Volume 10, Number 9 · May 9, 1968
Sense of Homer
By H.A. Mason
The Odyssey of Homer
translated with an Introduction by Richmond Lattimore
Harper & Row, 374 pp., $8.95
To anyone who has acquired a taste for the poetry of Pope, to anybody with a taste for English poetry, the possibility of possessing parts at least of the poem known as the Odyssey and commonly attributed to Homer is given as immediately as to Keats a key was given through the very inferior version by Chapman. Thanks to Pope we who search for the epics by way of translations can look beyond our noses and see that Homer has an indefinite future among us as exhibiting not only what humanity has been but what it once again might become. Pope's version has this success because it is on the right lines and concentrates on the main things: to make it apparent that, as a critic of our day has put it, Homer 'esprime valori eterni con parole di eternità.'
Review, 5495 words
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