Word: greeks
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...have the editors shirked areas of controversy. It will not, for instance, make Greek nationalists happy to find that the dictionary accepts the antitraditional view that ancient Helladic culture was not created by Greek indigenes but by people who emigrated from what is now Turkey...
BORN: July 16, 1930, Tarpon Springs EDUCATION: U of Pittsburgh, B.S., 1959; U of Florida, J.D., 1963 FAMILY: Wife, Evelyn; two children RELIGION: Greek Orthodox MILITARY: Air Force, 1951-55 OCCUPATION: Lawyer; restaurateur POLITICAL CAREER: U.S. House, 1982- ADDRESS: P.O. Box 1077, Tarpon Springs...
Robert Fagles, 63, has been teaching literature at Princeton since 1960. It was only after translating tragedies by Aeschylus and Sophocles that he began to consider "climbing back to the source" of Greek legends and taking on the herculean tasks of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Fagles knows that well-stocked bookstores will display plenty of competition for his forthcoming Odyssey, including the highly regarded verse renditions of Robert Fitzgerald (1961) and Richmond Lattimore (1965). But, says Fagles, "every generation needs a new translation of Homer. He was a performer, and he can be re-performed...
...19th century poet and critic Matthew Arnold commended Homer's "speed, directness and simplicity" in the original Greek, and these qualities abound in Fagles' translation. The problems the epic must resolve are quickly set forth. All the surviving Greek heroes from the 10-year siege and ultimate destruction of Troy--the subject matter of the Iliad--have long since returned to their homes except Odysseus, the King of Ithaca. There, 10 years after the fall of Troy, his faithful wife Penelope fends off a riotous band of suitors for her hand in marriage; his son Telemachus, an infant when...
...been downhill after that," says Fagles, only half-jokingly, about the history of Western narrative since Homer. The six years he spent translating the Odyssey involved long, grinding sessions with Greek lexicons and his own imagination, engaged in a "tug-of-war between ancient Greek words and their modern English equivalents." He passed versions of his work around to trusted colleagues, particularly Bernard Knox, who taught him more than 40 years ago at Yale and whose introduction to the new Odyssey is marvelously informative. Fagles reworked and revised some passages more than 20 times. His labors now ended, Fagles pronounces...