The Odyssey
Autor Homeren Limba Engleză Hardback – 16 dec 2011
Bazându-ne pe expertiza de trei decenii a lui Joe Sachs în cadrul programului „Great Books”, recomandăm această ediție a The Odyssey ca fiind un punct de intrare ideal în literatura antică. Observăm că această versiune nu este doar o simplă traducere, ci o recalibrare a textului homeric pentru cititorul contemporan, oferind o claritate modernă care nu sacrifică rigoarea originalului grecesc. Față de alte ediții academice, volumul de față, publicat în colecția Collins Classics, adoptă un stil „transparent și natural”, facilitând o imersiune rapidă în periplul de zece ani al lui Odiseu spre Ithaca.
Structura cărții este gândită strategic pentru a servi atât curiozității generale, cât și nevoilor curriculare. Credem că selecția capitolelor — de la întâlnirea cu ciclopul Polifem și vrăjitoarea Circe, până la coborârea în lumea umbrelor — reușește să păstreze tensiunea narativă intactă, oferind în același timp contextul necesar prin note de subsol și hărți detaliate. Cititorii familiarizați cu The Iliad and the Odyssey Boxed Set în traducerea lui Robert Fagles vor aprecia aici abordarea lui Sachs, care pune accent pe „auzirea” epopeii așa cum ar fi fost receptată de auditoriul antic, oferind o perspectivă mai intimă asupra personajelor.
În contextul operei autorului, dacă Classic Starts®: The Iliad este o adaptare pentru tineri, iar Circe and the Cyclops izolează episoade specifice, acest volum oferă o sinteză echilibrată. Această ediție reușește să demonstreze de ce poemul rămâne o explorare fundamentală a condiției umane, fiind o resursă esențială pentru oricine dorește să confrunte imaginația și inima lui Homer fără barierele unui limbaj arhaic excesiv.
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Specificații
ISBN-10: 1613828764
Pagini: 352
Dimensiuni: 157 x 235 x 25 mm
Greutate: 0.72 kg
Editura: Simon & Brown
De ce să citești această carte
Recomandăm această ediție pentru oricine dorește să descopere epopeea lui Homer într-un format accesibil, dar riguros. Cititorul câștigă o înțelegere profundă a călătoriei lui Odiseu datorită traducerii clare a lui Joe Sachs și a selecțiilor care elimină redundanțele, păstrând esența narativă. Este un instrument de studiu excelent datorită notelor explicative și hărților incluse, fiind ideal pentru studenți sau cititori pasionați de beletristica clasică.
Despre autor
Homer a fost un poet epic din Grecia Antică, considerat autorul fundamental al literaturii occidentale prin lucrările sale, Iliada și Odiseea. Deși identitatea sa rămâne subiect de dezbatere, tradiția îl descrie ca pe un bard orb din Ionia. Epopeile sale au modelat cultura și educația greacă, fiind pilonii pe care s-a construit civilizația europeană. Traducătorul acestui volum, Joe Sachs, aduce o perspectivă academică solidă, fiind cunoscut pentru traducerile sale fidele din Aristotel și Platon, realizate pe parcursul carierei sale de profesor la St. John's College.
Notă biografică
Descriere scurtă
This is a Jumbo Edition: it runs longer than our 442-page Liftable usability cap, printed in one volume up to our printer's mechanical maximum of 1,200 pages. Part of The Harvard Classics: Dr. Eliot's 1909 fifty-one-volume "Five-Foot Shelf," assembled to give any reader a complete liberal education in fifteen minutes of daily reading. This series is aimed at readers building a personal library of foundational works they always meant to read, in large type that makes a decades-old ambition practical today.
For collection development: this is a large-print edition intended for low-vision and aging patrons, and for any reader who finds standard trade print tiring over a long sitting. It suits large-print and accessibility collections, adult and young-adult general collections where the text is a standard, and reading-room copies where a durable case binding matters. This volume runs beyond the 442-page Liftable limit and is correspondingly heavier; a Liftable edition of the same text, divided into lighter volumes, is available under separate ISBNs. The text is unabridged and reproduced from a public-domain source without modernisation.
Algorithmic Quality Assurance: this edition was checked by 123 deterministic tests covering typography, pagination, colour, cover geometry and metadata, then read by frontier language models for semantic review and holistic evaluation. What was checked, and what those results do and do not mean, is explained in the back of the book.
