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MICHAEL
CURTIS
ReVIEW
_______________
A
MODERN TRANSLATION
OF THE
ODYSSEY
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Solot, Michael, translator:
The Odyssey by Homer
(illustrations Adan Kennedy)
New York: Society of Classical Poets, 2025
The
Odyssey is now reborn in a fresh translation by Michael Solot as the
robust, living work of art that it is. The standard academic approach to
the poem presents it as a subject for classroom study, as something
remote, antique, and difficult. But The Odyssey is easy, and if you
haven't been trained to know what to look for it is full of surprises,
and often very funny. The Odyssey’s ease, its surprises, and its humor
are all brought to light in Solot’s translation and in his commentary.
Solot’s focus is on the story. To make it as easy to enjoy in English as
it is in Greek, he has rejected the line-for-line approach often found
in academic translations; and to capture the distinctive flow of Homer’s
poetry, he has developed a supple five-beat line as consistently
scannable as the original’s hexameters, but with a length and a cadence
ideally suited to the task of recreating the endlessly varying and
propulsive rhythms of Homer’s verse in English.
Aedan Kennedy brings the Odyssey to life as never before with more than
eighty pen-and-ink illustrations, each one placed precisely within the
text to depict a particular moment in the story, a unique achievement in
the history of Homeric translation.
There are two editions. One has an extensive commentary intended to make
the epic as user-friendly as possible by offering readers a basic
understanding of ancient Greek religion, geography, and culture, while
exploring a range of other topics, such as Homer as an oral poet, his
art of characterization, the intricacies of his storytelling, and the
unfailing naturalism of the Odyssey, which, for all its impossibilities,
portrays the world as it is.
In place of the commentary, the other edition offers a short
introduction summarizing the basics about Homer, the themes of his epic,
its plotlines, its structure, and the cinematic nature of Homeric
storytelling. There is also a well-developed survey of humor in the
Odyssey, a much-neglected topic.
Serialization of the Audiobook
Odyssey, for Free! (Amazon lists
the book versions).
Starting on June 28, the audio version of the Society of Classical Poets
Odyssey will be released on this website as a serial: one Book (or
chapter) every Sunday for twenty-four weeks. Each Book will be available
for listening, for free, for three weeks. When Book 4 is added on July
19, for example, Book 1 will be removed. This pattern will hold to the
end, even after the complete audiobook is made available for sale. The
'Introduction' and 'To the Reader,' which are posted below, will remain
throughout the twenty-four weeks.
The audiobook will offer the first fully dramatized Odyssey: all the
major characters in the epic (and many of the minor ones) will be
portrayed by different voices. Like the printed version, the audiobook
is not going to be your grandfather’s Odyssey.
https://www.odyssey-illustrated.com/audiobook
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