The Odyssey by Homer - Paper - University of California Press

About the Book

The Odyssey is vividly captured and beautifully paced in this swift and lucid new translation by acclaimed scholar and translator Peter Green. Accompanied by an illuminating introduction, maps, chapter summaries, a glossary, and explanatory notes, this is the ideal translation for both general readers and students to experience The Odyssey in all its glory. Green’s version, with its lyrical mastery and superb command of Greek, offers readers the opportunity to enjoy Homer’s epic tale of survival, temptation, betrayal, and vengeance with all of the verve and pathos of the original oral tradition.

About the Author

Peter Green is Dougherty Centennial Professor Emeritus of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin. One of the most prolific scholars of the ancient world, he is the author of both historical studies and translations of poetry, including The Poems of Catullus, Apollonios's The Argonautika, and Homer's The Iliad, all by UC Press.

Reviews

"Comparisons to [Emily] Wilson's recent translation are inevitable. . . . Both Wilson and Green capture the spirit of the Odyssey, but word-for-word, Green also captures a feel for the Homeric language, an experience closer to the original."
— Library Journal

"Green's intelligent translation is . . . a superb choice."
— The Weekly Standard

"Green brings to the poem the rhetorical directness and historical expertise which worked so well in his translation of The Iliad. Speeches in his version are vigorous and direct. "
— London Review of Books

“The kind of absorption offered by Green’s translation seems particularly relevant to the reading of a poem from an alien culture and period. It contributes to the opening of the imagination that is surely one of the main pleasures of reading such a work. . . . I recommend this translation not only for its weighty introduction and notes but above all for the sensitivity of its expression.”
— Manchester Review

"Previous translators into English have taken the poet’s elusive sentence structure and 'chopped and changed' it to normalize it. Along with a few surprises in his interpretation, Green offers a flexible, colloquial reading of the tripartite work, making this an amazingly accessible translation for experienced or novice readers, a translation that conveys both the feeling and the sense of the original lyrical Greek. . . . Eminently suitable for classroom use."
— CHOICE

“This is a triumph, a worthy successor to Peter Green’s outstanding translation of The Iliad. The style is flexible, sometimes colloquial, and often touching the heights, while being always immensely accessible to a modern reader. No version known to me is better at conveying the feeling as well as the sense of the original, and it takes a poet as well as a scholar to do it so well.”—Christopher Pelling, Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford University

“Clear, concise, and poetic. Literally an epic achievement. Peter Green has done it again.”—Eric H. Cline, Professor of Classics and Anthropology and the Director of the Capitol Archaeological Institute at George Washington University

Praise for Peter Green’s translation of The Iliad:

“Taken as a whole, this is the best line-for-line translation of the poem I know.”—London Review of Books

“Peter Green’s particular merit lies in achieving a clarity and fluidity that carries the reader forward. A notable achievement.”—Times Literary Supplement

“[Green] gets the interpretation right without interrupting the forward motion that is always Homer’s aim—and this is one of the great virtues of Green’s translation as a whole: its limber fluency.”—New York Review of Books

The Odyssey

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