Customer Reviews

Homer: The Essential Homer

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Dr. Lombardo truly translates this and his work transports the epic poem into the modern era, complete with colloquial outbursts and vulgar insults shouted amongst the gods. These works are exciting! I can imagine the impact they once had is in many ways re-awakened by Lombardo's update to the otherwise antiquated language found in more classical translations such as Lattimore's. Clearly, the classical translations and even those of the 19th C are playing a somewhat different game and each have their respective merits, but I feel Lombardo's packs a punch and delivers the message to today's audience. Lombardo acts as a contemporary device to the original work making the piece current and attainable. Read the others when you want to study etymological roots, metaphor, iambic pentameter, etc.

I was fortunate enough, a few years ago, to see a live performance when Lombardo paid a visit to the classics department at Arizona State. He held a question and answer session that followed his presentation. Somehow, and I don't remember the question, he got to explaining that some transients had stumbled into an auditorium during one of his previous performances not knowing anything about the topic. They sat down on the floor in the front near the stage. When he asked the audience what their thoughts were one of the transients stood up to say, "Well, I don't know about anybody else, but I think this Agamemnon guy is a real A-hole. What happens next?"

And indeed, what happens next? You should stop watching reality TV right now. Jason Meznick and Molly What's-Her-Buckets got nothing on the scandalous womanizing moves of Zeus who rapes and then marries his sister, and then cheats on her mercilessly. Turn off the Bachelorette (also because it's really awful this season). Homer is far better. Here we have rage, jealousy, murder, lust, incest, seduction, lies, manipulation, narcissism, war, epic travels, pride unto death, and it's soon apparent that as much as things change it's all the same story in a different year.

Additionally a note on format, Susan Sarandon is great here as she does the book summaries that precede each reading by Lombardo. Also, the addition of the drums and music are fantastic as they break up the different books and add to the overall dramatic nature of this work. Better in the Iliad, however, than the Odyssey. The Odyssey music was video-gamish, or maybe that was just me. My only complaint is personal - I should have gotten the two unabridged versions of these. I wanted ALL the lines.

This audio is great company, and better than much of what is being passed off as literature these days. It's also a nice listen while stuck in rush hour traffic. The drums and the battles and the angry outbursts amongst the gods made me a more aggressive driver.