Odyssey
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€43.99
The Odyssey is one of the world's greatest and best-loved poems. It has survived for twenty-eight centuries, through upheavals that have wiped out most of what was written in the ancient world. Now Barry B. Powell, one of the twenty-first century's leading Homeric scholars, has given us a powerful new translation.
Powell's translation renders the Homeric Greek with a simplicity and dignity reminiscent of the original. The text immediately engrosses students with its tight and balanced rhythms, while the incantatory repetitions evoke a continuous "stream of sound" that offers as good an impression of Homer's Greek as one could hope to attain without learning the language. Accessible, poetic, and accurate, this translation is an excellent fit for today's students. Powell exposes them to all of the adventure, cunning, pathos, and humor that are Homer's Odyssey.
BARRY B. POWELL is the Halls-Bascom Professor of Classics Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he taught for thirty-four years. He is the author of the widely used textbook Classical Myth (8th edition, 2014). His A Short Introduction to Classical Myth (2001, translated into German) is a summary study of the topic. Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet (1991) advances the thesis that a single man invented the Greek alphabet expressly in order to record the poems of Homer. Writing and the Origins of Greek Literature (2003) develops the consequence of this thesis.
Powell's critical study Homer (2nd edition, 2004, translated into Italian) is widely read as an introduction for philologists, historians, and students of literature. A New Companion to Homer (1997, with Ian Morris, translated into modern Greek) is a comprehensive review of modern scholarship on Homer. Powell's Writing: Theory and History of the Technology of Civilization (2009, translated into Arabic and modern Greek).