The Odyssey

(Hardback)

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Beautifully designed, clothbound edition Part of Penguin's beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality colourful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design. The epic tale of Odysseus and his ten-year journey home after the Trojan War forms one of the earliest and greatest works of Western literature. Confronted by natural and supernatural threats - shipwrecks, battles, monsters and the implacable enmity of the sea-god Poseidon - Odysseus must use his wit and native cunning if he is to reach his homeland safely and overcome the obstacles that, even there, await him.

Reviews

[Robert Fitzgeralds translation is] a masterpiece . . . An Odyssey worthy of the original. The Nation

[Fitzgeralds Odyssey and Iliad] open up once more the unique greatness of Homers art at the level above the formula; yet at the same time they do not neglect the brilliant texture of Homeric verse at the level of the line and the phrase. The Yale Review

[In] Robert Fitzgeralds translation . . . 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, and this line-by-line vigilance builds up into a completely credible imagined world.
from the Introduction by Seamus Heaney

Author Bio

HOMER is thought to have lived c.750-700 BC in Ionia and is believed to be the author of the earliest works of Western Literature- The Odyssey and The Iliad. E. V. RIEU was a celebrated translator from Latin and Greek, and editor of Penguin Classics from 1944-64. His son, D. C. H. RIEU, has revised his work. PETER JONES is former lecturer in Classics at Newcastle. He co-founded the 'Friends of Classics' society and is the editor of their journal and a columnist for The Spectator.