This week, Somer makes a case for The Odyssey, one of history’s greatest epics and I (Somer) tried to make sure to avoid spoilers, which I assure you, was not easy because I could spend all day squealing about this work.

Show Notes

Time for The Odyssey!  Let me tell you, I had a rough time writing this episode because I wanted to maintain my spoiler-free vagueness, but I WANTED TO TALK ABOUT ALL THE THINGS.  I’m still a bit blown away, actually by the fact that The Iliad is a longer work than The Odyssey.  There really seems to be so much more to The Odyssey.  Oh well.

There’s a movie adaptation that I wanted to highlight here in the notes that I didn’t talk about in the show because I wanted to give a little love to O Brother, Where Art Thou?  But this movie, which I have never seen but would very much like to see, is titled L’Odissea.  It was a TV miniseries that was a coproduction of Yugoslavia, Italy, Germany, and France.  This movie has been praised for it’s faithfulness to The Odyssey and let me tell you, if an adaptation actually respects the source material, I’ll eat my hat.

I also talked again this week about the different translations of the book.  Poet Alexander Pope pretty much has the gold standard translation and I think that’s because he understood verse.  My Penguin Classics version which was translated by Robert Fagles is also great and it has a wonderful introduction by Bernard Knox, a very smart man who details some things about the language, body, and history of The Odyssey that I really appreciated. I don’t know that I’d read my Penguin Classics version before researching for this episode, and I’m really glad that I did.