Word: odyssey
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...explain the promotional muscle being flexed behind yet another translation of Homer's Odyssey, this one provided by Princeton professor Robert Fagles (Viking; 541 pages; $35)? Why expect people to pay $45 for a boxed set of tapes (issued by Penguin Audiobooks) on which the British actor Ian McKellen reads the text of Fagles' translation over a listening time of some 13 hours...
...principal reason seems to rest on precedent. The Fagles translation of Homer's Iliad, published by Viking in 1990 to considerably less hubbub than that heralding the upcoming Odyssey, went on to exceed all commercial expectations by selling 22,000 copies in hardback; the paperback version, now in its eighth printing, has moved 140,000 copies. And an abridged audiotape of the Iliad read by Derek Jacobi surprised Penguin Audiobooks by selling 35,000 copies...
Robert Fagles, 63, has been teaching literature at Princeton since 1960. It was only after translating tragedies by Aeschylus and Sophocles that he began to consider "climbing back to the source" of Greek legends and taking on the herculean tasks of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Fagles knows that well-stocked bookstores will display plenty of competition for his forthcoming Odyssey, including the highly regarded verse renditions of Robert Fitzgerald (1961) and Richmond Lattimore (1965). But, says Fagles, "every generation needs a new translation of Homer. He was a performer, and he can be re-performed...
...years have linguists and anthropologists come up with a plausible theory of how those poems must have been made. Homer--or the collection of bards given that name at some point in the murky past--did not wander around Greece with 12,109 lines of the Odyssey committed to memory. Instead, the Homeric repetitions so familiar to readers of English translations--all those "wine-dark seas" and "rosy-fingered dawns"--were actually stock formulas allowing the bard to fill out his line of verse and get on with the story. The pressure on these performers, composing while they spoke...
...Great Books (Simon & Schuster; 492 pages; $30), David Denby, film critic for New York magazine, recounts a personal odyssey. Some 30 years after taking the two core-curriculum courses--Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilization--at Columbia University, he takes them again, traveling with students several decades younger the long road from Homer to Woolf and Socrates to Nietzsche. Denby finds the so-called--and currently much maligned--great books more exhilarating the second time around: "They scrape away the media haze of second-handedness." The overarching impression left by his account is that education may be wasted on the young...