Description: This is the best-loved modern translation of the Odyssey, and the only one admired as a great poem in English. Fitzgerald's supple verse is ideally suited to the story of Odysseus' long journey home after the Trojan War. Homer's tale of love, adventure, sensual pleasure, and danger reaches the English-language reader in all its glory.
Brief description: Robert Fitzgerald's versions of the Iliad, the Aeneid, and the Oedipus cycle of Sophocles (with Dudley Fitts) are also classics. At his death, in 1985, he was Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard.
Review Quotes:
"A masterpiece . . . An Odyssey worthy of the original." --William Arrowsmith, The Nation
"Here there is no anxious straining after mighty effects, but rather a constant readiness for what the occasion demands, a kind of Odyssean adequacy to the task in hand." --Seamus Heaney "To get the gist of it you could read Fagles or Rieu. For some idea of how he must have sounded to his audiences or to the classical Greeks, we have our own archaic Chapman. To get a taste of his originality, try James Joyce, or Derek Walcott. For drama and pathos try Christopher Logue, and for sheer poetic artistry try Fitzgerald or Alexander Pope." --James Davidson, London Review of Books "The Odyssey . . . could be thought of as awaiting its translator: until Robert Fitzgerald came along . . . He has an ear for the cadence of speech, a sense of the prose reality of Homer's action." --D. S. Carne-Ross, The New York Review of Books "Graceful and inventive." --Guy Davenport, in Geography of the Imagination "Robert Fitzgerald's Odyssey is greatly told and in, exactly, our time; and the translator learned the meaning of certain words by using his eyes, on a boat in the Aegean, at dawn." --Hugh Kenner, in The Pound Era