The Odyssey The Fitzgerald Translation [Paperback]

The classic translation of The Odyssey, now in paperback.

Robert Fitzgerald's translation of Homer'sOdysseyis the best and best-loved modern translation of the greatest of all epic poems. Since 1961, thisOdysseyhas sold more than two million copies, and it is the standard translation for three generations of students and poets. Farrar, Straus and Giroux is delighted to publish a new edition of this classic work. Fitzgerald's supple verse is ideally suited to the story of Odysseus' long journey back to his wife and home after the Trojan War. Homer's tale of love, adventure, food and drink, sensual pleasure, and mortal danger reaches the English-language reader in all its glory.

Of the many translations published since World War II, only Fitzgerald's has won admiration as a great poem in English. The noted classicist D. S. Carne-Ross explains the many aspects of its artistry in his Introduction, written especially for this new edition.

This edition also features a map, a Glossary of Names and Places, and Fitzgerald's Postscript. Line drawings precede each book of the poem.

Winner of the Bollingen Prize

Robert Fitzgerald'sversions of theIliad, the Aeneid,and theOedipuscycle of Sophocles (with Dudley Fitts) are also classics. At his death, in 1988, he was Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard.

A masterpiece . . . AnOdysseyworthy of the original. William Arrowsmith, The Nation

Here there is no anxious straining after mighty effects, but rather a constant readiness for what the occasion demands, a kind of Odyssean adequacy to the task in hand. Seamus Heaney

This teacher's guide is keyed to the Robert Fitzgerald translation of The Odyssey. By universal consensus, Fitzgerald's Odyssey is acknowledged to have an openness and immediacy unsurpassed by any other English translation.

Little is certain when it comes to the origins of The Odyssey oló.