This Clearview Editions hardcover is built on a production standard that significantly exceeds the industry norm for large-print publishing. The body text is set at 18-point Atkinson Hyperlegible Next on 27-point leading, 1.5 line spacing --- the minimum WCAG 2.2 Level AAA Success Criterion 1.4.8 sets for a block of text, and the figure UKAAF's large-print guidance gives as well. The leading North American large-print hardcover imprints typically set their body text at 16 point, and most large-print trade paperbacks release at 14 to 16 point. At 18 point, Clearview Editions offers text that is measurably larger than every other major large-print publisher, specifically for readers with low vision, macular degeneration, glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy, or any visual condition that makes standard trade print frustrating or impossible to read for long stretches. The trim size is equally generous. Clearview Editions is printed on a 7x10-inch page, substantially larger than the 6x9 hardcover that is standard in the large-print industry and roughly 50 percent larger by area than the 5x8 trade paperback trim most legacy large-print paperback imprints use.
The extra page area is deliberate: it allows the 18-point body to set at the 50-to-55 character line length that reading-fatigue research identifies as optimal, without the narrow text columns and cramped margins that plague smaller-trim large-print books. The body font, Atkinson Hyperlegible Next, was developed by the Braille Institute of America specifically to maximize letter recognition for readers with low vision, macular degeneration, and visual processing differences. It distinguishes between commonly-confused letter pairs - lowercase l versus uppercase I, the digit 0 versus uppercase O, b versus d, p versus q - using distinctive shape features that preserve readability even under eye strain. Text is set ragged right with no word division: WCAG 2.2 1.4.8 and UKAAF both advise against justifying large-print text, since the uneven word spacing it creates is harder to track, and against breaking a word across a line ending, since the reader then has to reassemble it.
Descriere
The greatest of all epics, soon to be a major motion picture directed by Christopher Nolan.
Every book lover knows there are certain stories that transcend time, and Homer's The Odyssey stands tall among literature's greatest treasures. This isn't just another ancient epic gathering dust on your shelf—it's a masterfully crafted adventure that speaks to the wanderer in all of us.
Follow Odysseus through his legendary ten-year odyssey home from Troy, where every page brings fresh perils: vengeful gods, mythical monsters, treacherous seas, and the ever-present wrath of Poseidon. But this hero doesn't rely on brute strength alone—his sharp wit and clever cunning make him one of literature's most compelling protagonists.
At its heart, this is a story about family, perseverance, and the power of storytelling itself. As Odysseus struggles to return to his beloved Penelope and son Telemachus, we're drawn into a world where divine intervention shapes mortal lives, where heroes must prove themselves through trials that test both courage and character.
For any reader who loves epic adventures, complex characters, or simply beautiful prose that has influenced countless writers across millennia, The Odyssey deserves a place in your personal library.
This Deluxe Edition Includes:
- Elegant painted cover art from artist Laci Fowler with embossed details, designed foil edges, printed end sheets, and a ribbon marker
- Expert commentary
- Accessible translation that captures Homer's original poetry
- Perfect for both newcomers and literature enthusiasts
Textul de pe ultima copertă
After ten bloody years of fighting in the Trojan War, the intrepid Odysseus heads homeward, little imagining that it will take another ten years of desperate struggle to reclaim his kingdom and family. The wily hero circumvents the wrath of the sea god Poseidon and triumphs over an incredible array of obstacles, assisted by his patron goddess Athene and his own prodigious guile. From a literal descent into Hell to interrogate a dead prophet to a sojourn in the earthly paradise of the Lotus-eaters, the gripping narrative traverses the mythological world of ancient Greece to introduce an unforgettable cast of characters: one-eyed giants known as Cyclopses, the enchantress Circe, cannibals, sirens, the twin perils of Scylla and Charybdis, and a fantastic assortment of other creatures.
Remarkably modern in its skillful use of flashbacks and parallel line of action, Homer's monumental work is now available in this inexpensive, high-quality edition sure to be prized by students, teachers, and all who love the great myths and legends of the ancient world.
A selection of the Common Core State Standards Initiative.
