Word: greeks
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...week's end, partially as a result of the attacks on the PanLibHonCo nations. Costa Rica canceled the registration of 128 foreign-owned ships in arrears on tax payments, said it would go ahead with plans to abandon all convenience-flag registration at the end of this month. Greek shipowners agreed to negotiate with the Greek seamen's union for more jobs; U.S. unions said that they will continue to boycott...
...even harder to recognize. This is particularly true when they are written in verse, and when they presumably lose their pristine shine in the process of translation. It has taken 20 years for The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel to reach English in hexameter from its original modern Greek. The poem has not been translated into any other language and so is virtually unknown outside its native Greece. But in it, chances are, U.S. readers have a masterpiece at hand, in a fine translation...
When Author Nikos Kazantzakis died last year at 74, he was known to U.S. readers mostly for his novel Zorba the Greek, a flashing testament to the proposition that every minute of life should be lived to the sensuous, sensual hilt. At least twice, reportedly, he failed to win the Nobel Prize by the narrowest of margins. By taking for his own the name of Homer's poem, by adopting Odysseus as his own hero, Kazantzakis has underlined the audacity of his undertaking. His 33,333 lines measure its vastness. But the poem's real boldness lies...
Already Odysseus has begun to question, to doubt. To his surprise, he begins to find newborn sympathies with slaves and common folk. The old Greek gods have become objects of scorn, and what started as a mindless search for adventure has now become a journey of selfdiscovery. In Egypt he and his pals thieve and loot, fight against the depraved rulers and finally lead a ragged army to the headwaters of the Nile. There Odysseus builds a Utopian city-state in which marriage is outlawed, children are held in common, and the old and weak are left...
Kazantzakis labored on and off over a period of twelve years to produce a book of singular power and beauty. Translator Kimon Friar, a poet and scholar of Greek descent, received from Kazantzakis himself the ultimate praise: that the translation was as good as the original. Whether or not that is so, as it now reads, The Odyssey is by all odds the most impressive literary achievement of many a year. It bears out the feeling Kazantzakis once expressed, in describing a form of spiritual conversion he underwent during a solitary retreat in the mountains: "Since then I have felt...