A Guide to The Odyssey : A Commentary on the English Translation of Robert Fitzgerald

Rating:
Summary: Normal Structure for a Commentary
Review: It is the usual nature of a commentary that it is structured with notes keyed to terms in each line. If you want a good introductory discussion of the Odyssey, see Camps, An Introduction to Homer (or for something a little more spicy, though less traditional, see Paolo Vivante's book Homer in the Yale/Hermes series). The introduction to the Penguin translation of the Iliad by Fagles is good, too (though the translation itself is problematic).

Commentaries are primarily intended for close reading; but close reading a work in translation (especially in a very literary translation like Fitzgerald's, which takes a few liberties: but the principle is true for *all* translations) is a dangerous game. This book is probably best for giving you some idea of how you *could* apply close reading to the Odyssey if you knew Greek, or for helping a student with weak Greek skills to narrow something down before looking in the original, maybe; the commentaries on the Greek text are more likely to keep you on the straight and narrow (because of their nature; nothing to blame Prof. Hexter for).