Word: fitzgeralded
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This sense of the philosophical dimension in the violent old fable, together with seven years' hard labor, has served to give real distinction to this translation. Fitzgerald is the latest of a long line of poets and scholars-from Pope and Cowper to T. E. Lawrence and A. T. Murray-who, with varying fortune, have tried to make good English of good Greek, or in his words from the poem, to "tell us in our time, lift the great song again." Each generation must do it in its own idiom. If there is missing "like ocean on the Western...
Genius Versatile. But Fitzgerald's version could well make a radio narrative as was British Poet-Professor C. Day Lewis' Aeneid. Within his chosen limitations, Fitzgerald has succeeded brilliantly. He can be read at a fast clip, with the breath taken at the almost natural intervals of a relaxed but eloquent after-dinner entertainer with an unusually good scriptwriter. Doubleday has backed him up with good type and Picasso-style illustrations by Hans Erni. Fitzgerald did not underestimate the staggering intellectual difficulties of Englishing Homer. Literally, the first line of The Odyssey would read in English...
...insing muse versatile Who was harried very much. Fitzgerald...
shrewdness famed And genius versatile . . . The poem's climactic, blood-bubbling passage emerges thus with Fitzgerald: From storeroom to the court they...
While working on the translation, Fitzgerald lived around the Mediterranean, made a few pious visits to Homer's islands. On one visit to Ithaca, he spent a morning chatting with some old men who had no suspicion of his sinister scholarly mission. One of the oldsters suddenly stared out to sea and said: "They say he still turns up around here, a soldier, a seaman, an old bum or something." Fitzgerald did not crowd his scholar's luck by asking any questions, but accepted gratefully this intimation that Homer's world was not dead-nor his Odysseus...