The Odyssey (Homer)

“Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns driven time and again off course, once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy.” So begins Robert Fagles’s magnificent translation of The Odyssey, literature's grandest evocation of an everyman's journey through life. Odysseus’s reliance on his wit and wiliness for survival against divine and natural forces on his ten-year voyage home to Ithaca after the Trojan War is at once a timeless human story and an individual test of moral endurance.
 
Robert Fagles’s translation of The Odyssey, enhanced with maps, genealogy tables, and pronunciation guides, has been the touchstone translation of Homer’s epic for millions of readers. In the myths and legends 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. With an introduction and textual commentary by renowned classicist Bernard Knox, the Fagles translation of The Odyssey will continue to captivate the general reader and scholar alike.
 
Homer was probably born around 725BC on the Coast of Asia Minor, now the coast of Turkey, but then really a part of Greece. Homer was the first Greek writer whose work survives. He was one of a long line of bards, or poets, who worked in the oral tradition. Homer and other bards of the time could recite, or chant, long epic poems. Both works attributed to Homer – the Iliad and the Odyssey – are over ten thousand lines long in the original. Homer must have had an amazing memory but was helped by the formulaic poetry style of the time.