Sam Terry’s Reviews > The Odyssey of Homer > Status Update

Finished Book 3 of Lattimore and I’m catching up in Fagles. I liked Nestor’s account of the homecoming; I was excited to hear good news about my boys Diomedes and Idomeneus. I’m glad I read some of the Orestia last year because the betrayal story felt familiar and it was easy to see how Agamemnon’s story would be of interest to Telemachus

Goodreads has two separate listings for the Lattimore and Fagles translations but chalks up all my progress to the former. I’m on book 2 of Lattimore but am still working on Bernard Knox’s delightful introduction to Fagles, so I’ll just have to play catch up. I love the introduction’s discussion of the Romantic poets’ fascination with national epics and the ongoing debate regarding Homer’s literacy

From Bernard Knox’s introduction to the Fagles translation:

“Mênin aeide, thea…You got that?”

Restarting because it’s crunch time. I agonized over which translation to start so I’ve decided to just do both the Lattimore and the Fagles in tandem. The Lattimore I’ll annotate more closely and then I’ll do a pass of each book in the Fagles before bed to see if I like the language better. I didn’t love Lattimore’s interpretation of the tragedies but I loved his Iliad. I just wish this edition had notes

The fun continues! I liked Lattimore’s translation of the Iliad and you don’t change horses in the middle of a race. I do wish Richard Martin wrote an introduction to this edition, too, but maybe a lot of that material would be redundant. In any case I’m glad to hear more from Lattimore in this introduction.