Cuprins
- The Gods
- Odysseus
- A Note on Poetic Form and on the Translation
- Map
- Book One: Athena Visits Ithaca
- Book Two: Telemachus Prepares for His Voyage
- Book Three: Telemachus Visits Nestor in Pylos
- Book Four: The Suitors Plan to Kill Telemachus
- Book Five: Odysseus Leaves Calypso’s Island
- Book Six: Odysseus and Nausicaa
- Book Seven: Odysseus at the Court of Alcinous in Phaeacia
- Book Eight: Odysseus Is Entertained in Phaeacia
- Book Nine: Ismarus, the Lotus Eaters, and the Cyclops
- Book Ten: Aeolus, the Laestrygonians, and Circe
- Book Eleven: Odysseus Meets the Shades of the Dead
- Book Twelve: The Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, the Cattle of the Sun
- Book Thirteen: Odysseus Leaves Phaeacia and Reaches Ithaca
- Book Fourteen: Odysseus Meets Eumaeus
- Book Fifteen: Telemachus Returns to Ithaca
- Book Sixteen: Odysseus Reveals Himself to Telemachus
- Book Seventeen: Odysseus Goes to the Palace as a Beggar
- Book Eighteen: Odysseus and Irus the Beggar
- Book Nineteen: Eurycleia Recognizes Odysseus
- Book Twenty: Odysseus Prepares for His Revenge
- Book Twenty-One: The Contest with Odysseus’s Bow
- Book Twenty-Two: The Killing of the Suitors
- Book Twenty-Three: Odysseus and Penelope
- Book Twenty-Four: Zeus and Athena End the Fighting
- Literary Contexts
- from Xenophanes, Fragments (c. fifth century bce)
- from Pindar, Nemean 7 (c. fifth century bce)
- from Plato, The Republic (c. 380 bce)
- from Aristotle, Poetics (c. 335 bce)
- from Longinus?, On the Sublime (c. 1st century ce)
- from Demetrius?, On Style (c. 1st century ce)
- The Odyssey in Ancient Art
- Early Written and Printed Versions
Glossary
Acknowledgment
Recenzii
"Homer wrote a very long line of poetry—dactylic hexameter, with its six beats, and as many as seventeen syllables. Daniel Mendelsohn, the most recent translator of the Odyssey, preserves that scheme, writing a detailed, luxuriant, often beautiful line.”
“There are so many different English translations of the Odyssey. Which one is right for you? . . . The most Greek—Daniel Mendelsohn’s 2025 translation. And I’m saying this as someone who doesn’t read a word of Greek. I mean the one that seems to try to come closest to what it would be like to read the poem in the original language. ‘Tell me the tale of a man, Muse, who had so many roundabout ways / To wander, driven off course, after sacking Troy’s hallowed keep.’ This is not a poem that’s in a hurry to tell you a lot of things; this is a poem that is trying to kind of cast a spell on you.”
“[Mendelsohn's] language is luscious, full of detail, and lots of fun. (He describes Charybdis, for example, as being “like a seething cauldron / That bubbles up to the brim when it’s set on a roaring fire.”) When I read it aloud, my voice falls into a rolling cadence that propels the story forward. This is by design: Mendelsohn aims to replicate Homer’s original meter, which makes his version ideal for performance. Mendelsohn also retains Homer’s repetitious epithets for characters that some modern translations—written for the silent reader of the twenty-first century—have slimmed down."
“[A] lovely translation.”
“A virtuoso performance. . . . The best critics of the epic tradition come from within the tradition itself. Even as the genre gives us a window into the rage of battle, and all that justifying it entails, its ambiguities and ambivalences give us a roadmap for questioning the logics of authoritarianism, too. It’s in this double-vision that the true glory of epic resides—the tremendous success of Mendelsohn’s translation.”
“Reading Mendelsohn’s elegant new translation this past year, firmly in my middle years, I am fascinated by what it takes to reintegrate with your people, to show up, to finally drop the lies and masks and tricks, and to be seen, truly, for who you are.”
“Classicist and memoirist Daniel Mendelsohn offers a beautiful and majestic new translation of Homer’s Odyssey for the University of Chicago. At once contemporary in its readability and true to the original hexameter in its nuance and sophistication, Mendelsohn, one of the world’s leading experts on the poem, brings his profound knowledge to the work of making the Odyssey come alive. The Odyssey remains as relevant and powerful as ever, not least because of the Hollywood blockbuster currently in production.”
“When people ask me which translation of the Odyssey to read, I now tell them that if they read only one, it should be Mendelsohn’s.”
"A virtuoso performance. . . . There are many ways to reverse the tides of exclusion, political and interpersonal, alike. But in the spirit of Nolan’s adaptation, we can start by making Thersites and Polyphemus as much as Odysseus a continued part of the Homeric stories we tell. For the best critics of the epic tradition come from within the tradition itself. Even as the genre gives us a window into the rage of battle, and all that justifying it entails, its ambiguities and ambivalences give us a roadmap for questioning the logics of authoritarianism, too. It’s in this double-vision that the true glory of epic resides—the tremendous success of Mendelsohn’s translation. Here’s hoping Nolan’s film looks out with a similarly Janus-faced stare."