Word: homers
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...return with exceptional balance. Their augmented bullpen (Shantz, Face, Labine, and Green) is apt to be the best in the majors. But the Pirates need maximum performance from everyone to pull through; at present they are great more in terms of publicity than performance. Mazeroski, for example, whose homer felled the Yankees, may be capable of hitting .300, but he is just as likely to bat .250. The same holds for Hoak, Stuart, Cimoli, and Hal Smith...
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...
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...