Odissea

When you stop and think about it, much of classic literature is about how getting on a boat is a bad idea. This book is a litany on why boating is a bad idea. You can say it at least worked out for Odysseus but did it? Did it really ? If that dude isn’t haunted by the screams of his crew forever it’s Leggi tutto

"Okay, so here's what happened. I went out after work with the guys, we went to a perfectly nice bar, this chick was hitting on me but I totally brushed her off. Anyway we ended up getting pretty wrecked, and we might have smoked something in the bathroom, I'm not totally clear on that part, and the Leggi tutto

Quite possibly one of my favourite books! It was this novel that ignited my love for Greek and Roman mythology and antiquity - leading me to choose a degree in Classical Civilisations. I always look back on The Odyssey with fondness - I love all the monsters he faces and the gods who involve themselve Leggi tutto

I first read Homer in the 19th-century French translation by Leconte de Lisle — the equivalent, say, of the 18th-century translation into English by Alexander Pope : a pompous, archaic and exhausting bore of a book. I kept my chin up and, after a while, tried another inflated Frenchman: the 1955 tran Leggi tutto

“It is generally understood that a modern-day book may honorably be based upon an older one, especially since, as Dr. Johnson observed, no man likes owing anything to his contemporaries. The repeated but irrelevant points of congruence between Joyce's Ulysses and Homer's Odyssey continue to attract Leggi tutto

Ever since I first read Homer’s epic describing the adventures of Odysseus back in my school days, three of those adventures fired my imagination: The Lotus Eaters, The Cyclops and the Sirens, most especially the Sirens. I just did revisit these sections of this Greek epic and my imagination was set Leggi tutto

"I'm not normally a praying man, but if you're up there, please save me, Superman!" —Homer (Simpson) Following James Joyce's lead, I used Homer’s heroic story as inspiration for a novel-in-progress. But how can I, a mere mortal, do justice to the most famous epic poem ever written? An encounter wit Leggi tutto