ellauri026.html on line 225: The idea is there, but all the lingering emphasis in the original has been smoothed away. This, too, unfortunately, is typical of the whole. I have said that Wilson’s translation reads easily, and it does, like a modern novel: at shockingly few points does one ever need to stop and think. There are no hard parts; no difficult lines or obscure notions; no aesthetic arrest either; very little that jumps out as unusual or different. Wilson has set out, as she openly confesses, to produce an Odyssey in a “contemporary anglophone speech,” and this results in quite a bit of conceptual pruning. If you wait for the “Homeric tags,” the phrases that contained so much Greek culture they have been quoted over and over again by Greeks ever since—well, you are apt to miss them as they go by. A famous one occurs in book 24, when Odysseus and Telemachus are about to go into battle together: Odysseus tells Telemachus not to disgrace him, and Telemachus boasts that he need not fear. Laertes, Odysseus’s father, exclaims (Wilson’s translation), “Ah, gods! A happy day for me! My son and grandson are arguing about how tough they are!”
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