Customer Reviews

The Odyssey

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is Alexander Pope's verse translation of the Odyssey, first published in 1726, glommed into a kindle edition. It is not formatted for the Kindle and is thus very difficult to read -- instead of stanzas, it's all oddly-broken chunks that vaguely resemble paragraphs, presumably an artifact of whatever software was used to scan the original text. To add to that, it's poetry *by Alexander Pope*, and thus largely in heroic couplets, deliberately archaic even to the ear of Pope's 18th-century contemporaries, with "thou"s scattered throughout -- there's a reason that William Wordsworth thought Pope's poetry archaic and artificial.

As this is a "kindle bestseller" but there aren't any other listed reviews, I suspect a lot of people are (like myself) downloading this for their kindles because it shows up readily in a search for "Odyssey", and then getting stymied by the five-hundred-"location" introductory essay (written, as best I can tell, in the early 1800's, and thus hopelessly outdated by little things like two hundred year's worth of Homerian scholarship, Schliemann's discovery of Troy, etc.) and the near-impenetrable arrangement of the text. If anyone can find a better-formatted free-download kindle version of the Odyssey (perhaps a prose translation?) please link me to it in a comment. Thanks.

This Kindle download is difficult to figure out. It begins with a very lengthy introduction by Theodore Alois Buckley, which might cause you to think you had downloaded a critique of the Odyssey and not the actual story. That is not so.


The actual translation of the Odyssey begins at 8% on the Kindle: "O Muse! resound; Who when his arms had wrougt the destined fall of sacred Troy, and razed her heaven-built wall, wandering from clime to clime, observant stray'd..."

"Now at their native realms the Greeks arrived; all who the wars of ten long years survived; and scaped the perils of the gulfy main."

It is the translation by Alexander Pope and you either like his translation or you don't; there are, I believe, easier ones to understand.

Buckley says,"It would be absurd, therefore, to test Pope's translation by our own advancing knowledge of the original text. We must content to look at it as a most delightful work in itself,-- a work which is as much a part of English literature as Homer himself is of Greek."

The Kindle edition has what I consider a major problem:

There is no Table of Contents so you can not jump to a particular book which is very unfortunate because when studying the book you want to do exactly that. The fix would be to add a Bookmark every time you come to a new book so that you can easily go back and forth. But that, obviously, would mean you have to read through the whole book bookmarking as you go which is why I gave this a four star instead of five star review for this Kindle edition.

But... it is free and free is a very good price.

I too like some of the reviewers was close to removing this free edition from my Kindle as I began to wonder when The Odyssey would begin. It starts at 8 % or location 413 on the third Kindle type size. The first 8% is a biography of Homer and a critique of Alexander Pope's translation of Homer's The Odyssey. I found the biography interesting and The Odyssey itself is a great Greek epic. A linked table of contents would have been nice and a page break between the foreword and the start of the actual work would have been appreciated. So I take off a star for that. With Kindle's bookmarking, highlighting, note adding feature, and search feature you can quickly find and go anywhere though from your Kindle menu so the point becomes moot. Then I add a half star back for it was free anyways.

This review addresses not Homer's work, but the packaging of this work and the delivery system. It was the first book I tried with the Android version of Kindle, and it is useless, to the extent that there is no table of contents, just 750-odd positions and a slider bar. There is an introduction that takes up just less than 10% of the total text, and there is no method to navigate to the beginning of the real text, let alone any method to navigate among chapters (or books, in this case).

I have this same edition, 10% forward and all, from Gutenberg (i.e., free) with a third-party reader (Aldiko - also free), and it works just fine, or more to the point, it works as I expect: with some level of consideration and ease of use granted to the reader. It has a table of contents and is much more manageable.

Read this book as a freshman in high school - it is great to have free access to this book because it is so long checking it out from the library would be complicated and to purchase this book in print would be robbery. Easy read.

It doesn't have contents page and has a really long intro, plus the words cannot be looked up in dictionary. I'd rather pay to have somebody put his in.

The Trojan War is over and one of our hero kings is lost. His son (Telemachus) travels to find any information about his father's fait. His wife (Penelope) must cunningly hold off suitors that are eating them out of house and home.

If he ever makes it home, Odysseus will have to detect those servants loyal from those who are not. One absent king against rows of suitors; how will he give them their just deserts? We look to Bright Eyed Pallas Athena to help prophecy come true.

Interestingly all the tales of monsters and gods on the sea voyage was told by Odysseus. Notice that no one else survives to tell the tale. Therefore, we have to rely on Odysseus' word.

Many movies took sections of The Odyssey, and expanded them to make interesting stories those selves.

Not just the story but also the way in which it is told will keep you up late at night reading.

The Odyssey

Troy (Two-Disc Widescreen Edition)

Read the print version and I can say that this book really is complete.
I don't know why people are complaining about contents and intro. It's free.You get an intro in the print version too and the print version's table of contents doesn't automatically bring you to the page. Just look at the page number and go to it, it's the same on the kindle. Stop complaining for a free book. If you're too lazy to search for pages, you shouldn't read this book.

It's a great greek novel and it's amazing. Read further into it and you will be hooked on the adventure.

Its amazing to get many classic stories for free and getting them through amazon and reading them on your kindle is not only easy, its easy to read and the way things are going to go. The story was classic and I highly suggest downloading as many of the free classics as possible.

Bloated and difficult to understand, I deleted this after the first "chapter." I downloaded this book because I recall reading and loving it in high school. However, I didn't need the detailed explanation of the translators history. I couldn't care less! All I wanted was the story of Odysseus, told simply and clearly. It wasn't here.