Word: odysseus
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...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 date neatly at A.D. 363, the year in which the last Roman emperor to believe in the Olympians, Julian of Constantinople, was killed in battle. There are a lot of gods to discuss, and the result is that such notable heroes as Achilles and Ajax are ignored, and Odysseus, Paris and Helen are merely mentioned...
...left-of-Moscow terrorists in present-day Greece plans to set the Balkans afire by assassinating Marshal Tito. The wandering innocent who runs afoul of and eventually vanquishes these unpleasant plotters is an American architect named Strang. His wily adversary is a monster of plumbless evil who calls himself Odysseus-and the author does not fail to borrow a plot twist from Homer. The counter and under-the-counter intelligence agents of several countries haven't a clue about who Odysseus really is. Storyteller Maclnnes casts some forthright foreshadows, but it takes Strang and the reader most...
...sets done by Charles Elson in 1950. Musically, the production was markedly better than nine years ago. The early-Wagner score-shot through with popular Italian and French influences-was rousingly conducted by 29-year-old Thomas Schippers. In the role of the Dutchman (equated by Wagner with both Odysseus and the Wandering Jew) Baritone George London was convincingly demon-ridden, his voice fresh, passionate but controlled. In the comparatively minor role of Daland, the Norse sea captain, Bass Giorgio Tozzi-convincingly costumed in turtleneck sweater, jacket and boots-sang with warm-timbred verve, while Tenor Karl Liebl turned...
Squalling Grammarians. Traditional translations make much of Homer's epithets (Hera is "white-armed"; Odysseus generally "crafty"). Graves uses them sparingly, and sometimes ironically. The gods are treated with something less than respect; Zeus is a blowhard who hardly ever means what he says, and Hera, his wife, might be a garden-club president. When Zeus, who favors the Trojans, remarks that Hera protects the Greeks as if they were her own bastards, she replies pertly: "Revered Son of Cronus, what a thing to say!" Cartoonist Ronald Searle's illustrations wittily support Graves's wry treatment...