Word: homers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...ODYSSEY (474 pp.) - Homer, translated by Robert Fitzgerald -Doubleday...
...first looking into Fitzgerald's Homer, the modern reader will be less astonished than was Keats when he looked into Chapman's.* Poet Robert Fitzgerald has again put into English the very old story of the most indestructible of Greeks. Odysseus was a very Greek hero, "formidable for guile in peace and war," "the great tactician,'' "skilled in all ways of contending," "all craft and gall," admired as much for his divinely inspired chicanery as for his handiwork with spear, bow or tiller. Although favored by Pallas Athena, he was not a superhuman figure...
This should reassure the suspicious modern that Homer's epic is not a supernatural swindle but the narrative of a man in trouble-the "first novel," as one translator put it-and that Fitzgerald's English version is in the crisp demotic argot of today. The new translation, however, does not skip or try to improve on the few familiar Homeric cliches: the sea is still "wine-dark" or "fish-cold"; the dawn is still "rosy-fingered...
Holy Pallas. Translator Fitzgerald, a Roman Catholic, is highly respectful of the supernatural goings-on in Homer. He considers Pallas-Odysseus' patron and therefore responsible for the workings of the hero's mind-to have her near equivalent in the Holy Ghost of the Christian Trinity. Here, too, may be seen the theological base of the incandescent Greek intelligence: faith and reason live together...
...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...