Monday, August 30, 2010

The Odyssey Top Quality


This Kindle download is difficult to figure out. It begins with a very lengthy introduction by Theodore Alois Buckley, which might cause you to think you had downloaded a critique of the Odyssey and not the actual story. That is not so.


The actual translation of the Odyssey begins at 8% on the Kindle: "O Muse! resound; Who when his arms had wrougt the destined fall of sacred Troy, and razed her heaven-built wall, wandering from clime to clime, observant stray'd..."

"Now at their native realms the Greeks arrived; all who the wars of ten long years survived; and scaped the perils of the gulfy main."

It is the translation by Alexander Pope and you either like his translation or you don't; there are, I believe, easier ones to understand.

Buckley says,"It would be absurd, therefore, to test Pope's translation by our own advancing knowledge of the original test. We must content to look at it as a most delightful work in itself,-- a work which is as much a part of English literature as Homer himself is of Greek."

The Kindle edition has what I consider a major problem:

There is no Table of Contents so you can not jump to a particular book which is very unfortunate because when studying the book you want to do exactly that. The fix would be to add a Bookmark every time you come to a new book so that you can easily go back and forth.

But... it is free and free is a very good price.Get more detail about The Odyssey.

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