Word: odyssey
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...Story of The Odyssey, as every schoolboy used to know, is the tale of wily Odysseus' wanderings after the fall of Troy. Ten long years he and his comrades were buffeted about from disaster to disaster before hostile Poseidon, god of the sea, would...
...ODYSSEY OF HOMER?Translated by T. E. Shaw?Oxford University Press...
...army pittance of 60¢ a day. This Royal Air Force mechanic, Aircraftsman Thomas Edward Shaw, known to the world as Col. T. E. Lawrence of Arabia, whose most intellectual duty at present is "tinkering with engines," has just finished a four-year spare-time job of translating The Odyssey into English prose...
...Book. "The twenty-eighth English rendering of the Odyssey," says modest Translator Shaw, "can hardly be a literary event." Some of his 27 predecessors: George Chapman (1614), Alexander Pope (1726), William Cowper (1791), William Cullen Bryant (1871), William Morris (1887), George Herbert Palmer (1891). Samuel Butler (1900), S. H. Butcher & Andrew Lang (1898), A. T. Murray (1919). Scholastically, Shaw's translation ("made from the Oxford text, uncritically") may not please Homeric scholiasts. "I have not pored over contested readings, variants, or spurious lines. . . . Wherever choice offered between a poor and a rich word richness had it, to raise the color...
...Odyssey, he says, is "neat, close-knit, artful and various" but "never huge or terrible," never "great art. ... In this tale every big situation is burked and the writing is soft." Homer he calls "as muddled an antiquary as Walter Scott. . . . He thumb-nailed well" but his characterization was "thin and accidental." Though some modern scholars agree with him that The Odyssey is a much later work than The Iliad, most will think Shaw goes too far in saying "this Homer lived too long after the heroic age to feel assured and large." Penelope is "the sly cattish wife," Odysseus...