SB should do an Odyssey book club
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Oh and if you don’t want to read, you could always play the Wishbone CD ROM game set in the Odyssey
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There’s also the cancon tv show from the 90s
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and the franco-japonais cartoon from the early 80s
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I’ve never read the odyssey if we do a book club I’ll finally do it
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man every canadian actor of a certain age was up in this thing: will sasso, devon sawa, jewel staite, ryan reynolds. i was obsessed with this as a kid
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I read excerpts for high school and I’m ready to go into it with my adult eyes.
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Then we can litigate which translation to read. Fun! I vote Fitzgerald’s, who translated the Iliad and the Aeneid and Dante’s Inferno as well.
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I prefer Fitzgerald’s Homer probably because they were the first translations I read but I say it’s because he was an Actual Poet and you can tell.
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It’s Fitzgerald for any normal person, Lattimore for Hellenophilic sickos
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that kind of boastful ignorance is definitely british
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I will be the real sicko and say we should read the alexander pope translation. His poesy is so far beyond any other options
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I think if we really do this, we should encourage people to pick any translation and then we could compare verses. The rifts this approach could create within our community would be worth it, imo.
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I remember spending maybe one full class period on the line about “dawn’s fingers” as the teacher tried to get the students to understand metaphor, and I think that put me off of poetry for at least a decade.
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tell me more about the sicko version
lattimore is tin eared but is much more attentive to the sort of precision in translations that pedants love
he manages to make a work as goofy and full of wonder as the odyssey into something dry and dull
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Okay here’s a quick comparison of book 22’s opening scene, the three translations suggested here + Emily Wilson (one of the most recent translations, she loves anachronistic phrases)
Pope
Then fierce the hero o’er the threshold strode;
Stripp’d of his rags, he blazed out like a god.
Full in their face the lifted bow he bore,
And quiver’d deaths, a formidable store;
Before his feet the rattling shower he threw,
And thus, terrific, to the suitor-crew:“One venturous game this hand hath won to-day,
Another, princes! yet remains to play;
Another mark our arrow must attain.
Phœbus, assist! nor be the labour vain.”
Fitzgerald
Now shrugging off his rags the wiliest fighter of the islands
leapt and stood on the broad door sill, his own bow in his hand
He poured out at his feet a rain of arrows from the quiver
and spoke to the crowd: “So much for that. Your clean-cut game is over,
Now watch me hit a target that no man has hit before,
if I can make this shot. Help me, Apollo.”
Lattimore
Now resourceful Odysseus stripped his rags from him, and sprang
up atop the great threshold, holding his bow and the quiver
filled with arrows, and scattered out the swift shafts and before him
on the ground next to his feet, and spoke his word to the suitors:
‘Here is a task that has been achieved, without any deception.
Now I shall shoot at another mark, one that no man yet
has struck, if I can hit it and Apollo grants me the glory.’
Wilson
Odysseus ripped off his rags. Now naked,
he leapt upon the threshold with his bow
and quiverfull of arrows, which he tipped
out in a rush before his feet, and spoke.
“Playtime is over. I will shoot again,
towards another mark no man has hit.
Apollo, may I manage it!”
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now i want the felix version
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