Word: homers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...insurmountable deficit, winning all three games in Atlanta, then beating the defending world champions 3-2 in Yankee Stadium Saturday night. This Series had all the elements of a true Fall Classic. There was the unlikely hero off the bench: Yankee pinch hitter Jim Leyritz clubbing a three-run homer off Mark Wohlers to tie the score in the eighth inning of Game 4. There was the unlikely goat: sure-handed Atlanta center fielder Marquis Grissom dropping a fly ball to set up the only run of Game 5. There were the nightly chess matches in Atlanta between Torre...
...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...
...Homeric audiences had presumably heard of them too. For all its narrative speed, the Odyssey is remarkable in the way it resists modern notions of suspense. The question is not what will happen next but how thoroughly the bard recounts the particulars of every scene. Fagles' translation captures this peculiar quality perfectly. Late in the story Odysseus is back in Ithaca; he has revealed his identity to Telemachus and two loyal servants and challenged the hundred or so of Penelope's suitors to a fight to the death. All hell is about to break loose, and yet Homer pauses...
...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...
...success of his Iliad, published six years ago, seems to him to confirm a long-held belief: "I think in this channel-surfing age people are famished for stories, for vivid accounts of humans who wrestled with their destinies and the gods. Homer is so inclusive and encyclopedic that he can relieve us of ourselves for a while." Fagles recalls a day during his long labors on the Iliad when he was standing in line at a Princeton, New Jersey, bank. "I suddenly thought, 'Don't these people know there's a war going on?'" The Trojan War, of course...