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[ The Odyssey By Powell, Barry B ( Author ) Hardcover 2014 ]
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
September 1, 2026
Very underrated! Surprised it's not on recent lists of recommended translations. Lots of interesting footnotes, relevant ancient art.
August 22, 2026
A man, returning from a brutal war in a far-off land, does not make it back home ten years later. Is he lost at sea? Killed on some lonely island by warlike locals? Or is he wandering in some distant land, tired of family and his life at home? Twenty years have gone by since he went away to war. His patient wife Penelope still awaits his return. So does his son Telemachus, barely an infant when he went away, now a youth on the threshold of adulthood.
Homer’s great epic is the sequel to the Iliad and describes the travels of Odysseus as he tries to make his way back to his home in Ithaca, repeatedly waylaid by vengeful gods and amorous goddesses, beguiled by sirens, and entrapped by monsters and witches. The stories are known to every child. But the Odyssey does not present the stories of the travels in sequence. Instead, the first four of the 24 books describes the situation at home in Ithaca, where a horde of suitors are seeking the hand of Penelope. Hard-pressed Penelope asks for time to weave a shroud for her father-in-law Laertes (and secretly unravels the shroud at night). Telemachus would love to be rid of the noisy and entitled visitors who order up feasts and drink whenever they please, flirt and seduce the household slaves, and swagger about the household. But he dares not raise his voice. But the goddess Athena, in the guise of Mentor, appears to Telemachus and encourages him to go seek his father in Plyos and Sparta, the kingdoms of his father’s war buddies, respectively Nestor and Menelaus. These two tell him that Odysseus had left after the war, but they have no knowledge of where he could be. On the way back from this fruitless visit, the suitors hatch a plot to kill Telemachus, but he makes it back to Ithaca with the aid of Athena.
Books 5 to 8 have us catch up with Odysseus. A modern writer would have kept up the suspense for longer: is Odysseus alive or dead? But Homer lets us know that he is alive but had been for seven years, the reluctant guest of Calypso the beautiful sea nymph. Athena begs her father Zeus to send a message to Calypso that she should let Odysseus go. Reluctantly, Calypso equips Odysseus with a raft and allows him to sail away. But he is caught in a hurricane and washes up on the island of the Phaeacians, where the princess Nausicaa finds him naked and near death. Following Nausicaa’s advice, Odysseus makes it to the palace of her father King Alkinous, where he is treated kindly and hospitably.
Various episodes follow, of Odysseus shedding tears when the bards sing of the Trojan war, and of an athletic contest with arrogant young courtiers (who are humbled by Odysseus, of course). At the end of Book 8, King Alkinous begins to suspect that his guest is no ordinary traveler and asks him for his name. Odysseus reveals his name, and on the king’s request, tells the story of his travels.
These stories occupy four books, from 9 to 12, related as a flashback. Which means that many of the famous episodes of the Odyssey are compressed into only a few lines. First is the shameful raid on the Kikones (I am going to follow Powell’s spelling for names, which are sometimes different from what they are elsewhere) but the townsfolk raise the alarm and reinforcements begin to arrive, and Odysseus’s men beat a hasty retreat to their ships and then out to sea. Then they stumble upon the island of the Lotus Eaters, addicts to some intoxicating herb. When Odysseus’s scouts fail to return, he himself goes inland and fetches the besotted sailors back to the ship. From there, the Greeks sail to a lush and fertile island filled with abundance but apparently without people. It is the home of the cyclops, Polyphemus. They stumble on Polyphemus’s cave and gorge themselves on the food and drink inside, only to be trapped by the returning giant. They escape after blinding the monster by clinging to the fleece of Polyphemus’s sheep while the now blind and bellowing giant guards the entrance of the cave.
