Fagles Odyssey Quotes

Homer was thus at once contemporary in content and antique in form." - Bernard Knox

Suspicious we are, we men who walk the earth.

… and poured libations out to the everlasting gods who never die — to Athena first of all, the daughter of Zeus with flashing sea-grey eyes — and the ship went plunging all night long and through the dawn" (R. Fagles translation)

The meter itself demands a special vocabulary, for many combinations of long and short syllables that are common in the spoken language cannot be admitted to the line —any word with three consecutive short syllables, for example, any word with one short syllable between two longs. This difficulty was met by choosing freely among the many variations of pronunciation and prosody afforded by Greek dialectal differences; the epic language is a mixture of dialects." - Bernard Knox