The Odyssey

<i>Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns<br />driven time and again off course, once he had plundered<br />the hallowed heights of Troy.</i><br /><br />So begins Robert Fagles' magnificent translation of the <i>Odyssey</i>.<br /><br />If the <i>Iliad</i> is the world's greatest war epic, then the <i>Odyssey</i> is literature's grandest evocation of everyman's journey though life. Odysseus' reliance on his wit and wiliness for survival in his encounters with divine and natural forces, during his ten-year voyage home to Ithaca after the Trojan War, is at once a timeless human story and an individual test of moral endurance. <br /><br />In the myths and legends that are retold here, Fagles has captured the energy and poetry of Homer's original in a bold, contemporary idiom, and given us an <i>Odyssey</i> to read aloud, to savor, and to treasure for its sheer lyrical mastery.<br /><br />Renowned classicist Bernard Knox's superb Introduction and textual commentary provide new insights and background information for the general reader and scholar alike, intensifying the strength of Fagles' translation.<br /><br />This is an <i>Odyssey</i> to delight both the classicist and the public at large, and to captivate a new generation of Homer's students.<br /><br />--<br /><br />Robert Fagles, winner of the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation and a 1996 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, presents us with Homer's best-loved and most accessible poem in a stunning new modern-verse translation.