Sailing on, Odysseus and his men reach the island of the friendly Aiolians who give Odysseus a bag of winds in which all the violent storms are trapped, leaving only the gentle west wind to speed Odysseus home to Ithaca. But Odysseus’s men, suspicious that the bag contains gold that Odysseus is hiding from them, open the bag and let out the winds. Blown off course, the ships land on the island of the cannibalistic Laestrigonians who destroy all of Odysseus’s ships save one. Putting to sea once more, Odysseus reaches the island of the sorceress Kirke. All of the men, save a few, are transformed into pigs. But Athena again saves Odysseus. She appears to him in the form of a shepherd boy and asks him not to eat anything Kirke offers and to threaten her with death unless she frees all of Odysseus’s sailors. Kirke frees the men but advises that Odysseus should travel to the underworld to consult with the prophet Tiresias, who can advise him how to get back to Ithaca safely. Odysseus does so and returns to Circe’s island briefly to bury a dead sailor.
Then on to the sea again. The ship (now only one ship is left) sails past the island of the sirens and Odysseus orders his men to put wax in their ears and gets himself tied to the mast, so that he can hear the song of the sirens and not be lured to their death. Next, they sail past Scylla (a dreaded six-headed monster) and Charybdis (a thundering whirlpool that sucks anything that approaches it). A few of the men are snatched by Scylla, but the ships survive. The exhausted and famished sailors put ashore on the island of Trinachia (three-cornered, maybe Sicily). There, against Odysseus’s advice they kill and eat the divine cattle belonging to the sun god, Helios. The enraged god strikes the ship with lightning, causing all the men save Odysseus to perish at sea. Odysseus himself is thrown into the sea and makes it to Calypso’s island – where he is made a sex slave, as described above. That brings us to the end of Book 12 and to the end of the flashback.
As Book 13 opens, both Odysseus and Telemachus have made it back separately to Ithaca. But before Odysseus can go to his home, Athena appears to him as a young man and warns him of the dangers awaiting him there. Rapacious and violent young men are occupying the house and some of the servants may have turned traitor. Cunning Odysseus does not trust even his wife – what if she has a favorite and something like what happened to Agamemnon were to happen to him too? So, Odysseus makes his way to the distant hovel of the old pig-herder who he feels would be faithful. There he pretends to be a beggar seeking shelter and food. But who should happen to arrive but Telemachus! Impressed by the young man’s earnestness and obvious love for his father, Odysseus secretly reveals himself to his son. And the two plot Odysseus’s return to the palace.
Book 13 and the next 11 books are all about Odysseus’s machinations to outwit the suitors and rid his home of them. But here is where the action begins to flag a little. Having dismissed colorful stories of the Lotus Eaters and Scylla and Charybdis and the Aiolians’ bag of winds in a few racy lines, Homer seems to linger on details of Odysseus’s revenge on the suitors. Odysseus returns to the palace recognized by none save the old dog Argos. Odysseus attends the banquet of the suitors and is insulted by the leaders and has a footstool thrown at him. Odysseus fights with another beggar, with the suitors finding great amusement at the prospect of two bedraggled men duking it out and placing bets on the contenders. Odysseus, still in the guise of a beggar, has an audience with Penelope who queries him if he has heard anything of her husband on her travels. Odysseus, discovered by his old wet-nurse Eurykleia by the scar on his knee from a hunting accident.
Crafty Odysseus, slowly and methodically, is plotting his revenge. The occasion is a contest of skill, in which the suitors will try to string Odysseus’s old bow and shoot an arrow and the one to do it will win Penelope’s hand. First, he asks Telemachus to lock up all the shields and spears in the storeroom without raising any suspicion from the suitors. The women are asked to barricade themselves in their private quarters. Two loyal servants, with the pig-herder being one, are sent to lock the front and back doors so that no one can escape. Now the contest begins. The suitors take their turns, but none can string the heavy bow.
As it is being returned to storage, Odysseus has asked his servant to bring the bow to him. Amid howls of protest from the suitors, that a beggar cannot be allowed to vie for Penelope’s hand, Odysseus has strung it. A stunned silence falls. Now Odysseus has stationed himself on the threshold and is methodically killing the suitors one by one. Pandemonium erupts. There are screams of outrage and fear, tables are upturned and used as shields. Someone runs to fetch weapons and finds they have all disappeared. Men run for the doors and find them locked. Thinking that Odysseus would not be able to shoot them all, a bunch of suitors rush at Odysseus en masse only to be attacked from the wings by Telemachus and the two loyal servants. In the end, every last one of the suitors is killed. The corridors, the courtyard and the hall are all awash in blood.
