Robert Strupp’s Reviews > The Odyssey > Status Update

Actually page 234 is the last page in this 'The Odyssey' Homer Translated by T.E. Lawrence ISBN 1-85326-025-8 which was not to be found on Goodreads. Towards the end, Books 20 thru 24 ('Chapters') it gets pretty exciting. Never heard of 'T.E. Lawrence?' Perhaps you've heard of his more well known moniker 'Lawrence of Arabia?'

Book 13. Odysseus finally makes it home to Ithaca. The goddess Athena reveals herself to him, tells him to tell no one who he is, changes him into an old man and sends him to live with his own swineherd to be filled-in on what has happened since he departed a decade earlier.

Slow going but I'm recalling all the adventures Odysseus traveled from a long ago reading of the story.

I'm trying to read one book (chapter) a day. There's a whole lot of unnecessary words, but that's the way they wrote 3,000 years ago. I just completed the book where Ulysses poked the Cyclop's single eye out. Apparently the Cyclop race was descended from the god Poseidon. I had forgot that they were so huge that they could easily pick up two human warriors and eat them for breakfast and again, for dinner. Yum.

Slow going, but once one becomes accustomed to the language, it's quite readable. For whatever the reason it seems to take a lot more words to tell a story than it would, in English, nowadays. Still enjoyable. Learning a lot of facts I otherwise was not aware of. There is no way the 2026 Nolan movie The Odyssey is going to use language like this.

Reading 'The Odyssey,,' translated by T.E. Lawrence, so that I may laff even harder at the Emily Wilson sourced, Christopher Nolan directed 'The Odyssey.' Immediately seeing that the 2026 wordage uttered in the movie does not begin to do justice to the original, granted, translated into English. Like using 1950's 'Leave it to Beaver' verbiage in '3rd Rock from the Sun.' It'd sound as stupid as Damon's "Let's Go!'

Cover shown is wrong for the isbn. There are only 239 pages in my copy. Slow going and using A.I. to look up terms and individuals.