These epics lie at the beginning of the Western canon of literature, and have had an enormous influence on the history of literature. In the Western classical tradition, Homer (Greek: Ὅμηρος) is considered the author of The Iliad and The Odyssey, and is revered as the greatest of ancient Greek epic poets. 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 new modern-verse translation. This is an Odyssey to delight both the classicist and the public at large, and to captivate a new generation of Homer's students. Renowned classicist Bernard Knox's superb Introduction and textual commentary provide new insights and background information for the general reader and scholar alike, intensifying the strength of Fagles' translation. In the myths and legends that are 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. 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. If the Iliad is the world's greatest war epic, then the Odyssey is literature's grandest evocation of everyman's journey though life.

So begins Robert Fagles' magnificent translation of the Odyssey. Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turnsĭriven time and again off course, once he had plundered

Odysseia by Homer