The suitors may be dead, but the danger is not over, because the young men belonged to the cream of Ithacan society and their relatives are sure to demand justice. To buy themselves time, Odysseus orders that gentle music may be played in the palace as if a wedding were going on, and journeys upcountry with Telemachus to his father Laertes’s house. There too, Homer continues to spin the tale – instead of revealing himself to Laertes directly, Odysseus first pretends to be someone else and finally surprises his father. Odysseus musters up as many men as he could find, gives them armor and weapons – even old Laertes – and returns to the palace. On the way back, they are met by an enraged mob, but at just the moment Athena intervenes in the form of Mentor and persuades the townsfolk to stand down. If the young men were killed, it is because of their own fault for insulting a good man and the sanctity of his home and marriage.
Odysseus may be a hero, but I am not entirely sure he is likeable. He is crafty and cunning, but also a liar, mistrustful, and sometimes too belligerent. Poor Polyphemus, minding his own business in his cave until hostile people enter it and raid his food. Odysseus faults him for being inhospitable, but it was not he who invited guests in. Yes, he is a cannibal, but he did not go out seeking Odysseus’s men for food – they came to him. And he ended up blinded and insulted. Similarly, the pillaging, murder and kidnapping of the Kikones. Odysseus can also be devious. In sailing between Scylla and Charybdis, Odysseus does not tell his men that Scylla is going to unavoidably get a few of them – if he had told them that, the men would have rebelled. He preferred to endanger a few of the men, than to abort the journey as a whole. I also felt sorry for the loyal pig-herder and tearful Penelope, with Odysseus lying so fluently to them even as he could see their sorrow.
Homer’s original was composed in dactylic hexameter, with each line composed of six rhythmic feet—each foot being a dactyl (one long and two short syllables) or a spondee (two long syllables). Barry Powell’s fluent and easy to read translation has five-beat lines, with no rhyming. Maybe because of the rhythm or the fast-paced lines and the easy language (though the names could be complicated), I found the book easy to read. There is an excellent introduction that discusses the difficulty of translating the Iliad and Odyssey (because of the unique words and expressions found in them and the strangeness of the 8th century Greek world), and the identity of Homer (was there really even a person called Homer). The existence of various texts of Homer is mentioned, until they were standardized in Alexandria in the 3rd to the 2nd century BC (the “Alexandrian Vulgate”). The introduction also wrestles with the “Homeric Question”? Were these works composed by different authors and stitched together or is there an organic unity to the text that hints at a common origin?
The “Oral Formulaic Theory” of Milman Parry is discussed. Parry’s observation is that some of the repeated formulaic patterns in Homer – for example, the repeated “noun-epithet combinations” (“Achilles the fast runner,” “flashing eyed Athena”) as well as word-for-word, recurring, standardized descriptions of events like putting out to sea, preparing a feast, welcoming visitors, or the rising sun suggest the origin of the Iliad and Odyssey in oral performance. This suggests that the epics emerged through transmission from poet to poet until they were set down in writing sometime prior to their standardization in the Alexandrian Vulgate. Indeed, as Powell argues, it is possible that the Greek script was invented specifically to write down Homer. Prior writing systems such as the Phoenician alphabet lacked vowels, which is perfectly adequate for recording commercial inventories and details of contracts but insufficient as a medium for poetry.
The introduction also has a fascinating section on the historical context of the Odyssey – the expansion of the Greek oikumene through trade and exploration in the 8th century BC that brought various peoples into contact and sometimes conflict in the eastern Mediterranean. As well as the modern history of the finding of Mycene and Troy by Schliemann.
