#fagles

[starin-down-a-better-path]

Now that I’m free from school I can start my summer reading!!!!! 📖 😍

[mauvekidgloves]

i may be very nearly failing geometry but hey at least i own 2 different translations of the odyssey

[lifeandheart]

I’ve been feverishly dreaming of the bright-eyed Athena in the Fagles Odyssey translation. Her ocean grey eyes and her golden sandals. How she is the essence of vitality.

[bookedallsummer]

Sophocles (edited by Robert Fagles), Oedipus the King

[yolodashes]

October 16, 2017: The Iliad, by Homer (Robert Fagles translation)

[jjnora]

So I'm reading the Odyssey and the kInG AnD QUEeN oF SPaRtAS dAUGhTEr Is CaLLEd HErMIoNE

[hithertokt]

The Odyssey: Book 1

This book was still pretty fresh in my memory. I started off teaching The Odyssey this year with one week o'fun: both honing in on the first four books (much condensed) and facilitating group research projects (on the modern-day equivalents of Odyssey's stops, presented on the day we read that section).

I introduced the same ideas girlwithalessonplan pointed out, alternating between reading together and -- as an experiment -- just listening to the audio without the text in front of us. The students didn't love that part, but I thought it was a fun way to connect with oral tradition and save paper.

I like the interactions between the gods in this book--and the going behind of Poseidon's back to release Odysseus finally. Zeus talks about Aegisthus (Agamemnon's killer), saying, "Ah how shameless--the way these mortals blame the gods. From us alone, they say, come all their miseries, yes, but they themselves, with their own reckless ways, compound their pains beyond their proper share." Beyond their proper share. It's a great insight into the gods, and a parallel that very much applies to Odysseus. Like, yeah we dish out bad shit and it's not always fair, but you made it worse because of how you chose to react to the bad shit.

Also: the interconnection of honor and legacy between fathers and sons. Telemachus is lost without his father or the foundation of his accomplishments -- the parallel of Orestes becoming a man and avenging his father's death escapes him, because of the unknown quantity of Odysseus' fate ("if he'd gone down with his comrades off in Troy... he'd have won his son great fame for years"). It's such a human thing to find the not knowing more of a hindrance than the knowing.

[skitterjitter]

how is Fagles's translation of the Iliad? I just went to the store to see if they had a copy, and I read the first five or so lines and I...I like the translation. I won't ever find a translation I like better than my own, honestly, but Fagles's seemed pretty close to it