The Odyssey is vividly captured and beautifully paced in this swift and lucid new translation by acclaimed scholar and translator Peter Green. Accompanied by an illuminating introduction, maps, chapter summaries, a glossary, and explanatory notes, this is the ideal translation for both general readers and students to experience The Odyssey in all its glory. Green’s version, with its lyrical mastery and superb command of Greek, offers readers the opportunity to enjoy Homer’s epic tale of survival, temptation, betrayal, and vengeance with all of the verve and pathos of the original oral tradition.
“This is a triumph, a worthy successor to Peter Green’s outstanding translation of The Iliad. The style is flexible, sometimes colloquial, and often touching the heights, while being always immensely accessible to a modern reader. No version known to me is better at conveying the feeling as well as the sense of the original, and it takes a poet as well as a scholar to do it so well.”—Christopher Pelling, Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford University
“Clear, concise, and poetic. Literally an epic achievement. Peter Green has done it again.”—Eric H. Cline, Professor of Classics and Anthropology and the Director of the Capitol Archaeological Institute at George Washington University
Praise for Peter Green’s translation of The Iliad:
“Taken as a whole, this is the best line-for-line translation of the poem I know.”—London Review of Books
“Peter Green’s particular merit lies in achieving a clarity and fluidity that carries the reader forward. A notable achievement.”—Times Literary Supplement
“[Green] gets the interpretation right without interrupting the forward motion that is always Homer’s aim—and this is one of the great virtues of Green’s translation as a whole: its limber fluency.”—New York Review of Books
“The kind of absorption offered by Green’s translation seems particularly relevant to the reading of a poem from an alien culture and period. It contributes to the opening of the imagination that is surely one of the main pleasures of reading such a work. . . . I recommend this translation not only for its weighty introduction and notes but above all for the sensitivity of its expression.”