The book published by Oxford University Press has a slim bibliography of a couple of pages, listing major translations and critical works on Homer and various interpretations. There is also a very useful pronunciation guide for names which also serves as an index, because the names are referenced to the Book and line on which they occur. But perhaps the best part of the book is the lavish illustrations: five maps, and close to sixty photographs of art, ceramics, and sculpture depicting the scenes from the Odyssey.
Homer’s great epic is the sequel to the Iliad and describes the travels of Odysseus as he tries to make his way back to his home in Ithaca, repeatedly waylaid by vengeful gods and amorous goddesses, beguiled by sirens, and entrapped by monsters and witches. The stories are known to every child. But the Odyssey does not present the stories of the travels in sequence. Instead, the first four of the 24 books describes the situation at home in Ithaca, where a horde of suitors are seeking the hand of Penelope. Hard-pressed Penelope asks for time to weave a shroud for her father-in-law Laertes (and secretly unravels the shroud at night). Telemachus would love to be rid of the noisy and entitled visitors who order up feasts and drink whenever they please, flirt and seduce the household slaves, and swagger about the household. But he dares not raise his voice. But the goddess Athena, in the guise of Mentor, appears to Telemachus and encourages him to go seek his father in Plyos and Sparta, the kingdoms of his father’s war buddies, respectively Nestor and Menelaus. These two tell him that Odysseus had left after the war, but they have no knowledge of where he could be. On the way back from this fruitless visit, the suitors hatch a plot to kill Telemachus, but he makes it back to Ithaca with the aid of Athena.
Books 5 to 8 have us catch up with Odysseus. A modern writer would have kept up the suspense for longer: is Odysseus alive or dead? But Homer lets us know that he is alive but had been for seven years, the reluctant guest of Calypso the beautiful sea nymph. Athena begs her father Zeus to send a message to Calypso that she should let Odysseus go. Reluctantly, Calypso equips Odysseus with a raft and allows him to sail away. But he is caught in a hurricane and washes up on the island of the Phaeacians, where the princess Nausicaa finds him naked and near death. Following Nausicaa’s advice, Odysseus makes it to the palace of her father King Alkinous, where he is treated kindly and hospitably.
Various episodes follow, of Odysseus shedding tears when the bards sing of the Trojan war, and of an athletic contest with arrogant young courtiers (who are humbled by Odysseus, of course). At the end of Book 8, King Alkinous begins to suspect that his guest is no ordinary traveler and asks him for his name. Odysseus reveals his name, and on the king’s request, tells the story of his travels.
These stories occupy four books, from 9 to 12, related as a flashback. Which means that many of the famous episodes of the Odyssey are compressed into only a few lines. First is the shameful raid on the Kikones (I am going to follow Powell’s spelling for names, which are sometimes different from what they are elsewhere) but the townsfolk raise the alarm and reinforcements begin to arrive, and Odysseus’s men beat a hasty retreat to their ships and then out to sea. Then they stumble upon the island of the Lotus Eaters, addicts to some intoxicating herb. When Odysseus’s scouts fail to return, he himself goes inland and fetches the besotted sailors back to the ship. From there, the Greeks sail to a lush and fertile island filled with abundance but apparently without people. It is the home of the cyclops, Polyphemus. They stumble on Polyphemus’s cave and gorge themselves on the food and drink inside, only to be trapped by the returning giant. They escape after blinding the monster by clinging to the fleece of Polyphemus’s sheep while the now blind and bellowing giant guards the entrance of the cave.
Sailing on, Odysseus and his men reach the island of the friendly Aiolians who give Odysseus a bag of winds in which all the violent storms are trapped, leaving only the gentle west wind to speed Odysseus home to Ithaca. But Odysseus’s men, suspicious that the bag contains gold that Odysseus is hiding from them, open the bag and let out the winds. Blown off course, the ships land on the island of the cannibalistic Laestrigonians who destroy all of Odysseus’s ships save one. Putting to sea once more, Odysseus reaches the island of the sorceress Kirke. All of the men, save a few, are transformed into pigs. But Athena again saves Odysseus. She appears to him in the form of a shepherd boy and asks him not to eat anything Kirke offers and to threaten her with death unless she frees all of Odysseus’s sailors. Kirke frees the men but advises that Odysseus should travel to the underworld to consult with the prophet Tiresias, who can advise him how to get back to Ithaca safely. Odysseus does so and returns to Circe’s island briefly to bury a dead sailor.
