The Odyssey - by Homer (Paperback)

About the Book

This is the best-loved modern translation of the Odyssey, and the only one admired as a great poem in English. Fitzgerald's supple verse is ideally suited to the story of Odysseus' long journey home after the Trojan War. Homer's tale of love, adventure, sensual pleasure, and danger reaches the English-language reader in all its glory.

Book Synopsis

The classic translation of The Odyssey, now in a deluxe paperback edition with a new introduction by Laura Slatkin and a new afterword by A. E. Stallings.

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 has long been the standard translation for generations of students and poets. Picador is delighted to publish a new edition of this classic work with a new cover, an attractive, collectible package, and a new scholarly introduction and afterword that will connect Fitzgerald's Homer to ever more students and general readers. Fitzgerald's supple verse is ideally suited to the story of Odysseus's 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 Laura Slatkin explains the depth of his engagement with the complex and timeless themes of Homer, while the award-winning poet A. E. Stallings expounds on the gift of his lyrical, ageless poetry that has brought Homer and Odysseus to life for millions of readers of every age.

Winner of the Bollingen Prize

This edition also features a map, a Glossary of Names and Places, and Fitzgerald's Postscript. Line drawings precede each book of the poem.

Review Quotes

"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

"To get the gist of it you could read Fagles or Rieu. For some idea of how he must have sounded to his audiences or to the classical Greeks, we have our own archaic Chapman. To get a taste of his originality, try James Joyce, or Derek Walcott. For drama and pathos try Christopher Logue, and for sheer poetic artistry try Fitzgerald or Alexander Pope." --James Davidson, London Review of Books

"The Odyssey . . . could be thought of as awaiting its translator: until Robert Fitzgerald came along . . . He has an ear for the cadence of speech, a sense of the prose reality of Homer's action." --D. S. Carne-Ross, The New York Review of Books

"Graceful and inventive." --Guy Davenport in Geography of the Imagination

"Robert Fitzgerald's Odyssey is greatly told and in, exactly, our time; and the translator learned the meaning of certain words by using his eyes, on a boat in the Aegean, at dawn." --Hugh Kenner in The Pound Era

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 1985, he was Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard.

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.