The Odyssey

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The Odyssey

By: Homer

Narrated by: Ian McKellen

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About this listen

The great epic of Western literature, translated by the acclaimed classicist Robert Fagles

Soon to be a major motion picture directed by Christopher Nolan

Robert Fagles, winner of the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation and a 1996 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, presents us with Homer's best-loved and most accessible poem in a stunning modern-verse translation. "Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns driven time and again off course, once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy." So begins Robert Fagles' magnificent translation of the Odyssey, which Jasper Griffin in the New York Times Book Review hails as "a distinguished achievement."

If the Iliad is the world's greatest war epic, the Odyssey is literature's grandest evocation of an everyman's journey through life. Odysseus' reliance on his wit and wiliness for survival in his encounters with divine and natural forces during his ten-year voyage home to Ithaca after the Trojan War is at once a timeless human story and an individual test of moral endurance.

In the myths and legends retold here, Fagles has captured the energy and poetry of Homer's original in a bold, contemporary idiom, and given us an Odyssey to read aloud, to savor, and to treasure for its sheer lyrical mastery. This is an Odyssey to delight both the classicist and the general listener, to captivate a new generation of Homer's students.

HomerIan McKellenPenguin AudioIliad & Odyssey

Ancient, Classical & Medieval Literature

Classics

Collections

Epic

Poetry

Themes & Styles

Mythology

Ancient History

Ancient, Classical & Medieval Literature Classics Collections Epic Poetry Themes & Styles Mythology Ancient History

Critic reviews

“[Robert Fitzgerald’s translation is] a masterpiece . . . An Odyssey worthy of the original.” –The Nation

“[Fitzgerald’s Odyssey and Iliad] open up once more the unique greatness of Homer’s art at the level above the formula; yet at the same time they do not neglect the brilliant texture of Homeric verse at the level of the line and the phrase.” –The Yale Review

“[In] Robert Fitzgerald’s translation . . . there is no anxious straining after mighty effects, but rather a constant readiness for what the occasion demands, a kind of Odyssean adequacy to the task in hand, and this line-by-line vigilance builds up into a completely credible imagined world.”
–from the Introduction by Seamus Heaney

Most relevant

McKellen is excellent. The epic itself is excellent. Audio issues throughout, such as audible playback chatter (guess the recording booth wasn't soundproof).