warn off that wolf pack of the suitors who prey upon his flocks and dusky cattle. I'll send him to the mainland then, to Sparta by the sand beach of Pylos; let him find news of his dear father where he may and win his own renown about the world."
She bent to tie her beautiful sandals on, ambrosial, golden, that carry her over water or over endless land on the wings of the wind, and took the great haft of her spear in hand--that bronzeshod spear this child of Power can use to break in wrath long battle lines of fighters.
Flashing down from Olympos' height she went to stand in Ithaka, before the Manor, just at the doorsill of the court. She seemed a family friend, the Taphian captain, Mentes, waiting, with a light hand on her spear. Before her eyes she found the lusty suitors casting dice inside the gate, at ease on hides of oxen--oxen they had killed.
Their own retainers made a busy sight with houseboys mixing bowls of water and wine, or sopping water up in sponges, wiping tables to be placed about in hall, or butchering whole carcasses for roasting.
Long before anyone else, the prince Telmakhos now caught sight of Athena--for he, too, was sitting there unhappy among the suitors, a boy, daydreaming. What if his great father came from the unknown world and drove these men like dead leaves through the place, recovering honor and lordship in his own domains? Then he who dreamed in the crowd gazed out at Athena.
Straight to the door he came, irked with himself to think a visitor had been kept there waiting, and took her right hand, grasping with his left her tall bronze-bladed spear. Then he said warmly:
"Greetings, stranger! Welcome to our feast. There will be time to tell your errand later."
He led the way, and Pallas Athena followed into the lofty hall. The boy reached up and thrust her spear high in a polished rack against a pillar where tough spear on spear of the old soldier, his father, stood in order. Then, shaking out a splendid coverlet, he seated her on a throne with footrest--all finely carved--and drew his painted armchair near her, at a distance from the rest. To be amid the din, the suitors' riot, would ruin his guest's appetite, he thought, and he wished privacy to ask for news about his father, gone for years.
A maid
brought them a silver finger bowl and filled it out of a beautiful spouting golden jug, then drew a polished table to their side.
The larder mistress with her tray came by and served them generously. A carver lifted cuts of each roast meat to put on trenchers before the two. He gave them cups of gold, and these the steward as he went his rounds filled and filled again.
Now came the suitors,
young bloods trooping in to their own seats on thrones or easy chairs. Attendants poured water over their fingers, while the maids piled baskets full of brown loaves near at hand, and houseboys brimmed the bowls with wine. Now they laid hands upon the ready feast and thought of nothing more. Not till desire for food and drink had left them were they mindful of dance and song, that are the grace of feasting. A herald gave a shapely cithern harp to Phmios, whom they compelled to sing--and what a storm he plucked upon the strings for prelude! High and clear the song arose.
Telmakhos now spoke to grey-eyed Athena, his head bent close, so no one else might hear:
"Dear guest, will this offend you, if I speak? It is easy for these men to like these things, harping and song; they have an easy life, scot free, eating the livestock of another--a man whose bones are rotting somewhere now, white in the rain on dark earth where they lie, or tumbling in the groundswell of the sea. If he returned, if these men ever saw him, faster legs they'd pray for, to a man, and not more wealth in handsome robes or gold. But he is lost; he came to grief and perished, and there's no help for us in someone's hoping he still may come; that sun has long gone down. But tell me now, and put it for me clearly--who are you? Where do you come from? Where's your home and family? What kind of ship is yours,and what course brought you here? Who are your sailors? I don't suppose you walked here on the sea. Another thing--this too I ought to know--is Ithaka new to you, or were you ever a guest here in the old days? Far and near friends knew this house; for he whose home it was had much acquaintance in the world."
To this
the grey-eyed goddess answered:
"As you ask,
I can account ...