Then on to the sea again. The ship (now only one ship is left) sails past the island of the sirens and Odysseus orders his men to put wax in their ears and gets himself tied to the mast, so that he can hear the song of the sirens and not be lured to their death. Next, they sail past Scylla (a dreaded six-headed monster) and Charybdis (a thundering whirlpool that sucks anything that approaches it). A few of the men are snatched by Scylla, but the ships survive. The exhausted and famished sailors put ashore on the island of Trinachia (three-cornered, maybe Sicily). There, against Odysseus’s advice they kill and eat the divine cattle belonging to the sun god, Helios. The enraged god strikes the ship with lightning, causing all the men save Odysseus to perish at sea. Odysseus himself is thrown into the sea and makes it to Calypso’s island – where he is made a sex slave, as described above. That brings us to the end of Book 12 and to the end of the flashback.
As Book 13 opens, both Odysseus and Telemachus have made it back separately to Ithaca. But before Odysseus can go to his home, Athena appears to him as a young man and warns him of the dangers awaiting him there. Rapacious and violent young men are occupying the house and some of the servants may have turned traitor. Cunning Odysseus does not trust even his wife – what if she has a favorite and something like what happened to Agamemnon were to happen to him too? So, Odysseus makes his way to the distant hovel of the old pig-herder who he feels would be faithful. There he pretends to be a beggar seeking shelter and food. But who should happen to arrive but Telemachus! Impressed by the young man’s earnestness and obvious love for his father, Odysseus secretly reveals himself to his son. And the two plot Odysseus’s return to the palace.
Book 13 and the next 11 books are all about Odysseus’s machinations to outwit the suitors and rid his home of them. But here is where the action begins to flag a little. Having dismissed colorful stories of the Lotus Eaters and Scylla and Charybdis and the Aiolians’ bag of winds in a few racy lines, Homer seems to linger on details of Odysseus’s revenge on the suitors. Odysseus returns to the palace recognized by none save the old dog Argos. Odysseus attends the banquet of the suitors and is insulted by the leaders and has a footstool thrown at him. Odysseus fights with another beggar, with the suitors finding great amusement at the prospect of two bedraggled men duking it out and placing bets on the contenders. Odysseus, still in the guise of a beggar, has an audience with Penelope who queries him if he has heard anything of her husband on her travels. Odysseus, discovered by his old wet-nurse Eurykleia by the scar on his knee from a hunting accident.
Crafty Odysseus, slowly and methodically, is plotting his revenge. The occasion is a contest of skill, in which the suitors will try to string Odysseus’s old bow and shoot an arrow and the one to do it will win Penelope’s hand. First, he asks Telemachus to lock up all the shields and spears in the storeroom without raising any suspicion from the suitors. The women are asked to barricade themselves in their private quarters. Two loyal servants, with the pig-herder being one, are sent to lock the front and back doors so that no one can escape. Now the contest begins. The suitors take their turns, but none can string the heavy bow.
As it is being returned to storage, Odysseus has asked his servant to bring the bow to him. Amid howls of protest from the suitors, that a beggar cannot be allowed to vie for Penelope’s hand, Odysseus has strung it. A stunned silence falls. Now Odysseus has stationed himself on the threshold and is methodically killing the suitors one by one. Pandemonium erupts. There are screams of outrage and fear, tables are upturned and used as shields. Someone runs to fetch weapons and finds they have all disappeared. Men run for the doors and find them locked. Thinking that Odysseus would not be able to shoot them all, a bunch of suitors rush at Odysseus en masse only to be attacked from the wings by Telemachus and the two loyal servants. In the end, every last one of the suitors is killed. The corridors, the courtyard and the hall are all awash in blood.
