The Odyssey

Seeking modern adventure demanding frequent suspension of disbelief? Vivid vision? Realistic dialogue? Recognizable characters and situations? Occasional implausibility? Here, writes Green (Univ. of Texas, Austin), is a "semi-heroic adventure story ... [embellished] by folktale and fantasy." Thus, he identifies a few irresistible Homeric features in this new Odyssey translation, out just four years after his acclaimed version of the Iliad (CH, Sep'15, 53-0093). Homer's epic tale of survival, temptation, betrayal, and vengeance loses none of its verve and pathos in Green's experienced hands. Previous translators into English have taken the poet's elusive sentence structure and "chopped and changed" it to normalize it. Along with a few surprises in his interpretation, Green offers a flexible, colloquial reading of the tripartite work, making this an amazingly accessible translation for experienced or novice readers, a translation that conveys both the feeling and the sense of the original lyrical Greek. Green does this by drawing on the classical and admirable example of C. Day Lewis's "declaimable" (i.e., easily recited) and mainly dactylo-spondaic rendering (in 1952) of Virgil's Aeneid. The extensive introduction, maps of ancient Greece and Asia Minor, detailed chapter summaries, and explanatory notes make the volume eminently suitable for classroom use. Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. --Raymond J. Cormier, emeritus, Longwood University

Green (Dougherty Centennial Professor Emeritus of Classics, Univ. of Texas at Austin), classical historian, translator, and poet, whose many books include a noted biography of Alexander the Great, a history of the Persian War, and translations of the Argonautika and Ovid's Tristia, offers a new verse translation of the Odyssey, the product of many years of reading and thinking. As with his earlier translation of the Iliad, Green aspires to a "declaimable" style, inspired by C. Day Lewis's Aeneid and Richmond Lattimore's Iliad. He avoids the anarchizing tendencies of Stanley Lombardo, following an approach closer to that of Anthony Verity and Robert Fagles. Comparisons to Emily Wilson's recent translation are inevitable. While Wilson seeks a modern, readable version Green wishes to capture the strangeness of Homer's oral language, preserving the repetitive epithets and phraseology, using the transliteration of the Greek names rather than their Latinate forms, and following the linear rhetoric and syntax of the original. VERDICT Both Wilson and Green capture the spirit of the Odyssey, but word-for-word, Green also captures a feel for the Homeric language, an experience closer to the original.-Thomas L. Cooksey, formerly with Armstrong Atlantic State Univ., Savannah © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.