Home » It’s been quite an odyssey for the Odyssey

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It’s been quite an odyssey for the Odyssey — 16 Comments

  1. In the same way that LL Bean has learned that they don’t sell camping clothes unless they have a certain amount of actual (usually poor-selling) equipment in the store or catalog, B Dalton has learned that they don’t sell those other books unless they have a certain amount of real literature on the shelves.

  2. Just for fun:
    Rosemary Sutcliff’s “Black Ships Before Troy”. It is a young adult version. She did not cut the Iliad. She told the story.
    I’ve read both and was relieved to escape endless iterations of “rosy-fingered dawn” and “his armor rang round him as he fell”.
    I see she also wrote “The Wanderings of Odysseus”, which is probably a similar treatment of the Odyssey.
    Highly recommend her stuff for bright kids from jr. hi. and up, as long as you can give them the kind of historical perspective they used to get in school.

  3. Sutcliff’s treatment is nice but I was more impressed by the wonderful accompanying illustrations by Alan Lee. Every bit as evocative as his work on Lord of the Rings.

  4. Light.
    Yes. There’s an ominous quality–which is quite in keeping–with a bunch of ships showing up with armed men determined to kill you. Pix help.
    One pop historian–I believe the book was “Lost Worlds and Sunken Civilizations”–referred to ” a boatload of Rhodian pirates”.
    Achilles was an oversized, spoiled adolescent with superior hand-eye coordination and a divine break. I would be suspicious of anybody who admires him. Hector is the man.

  5. Neo,

    As you know, it’s hard to appreciate these works in translation.

    Having read the Iliad (and much of the Odyssey) in the Greek original, I feel confident making this claim.

    But having said that, I have to admit I was moved to learn Greek by Richmond Lattimore’s translations, which I read more than forty years ago. It’s good to know that B. Dalton still bothers to carry a translation.

    Jamie Irons

  6. My daughter, who is a student at UGA,
    is reading The Odyssey for one of her classes.

    So, they will sell a copy or two.

  7. You mentioned the ancient controversy over the identity of Homer. Reminded me of the old joke about the classical scholar who spent 30 years working to prove that the Illiad had not be written by Homer but by another Greek of the same name!

  8. I love all bookstores. New, used, or on-line bring ’em on. Anything to feed my reading habit.

  9. Aubrey,

    You are right — Hector is clearly, to the modern sensibility, the admirable figure. But to classical listeners, Achilles was the hero and Hector the putz. It stands as a measure of just how great is the cultural gulf separating us from the classical world. Today Heracles would be a serial/spree killer. Then he was the most admired of the heroes.

    We’ve come a long way, baby.

  10. D.B. Light-
    It’s worth noting that as horrid as the other gods were, Vulcan/Hephaestus was considered as bad or worse… because he didn’t have good legs.

    He did amazing things, he was about the only god you’d want as a neighbor, but he was as bad as a murderous idiot who set his girlfriend on fire because he limped.

    (I always found that a good cure to gilding of the Romans….)

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