The suitors may be dead, but the danger is not over, because the young men belonged to the cream of Ithacan society and their relatives are sure to demand justice. To buy themselves time, Odysseus orders that gentle music may be played in the palace as if a wedding were going on, and journeys upcountry with Telemachus to his father Laertes’s house. There too, Homer continues to spin the tale – instead of revealing himself to Laertes directly, Odysseus first pretends to be someone else and finally surprises his father. Odysseus musters up as many men as he could find, gives them armor and weapons – even old Laertes – and returns to the palace. On the way back, they are met by an enraged mob, but at just the moment Athena intervenes in the form of Mentor and persuades the townsfolk to stand down. If the young men were killed, it is because of their own fault for insulting a good man and the sanctity of his home and marriage.
Odysseus may be a hero, but I am not entirely sure he is likeable. He is crafty and cunning, but also a liar, mistrustful, and sometimes too belligerent. Poor Polyphemus, minding his own business in his cave until hostile people enter it and raid his food. Odysseus faults him for being inhospitable, but it was not he who invited guests in. Yes, he is a cannibal, but he did not go out seeking Odysseus’s men for food – they came to him. And he ended up blinded and insulted. Similarly, the pillaging, murder and kidnapping of the Kikones. Odysseus can also be devious. In sailing between Scylla and Charybdis, Odysseus does not tell his men that Scylla is going to unavoidably get a few of them – if he had told them that, the men would have rebelled. He preferred to endanger a few of the men, than to abort the journey as a whole. I also felt sorry for the loyal pig-herder and tearful Penelope, with Odysseus lying so fluently to them even as he could see their sorrow.
Homer’s original was composed in dactylic hexameter, with each line composed of six rhythmic feet—each foot being a dactyl (one long and two short syllables) or a spondee (two long syllables). Barry Powell’s fluent and easy to read translation has five-beat lines, with no rhyming. Maybe because of the rhythm or the fast-paced lines and the easy language (though the names could be complicated), I found the book easy to read. There is an excellent introduction that discusses the difficulty of translating the Iliad and Odyssey (because of the unique words and expressions found in them and the strangeness of the 8th century Greek world), and the identity of Homer (was there really even a person called Homer). The existence of various texts of Homer is mentioned, until they were standardized in Alexandria in the 3rd to the 2nd century BC (the “Alexandrian Vulgate”). The introduction also wrestles with the “Homeric Question”? Were these works composed by different authors and stitched together or is there an organic unity to the text that hints at a common origin?
The “Oral Formulaic Theory” of Milman Parry is discussed. Parry’s observation is that some of the repeated formulaic patterns in Homer – for example, the repeated “noun-epithet combinations” (“Achilles the fast runner,” “flashing eyed Athena”) as well as word-for-word, recurring, standardized descriptions of events like putting out to sea, preparing a feast, welcoming visitors, or the rising sun suggest the origin of the Iliad and Odyssey in oral performance. This suggests that the epics emerged through transmission from poet to poet until they were set down in writing sometime prior to their standardization in the Alexandrian Vulgate. Indeed, as Powell argues, it is possible that the Greek script was invented specifically to write down Homer. Prior writing systems such as the Phoenician alphabet lacked vowels, which is perfectly adequate for recording commercial inventories and details of contracts but insufficient as a medium for poetry.
The introduction also has a fascinating section on the historical context of the Odyssey – the expansion of the Greek oikumene through trade and exploration in the 8th century BC that brought various peoples into contact and sometimes conflict in the eastern Mediterranean. As well as the modern history of the finding of Mycene and Troy by Schliemann.
The book published by Oxford University Press has a slim bibliography of a couple of pages, listing major translations and critical works on Homer and various interpretations. There is also a very useful pronunciation guide for names which also serves as an index, because the names are referenced to the Book and line on which they occur. But perhaps the best part of the book is the lavish illustrations: five maps, and close to sixty photographs of art, ceramics, and sculpture depicting the scenes from the Odyssey.
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